Full Bucket Music: Bucket Pops

German programmer and software engineer Björn Arlt began building VST plugins under the name Full Bucket Effects in 2010. Being a musician, and a synth enthusiast from a young age, he was drawn to analysing and building software synths. He now offers both synth emulations and effects as freeware through his website.

Bucket Pops is a software instrument that emulates the classic 1966 KORG Mini Pops-7 Rhythm Machine, a drum machine that features on Jean-Michel Jarre’s classic Oxygene or Equinoxe albums. The plugin is a rhythm machine with 20 different rhythm patterns and 15 individual instruments. The patterns are 2 bars long, although the second bar of most of the patterns is a repetition of the first bar. Rhythm patterns are organised in two rows: The Top Row (Waltz to Swing) and the Bottom Row (Jazz Waltz to Latin Swing). The switch located below the POWER switch at the very right is used to flip between the two rows.

All controls of the original Mini Pops-7 have been placed on the ‘main page’ of Bucket Pops, and all additional parameters are accessible via the Settings and the Sequence pages.

Features:

• Oxygene / Equinoxe vibes
• 20 original rhythms
• 15 modelled drum instruments (no samples)
• Tweakable instrument parameters
• Tweakable rhythm sequencer
• Resizable user interface (not N version)
• MIDI Learn – all parameters can be controlled by MIDI CC
• Plugin supports Windows and macOS (32 bit and 64 bit)