Excite Audio’s Bloom Drum Kits is built for producers who want drums that feel performed, processed, and ready to shape inside a modern production workflow. It takes live drum recordings, one-shots, top loops, percussion, detuned toms, textured snares, and processed rhythmic material, then places them inside a playable instrument with enough control to move from quick ideas into detailed sequencing.
The appeal is clear if you write drums inside a DAW but still want something that feels less rigid than basic grid programming. Bloom Drum Kits has the loose timing, recorded feel, and imperfect edges of real drums, but it still behaves like a plugin built for fast writing. You can start with a preset, play individual hits, trigger phrases, reshape the tone with macro controls, then move into deeper sample and sequence editing when the track needs more personality.
It also comes in at an amazing price point. Bloom Drum Kits is available for $39 during its launch sale, down from $59, which makes it an easy impulse buy for producers who need better drum starting points without committing to a huge sample library or a full drum suite.
A Faster Way To Get Live Drum Feel Into A Track
Bloom Drum Kits works because it gives you useful drum material right away. The preset library includes over 250 options across categories like Basic, Experimental, Kits, High Energy, Low Energy, Percussion, Processed, and Top Loops, so you can start with full rhythmic ideas, single-hit kits, heavier processed patterns, or stripped-back loops depending on the track.
The main page keeps things immediate. Fourteen sample keys handle the playable sounds, while modifier keys and phrase triggering make it easy to move between hits, loops, and rhythmic ideas without stopping the session. The four macro controls, Tape, Re-Amp, Room, and Phaser, are also smart choices because they target the kinds of tone changes producers usually reach for when live drums feel too clean, too dry, or too disconnected from the rest of the track.
The new sample import feature gives the instrument a longer lifespan as well. You can bring in up to 112 of your own samples, swap them into the engine, and use Bloom Drum Kits as a personalized rhythm tool instead of relying only on the included content.
The Edit Page Gives It More Than Preset Value
The deeper editing tools are where Bloom Drum Kits becomes more useful for producers who want control. Playback direction, playback mode, start and end markers, crossfade, attack, release, pan, volume, pitch, fine pitch, formant, pitch warp, and choke groups all give you enough room to turn a simple hit or loop into something that fits your track more precisely.
The sequencer is also a major part of the plugin’s value. It handles swing, timing, velocity, probability, step rate, modulation, pitch, volume, filter movement, and effect modulation, which helps drum parts feel less static over time. The effects section adds rearrangeable Dynamics, Reverb, and Delay modules, with plate, hall, and spring reverb options, stereo and ping-pong delay, compression, gating, and filtering.
For indie, leftfield electronic, experimental pop, and sample-heavy production, Bloom Drum Kits looks like one of the more useful additions to Excite Audio’s Bloom line. It gives you live drum character, fast arrangement tools, custom sample import, and enough depth to keep shaping the part after the first idea lands.
Will Vance is a professional music producer who has been involved in the industry for the better part of a decade and has been the managing editor at Magnetic Magazine since mid-2022. In that time period, he has published thousands of articles on music production, industry think pieces and educational articles about the music industry. Over the last decade as a professional music producer, Will Vance has also ran multiple successful and highly respected record labels in the industry, including Where The Heart Is Records as well as having launched a new label with a focus on community through Magnetic Magazine. When not running these labels or producing his own music, Vance is likely writing for other top industry sites like Waves or the Hyperbits Masterclass or working on his upcoming book on mindfulness in music production. On the rare chance he's not thinking about music production, he's probably running a game of Dungeons and Dragons with his friends which he has been the dungeon master for for many years.
