Hot on the heels of the free ReBirth soft synth available from the Propellerhead ReBirth Museum, d-lusion have released their old Drumstation drum machine and Rubberduck bassline synth as freeware. These ones are “based on” the TB303 and TR909 rather than being proper emulations, but d-lusion do point out that their Rubberduck bass synth was out well before ReBirth.

The Drumstation details from the website: “Based on the concept of the legendary drum computers TR-909, TR-808 and TR-606 whose throbbing bassdrums and crashing hihats sent generations of dance-music enthusiasts into extasy, Drumstation combines cool old drum machine features with cutting-edge software-synthesis technology. Drumstation featured 8 channels of drums (either samples or synthesized drum sounds), programmable via an easy-to-use step sequencer, effects (realtime reverb, delay, flanger, filter, distortion) for each channel, loops could be sliced and stretched. With the drumkit manager, you could create your own drumkits. All this in the year 1998!”

As for Rubberduck: “Roughly based on the the well known TB-303, Rubberduck’s synthesis model consists of an oscillator wave with a resonant filter sweep applied to it combined with an efficient hardware sequencer design which resolves in the typical twisted, screaming, bubbling bass sound that is often used in Acid House, Goa Trance, or Techno productions. Rubberduck featured realtime digital resonant dynamic filters, frequency and volume envelope (DCA, DCF), 4 basic waveforms, dual oscillator sound generation (starting with version 2.0), a 224 note sequencer, a drum section where samples could be synchroneous played back, an effect unit (delay/feedback/distortion) and was fully Windows 95 compatible.”

There are some mildly amusing quotes about Rubberduck, too, but no mention of the name, which to me is one of the best things about this instrument. I don’t know how well they work on current versions of Windows, but they may be worth a shot.