There’s no shortage of drum plugins in 2026—but every once in a while, something arrives that reframes the process. Enter DrumX, a new groove machine from Jimmy Jam and EastWest Sounds that leans into a deceptively simple idea: great songs don’t start with notes—they start with feel.
Now available via EastWest, DrumX isn’t just another virtual instrument stacked with vintage kits. It’s a philosophy baked into software, shaped by one of the most influential hitmakers of the last four decades. “Groove is the foundation of every great record,” Jam says. “With DrumX, music creators can start with grooves that already feel great, and then build their own ideas from there.”
If that sounds like a throwback mindset, it is—but intentionally so. Jam, alongside longtime collaborator Terry Lewis, helped define the sound of ‘80s and ‘90s R&B and pop by building songs from the drums up. That same approach is hardwired into DrumX. As he puts it, “A lot of the creative stuff that Terry and I did in the '80s was really based around drum machines… the creativeness came from the drums first, more so than the notes on a keyboard first.”
DrumX pulls from a hall-of-fame lineup of rhythm boxes—the Roland TR-808, Roland TR-909, LinnDrum, and E-mu SP-12 among them—10 in total, all meticulously captured and reimagined inside a modern production environment. But this isn’t just a nostalgia trip. Alongside the classics are exclusive custom samples designed by Jam himself, plus a deep toolkit that encourages reshaping rather than replaying.
At the center of it all are hundreds of pre-programmed grooves spanning everything from R&B and hip-hop to industrial and pop ballads. They’re not static loops—they’re starting points. EastWest founder Doug Rogers describes the workflow simply: “You just loop it, get on a keyboard and start playing with the groove, and all of a sudden, the song just starts materializing.”
That sense of immediacy is where DrumX separates itself. Features like DX Pitched (which turns drum hits into melodic instruments), DX Stacks (layering hits across machines), and DX Layers (swapping textures on the fly) blur the line between rhythm and harmony. Add in tape saturation modeled on classic Studer machines—including the rare J-37—and re-amping through EastWest’s Studio 1 and 2, and the plugin starts to feel less like a drum machine and more like a full-on idea generator.
In a landscape where many tools promise infinite options but deliver decision paralysis, DrumX takes a more curated route: start with something that already grooves, then make it yours. It’s a subtle shift, but one that could change how producers approach the blank session entirely.
DrumX is currently available as a free addition for ComposerCloud+ subscribers, with a standalone release set for May 27. For a plugin built on decades-old machines, it feels surprisingly forward-thinking—proof that sometimes the future of production is just a better understanding of what made the past move.
More info at eastwestsounds.com/drumx.
