Punchy Nu Disco Drums
- A professional-grade virtual session musician that follows your direction
- Specialized in nu disco, dance-pop, house, and adjacent styles
- For pro producers and enthusiasts seeking production-ready drums
- Choose from 5 acoustic drum kits and 690 drum grooves in 30 different styles
- Free 7-day trial. If you own any UJAM product, you get a loyalty discount
Hits like a drum machine. Grooves like a drummer.
NEON is UJAM’s Virtual Drummer plugin for nu disco drums and dance-pop grooves. These are defined by their tight, snappy, on-top-of-the-mix drum sound in combination with a driving, forward rhythmic feel.
Referring to the legends of 1970s disco like Chic and The Bee Gees, NEON’s rhythm engine gives you that organic liveliness only an actual human drummer can deliver. The recorded drum kits are original vintage kits from the most legendary makers like Ludwig and Rogers.
We recorded them in a small booth using era-specific mics and outboard processing like the Sennheiser MD 421 and Neve 1073. That pristine vintage drum quality is then processed by a state-of-the-art mixing console under the hood of Virtual Drummer NEON, which is macro-controlled by 6 mix presets. The combination of vintage recording and modern processing is what gives NEON its signature sound.
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Hear NEON's nu disco drums in action
From nu disco to dance-pop, NEON offers the perfect danceable pop drums. The drum grooves in each audio example consist of 100% drum phrases and onboard processing from NEON, with no additional editing, samples, or effects.
35 years of drum recording excellence
Bernhard "Böni" Hahn has worked as a producer, recording, and mixing engineer since 1991, on several hundred pop, rock, and indie productions with award-winning artists including Kim Wilde, Nena, and Tarja Turunen (Nightwish).
For NEON, Bernhard close-miked every drum, added overhead and room pairs, and tracked the nu disco drums through Neve 1073 and 1081 preamps and a vintage Studer 962 console.
Your studio companion
Unlike standard acoustic sample libraries that require meticulous velocity layering and manual ghost-note programming, a Virtual Drummer acts as a studio collaborator that responds dynamically to performance intensity and style input.
Pick one of NEON’s 30 styles to match your genre or song’s energy level, and select and combine drum phrases for intros, verses, choruses, and more to quickly build your drum arrangement.
Drag any of the 23 phrases per style into your DAW as a MIDI clip to edit and refine it. Or stay in the zone and trigger ready-made grooves – built from human performances – through single MIDI keys in time with your DAW’s tempo.
At the core, NEON beautifully captures the sound and energy of modern disco, but there’s so much fun to be had in pushing those sounds towards rock, hip-hop, and beyond.
– Nate Williams
(Ex-Jamiroquai, Steve Winwood)
The nu disco drum sound is a hybrid of 1970s human soul and machine punchiness — a tight, upfront groove crafted for the modern dancefloor.
– Bernhard "Böni" Hahn
(Kim Wilde, Nena, and Tarja Turunen (Nightwish))
