Introducing Little Drum Machine and Little Duck

This week we released two new plugins, Little Drum Machine and Little Duck, and both are free. We wrote them for ourselves. They started as small tools built to speed up our own workflow, each aimed at something you always need done fast and frictionless. At some point they got good enough that keeping them to ourselves felt a bit stingy, so we polished them up and sent them out into the world. And free felt like the right price for something we'd already built anyway. Both are out now for macOS, Windows, and iPad.

Neither one is trying to reinvent the wheel. A drum machine and a ducker are about as well-worn as audio tools get. What we wanted was our own take on each: the familiar idea, pared back to what actually matters, behind a UI clear enough that you land on a result in seconds. The point was never to pile on features. It was fast results that stay out of your way and keep you in the creative flow instead of yanking you out of it.

Little Drum Machine is the one we reach for when an idea needs a beat right now. Eight lanes, per-step velocity, and a grid you program in seconds. When you're staring at an empty pattern, Randomize hands you a starting point and Mutate nudges what you already have somewhere new. Scenes chain into full arrangements, there's a built-in mixer, and it sends MIDI out to drive your own drum modules and synths. Start with the built-in sounds or drop in your own samples.

Little Duck is a ducker without the wiring. Normally a sidechain pump means routing an input and coaxing a compressor until it breathes right. Little Duck skips all of that: pick a rate and it locks to your host's tempo, then Depth, Attack, Release, and Shape set exactly how the volume dips. A live curve shows the movement as you shape it, so you're working by ear and eye instead of guessing at numbers.

Both share the same instinct: get out of the way. No menus to dig through, no manual to read before the first sound. And both are genuinely free, as desktop plugins for macOS and Windows and on the App Store for iPad, with no trial timer and nothing locked behind a purchase.

You can grab them from the Little Drum Machine and Little Duck pages, where the full feature rundown and the manuals live. We hope they earn a spot in your sessions the way they did in ours.