Slice Sampler, Sequencer and FX Rack for the Amen Break
Forget sample packs. Forget the 47th „Ultimate Jungle Drums“ collection rotting on your drive. Anyone serious about the Amen Break doesn’t need more audio material, they need a tool. That’s exactly what Amen Machine is.
Amen Machine is the Amen endgame!
Zardonic
Venezuelan metal and bass producer Zardonic has worked with the Amen break since 2004, has released five albums and built remixes for Fear Factory, Noisia and Bullet for My Valentine. Over the years he had built up a very large break folder of his own. Why he reaches for Amen Machine anyway, he explains in our portrait: „I don't think I've ever seen a plugin that allows me to come up with so many different ways of mangling an Amen break in one place.“
At its core, the plugin chops the break into 46 slices and rebuilds it on a 64 step sequencer across 4 bars. Four engines on the menu. Repitch for that classic mid 90s sampler vibe, mono split aliasing included when you want it ugly. Cycles as a clean granular engine for half time and pitched drums without the chipmunk effect. Textures for spectral wandering that turns the break into pads, drones and cinematic surfaces, pitch-stable, with clean crossfades and no drift. Stretch stretches every hit in the style of old hardware samplers, from eighth speed up to four times, and leaves the attack untouched. Pitch, speed and formant decoupled, grain size from 10 to 200 ms, motion all the way to wild scatter. A global Length knob scales slice length down to 1%. Extremely short stabs and clicks are just as possible as long sustained tones. Once the groove sits, a Drag MIDI button in the Composing tab pulls the current 64-step pattern straight into your DAW or onto your desktop as a standard MIDI file. Four bars, clean slice mapping, current tempo baked in.
The real killer feature is the Variation Engine. Six stages working through swing, mutate, reverse, ghost hits, stutter rolls and eleven hand crafted fill patterns. Mutate swaps slices role compatible, BD stays BD, snare stays snare. Lock Kick on 1 and Lock Backbeat keep the skeleton intact even when you reduce the rest to rubble. Want full breakcore chaos? Kill the anchors and crank all six knobs to red. With Seed Lock the result freezes, without it every loop sounds new. Your choice between reproducible magic and permanent mutation.
The Pattern Generator
A new Pattern Generator card now sits right next to Play Mode in the Composing tab. Hit the dice and a fresh, groove coherent Amen variation rolls straight into your grid, as many times as you like. Four knobs shape it:
- CHOP sets how busy the beat is, from whole bars to tight quarter chops.
- VARIETY is the big one. Low stays close to the original break, high changes the whole structure, from a rolling break to a hypnotic loop to a fully programmed beat.
- REPEAT decides how much a phrase loops and locks in versus keeps evolving.
- GROOVE sets how tightly everything snaps to the beat.
Found a keeper? Hit Keep and it is saved as your own preset (Random 01, Random 02 and so on). Your existing patterns stay untouched, every roll starts on the 1, keeps rolling and never drops into silence.
64 varied factory patterns
64 factory pattern presets bring serious variety. Instead of all leaning on the same rolling feel, they span three distinct beat characters from the hand-made classics: rolls, looped grooves and anchored beats, plus halftime, breakcore and syncopated flavours. 64 patterns that each bring their own vibe instead of blurring together.
Behind all that sits the real heavy hitter: a 19 slot Master FX Rack with 35 swappable modules. Para EQ 6, Dynamic EQ 3, RMS Compressor, FET Compressor with All Buttons, Upward Multiband, Transient Shaper. Saturation in five flavors plus a multiband variant, BitCrusher, Hard Clip, Wavefolder. Sweep Filter, Frequency Shifter, Ring Mod, Stereo Widener, Haas Delay, M/S EQ. Plate Reverb, Convolution with five centered rooms, Tape Delay, Stutter Gate as a real buzz roll. Spectral Stretch for extreme stretching up to 50x and a Signalsmith based Pitch Bus. Plus Gate and Resonator, Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Tremolo / Pan, Ping-Pong Delay, Tape Stop, Vinyl / Cassette, Tilt EQ, Utility and Retro Stretch. Drag and drop in any order. At the end always a true peak BrickWall Limiter, ISR compliant for streaming.
If you want to use the rack on other material, switch the engine off completely via Bypass Sampler . A sidechain input then runs straight through the 19 slots, sequencer and Variation Engine are off, the Master FX Rack lands as a pure effect on drum bus, synth loop or vocal layer. 50 FX Board presets bring ready-made chains for it and switch the mode on by themselves when loaded.
In plain terms: you pull every classic sound from three decades of Amen history straight out of the plugin. Liquid DnB with Plate Reverb and FET Crush. Surgical neurofunk bus with the Textures engine and diode saturation. Breakcore with wavefolder metallics. Footwork and jungle halftime with Tape Echo dub. Cathedral reverb on an 8x spectral stretch for the cinematic pad out of the Amen. 116 factory sound presets, 31 genre, 5 cinematic, 23 showcase presets each with their own spotlight FX, 7 tool presets for targeted jobs and 50 FX Board presets for effect use, cover the whole spectrum. On top of that, pattern presets as ready-made sequencer grids and performance presets with full macro mappings. The rest you control live via the 32-macro performance system, with full MIDI Learn, CC mapping and Sticky Learn for persistent hardware-controller assignments. Map it once, it stays. And when you want to play the Amen Machine like a drum machine rather than have it programmed, flip the Ext MIDI toggle in the header bar: the internal sequencer goes silent, incoming MIDI notes trigger the slices directly (note 48 to 93 onto slice 0 to 45, exactly like the original Amen MIDI file). All slice settings and the full FX chain stay active, just like a classic pad sampler, played from the piano roll or live on the pads.
New in version 1.7.2
- Amen Machine as an effect: 50 new presets in the FX Board category turn the Amen Machine into an insert effect for a drum bus, break or loop from your DAW. They switch on Bypass Sampler when loaded and process the signal at the sidechain input: drum bus glue, parallel compression, dub throws, lo-fi buses, techno rumble, gated 80s snare and more. Reverb and delay are always filtered, stereo width sits above a mono bass, and the level stays close to the input.
- Retro Stretch: The stretch from the fourth engine is now also an effect in the rack, the 35th module, so it works on any signal. At speed 1 it is a pitch shifter with up to 12 semitones up or down and the flutter of old hardware samplers. Below that it plays halftime in a window from a quarter note to two bars on the DAW grid, above that doubletime up to four times. Every hit plays its attack once, unstretched. Latency is fixed at 30 ms.
- New names: The BitCrusher modes are now called Mu-Law 12 and 12-bit 26k. Old projects load unchanged.
- Window size on the Mac: On Retina displays the editor opens at 120% instead of 200%. On every system it scales itself down when opening until it fits on the screen.
New in version 1.7
- Stretch: The fourth engine stretches every slice in the style of old hardware samplers, from eighth speed up to four times. Every hit stays in place, its attack plays exactly once and untouched, only what comes after it gets stretched. That is the metallic sound of stretched jungle breaks, with no latency and no more CPU than Repitch.
- Textures retuned: Slowed down, the break flutters and smears, and every hit comes twice with a slight pre-echo. The attack lands at full level at any tempo.
- Perform Pads: Eight pads on the Performance tab with eight modes, from Roll and Slicer through Gate, Restart, Reverse, Tape Stop and Stutter to Trans, in three banks. Right-click any pad, mode or bank to put it on a MIDI controller. Without any setup, notes 36 to 43 play the pads.
- Eleven new effects: Gate, Resonator, Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Tremolo / Pan, Ping-Pong Delay, Tape Stop, Vinyl / Cassette, Tilt EQ and Utility, plus nine new factory presets that show what they can do. The rack now holds 34 modules.
- New pattern dice: Every roll follows the rules of the handmade patterns: a snare in every bar, no hi-hat carpets, bar 4 never a copy. VARIETY at full really takes you away from the original.
- Punchier attack: New notes start with no wait and no click, even when all 16 voices are busy.
- CLAP: Next to VST3, AU and standalone, the Amen Machine now also runs as CLAP.
A tribute to six seconds
The Amen Break was played in 1969 by Gregory C. Coleman on the drums of funk band The Winstons, on a B side called „Amen, Brother“. Six seconds of drums that have shaped all of electronic music ever since. Hip hop, jungle, drum & bass, breakcore, hardcore, footwork, IDM. Half of these genres wouldn’t exist without that take. Coleman never saw a cent for it and died homeless in Atlanta in 2006.
Amen Machine is a tribute to those six seconds. Not a loop browser, not a sample pack, but an instrument that treats the break as what it actually is: the most important drum performance in electronic music. Build your own style with it.
Formats & Systems
Formats: VST3, AU, CLAP, Standalone
Systems:
- macOS Universal2 (Intel and Apple Silicon)
- Windows x64
- Linux x64
License Information
This product includes a professional license system with the following features:
- Online activation with hardware fingerprinting
- Up to 3 device activations included
- Automatic license delivery via email
- Customer portal for license management
After purchase, you will receive your license serial number via email within minutes.