From THE_PATTERN to THE_PATTERN 2: Why I Rebuilt My Drum Plugin From Scratch

In December 2022 I released THE_PATTERN and called it "the drum sequencer of the future."

In October 2026 I released THE_PATTERN 2. The first line on its page reads "THE DRUM MACHINE FROM THE FUTURE."

Same promise. A completely different plugin.

THE_PATTERN 2 is not an update. I rebuilt it from a blank page.

So if you read about THE_PATTERN anywhere before October 2026, including what it couldn't do, you read about version 1. This is the whole story: what the first one was, where it hit its limits, what was hard about building the second one, and exactly what changed.

What was THE_PATTERN (2022)?

THE_PATTERN was the first big plugin I built after THE_INSTRUMENT. The idea was simple: the right drums for your song, always just a few clicks away.

It gave you six lanes: kick, snare, clap, hat and two percussion lanes. Each lane held one sample and one pattern. You clicked through sounds and grooves, locked the ones you liked, and kept going until the beat felt right.

Every lane had its own delay, lo-fi, reverb, auto-pan and transpose. Every sample arrived at the same level. And you could drag any lane's MIDI into your DAW, or export the whole beat as stems.

People loved how fast it got them to a groove. In 2024, version 1.5 let you save your own kits.

Where THE_PATTERN (2022) hit its limits

You told me where it stopped. You were right.

• Six lanes, fixed. Kick, snare, clap, hat, two percs. No room for toms, a shaker and a ride in the same beat.
• Four bars of 4/4. Every pattern. No 7/8, no 6/8, no breakbeat in anything else.
• No triplets. The grid went 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 and nothing in between.
• No ghost notes. The step grid played every hit at full velocity.
• One sample per drum. No velocity layers, no round-robins.
• Loops, not songs. No intro, no verse, no drop. You arranged in your DAW.
• MIDI only by dragging. No live MIDI out to your DAW.
• A dance-leaning library. Great if you made dance music. Less great if you didn't.
• No real manual.

Every one of those limits came from the same place. Six lanes, four bars and one sample per drum weren't settings. Everything was built on top of them.

You can't patch your way out of that.

So I started again from a blank page.

What I kept from THE_PATTERN

Starting over didn't mean throwing everything away.

• The kits. THE_PATTERN's kits live on in CORE, the library that comes with THE_PATTERN 2, rebuilt for the new engine.
• The notes. THE_PATTERN 2 uses the same MIDI notes THE_PATTERN did, so the clips and templates you built for it still line up with the pads.
• The levels. Sounds still arrive levelled, like they did in THE_PATTERN. Now that balance also holds when you swap a sound or generate a new kit.

Everything else is new.

THE_PATTERN vs THE_PATTERN 2: what changed

In plain words:

• Unlike THE_PATTERN, THE_PATTERN 2 isn't limited to six drums. It has 16 pads, and any sound can sit on any pad.
• Unlike THE_PATTERN, THE_PATTERN 2 does triplets, odd time signatures and ghost notes.
• Unlike THE_PATTERN, THE_PATTERN 2 lets you edit every sound in depth, from velocity layers to a full channel strip on every pad.
• Unlike THE_PATTERN, THE_PATTERN 2 turns a groove into a whole song and sends live MIDI to your DAW.

What THE_PATTERN 2 does that THE_PATTERN never could

• That drum loop you found? Get it back as a kit and a pattern. Every drum lands on its own pad, ready to change. It runs on your computer. Nothing is uploaded.
• Hear that loop rebuilt from your own sounds. LIBRARY swaps each drum for the closest match in your library.
• Turn eight bars into a whole drum track. MAKE SONG writes the intro, verse, break and outro, plus the build in a club track, fills included.
• Clone a kick into a synth. Drop a kick on the kick synth and MATCH rebuilds it as a kick you can tune, shorten and shape.
• Beatbox a beat onto the grid. With a mic and THE_BRIDGE, my free companion app.
• Describe a beat in words, or pick a genre. GENERATE grows a new kit from one of my kits and keeps its groove.
• Your own sounds, filed next to mine. MY SOUNDS reads your sample folders without moving a file.
• Effects for the whole kit. Master effects on the drum bus.

How I tested THE_PATTERN 2, and why AI changed everything for me

AI is a game changer in how I build plugins. Not because it writes the code. Because of simulations and testing.

I can now test things one person in a studio never could. Here's what that looked like for THE_PATTERN 2.

A virtual producer made the first beat

Before a person made a beat with THE_PATTERN 2, a simulated one did.

It sits in front of the real plugin and makes a beat, clicking the way you would. For every task, like "put a kick on every beat", it counts the clicks against a limit. It flags every click that changed nothing, and every control without a tooltip in all five languages. Then it hands me the beat as audio, and I listen.

My rule: a feature that works but takes nine clicks and has no tooltip is a bug.

The machine measures. My ears decide.

Hearing a loop rebuilt from your library is the hardest thing THE_PATTERN 2 does. My first approach matched one slice per drum, and bass and room sound in the loop kept fooling it. So I rebuilt it to recreate the whole loop, every hit of every drum, and compare that with the original.

Numbers can tell me when something got worse. They don't get to decide what sounds better.

So every version rendered real loops, and I rated them blind, without knowing which version was which. The new engine scored between 3.75 and 4.00 out of 5. The old approach scored between 2.50 and 3.12.

Two "smarter" ideas for finding similar sounds lost or tied in the same blind tests. I removed them.

Teaching it which drum is which

To turn a loop into a pattern, THE_PATTERN 2 has to hear which hit is the kick, which is the snare and which is the hat.

My first hand-built detector got that right 42% of the time. Then I let it learn drums from my own library. On the same test, it now gets 74% right.

More than a quarter of the hits in real loops are two drums at once, so I made sure a wrong guess still sounds right. Each pad plays the loop's own slice of that drum. If a snare gets labelled as a clap, it still sounds like your loop, and fixing the name is one drag.

Testing caught something else too. My first tempo model looked almost perfect, and it was cheating: it had memorised the tempos in my test set instead of listening to the music. The version that ships gets the tempo right on 55 of 59 real loops, up from 44. When it lands at half or double speed, ×0.5 or ×2 fixes it in one click.

Nothing you saved changes behind your back

The kick synth got a whole new engine. Before it shipped, 24 kicks were checked against recordings of how they sounded on the old engine, to prove they still sound exactly the same.

The same audit found a set of click controls that had never made a sound at all. They work now.

Then I tuned MATCH, the part that clones a kick you drop on it, until it scored between 80 and 100 on 17 of the 21 synth kicks in CORE.

Two different kinds of AI

One thing to keep apart. The AI I test with is a tool on my desk. It doesn't ship inside THE_PATTERN 2.

What ships is the result, and some of it learned from my own drum library, like the loop detection. That runs on your computer.

Why THE_PATTERN 2 changed so fast after launch

No test replaces the real world. The moment many producers, on very different computers, DAWs and sample libraries, open a plugin, they find things I couldn't.

That's what happened in the first days. One producer's huge sample folder froze the plugin while it loaded. It was fixed the next day, in version 1.1. Four days after launch, THE_PATTERN 2 was on version 1.2. Your feedback drove those first fixes.

A perfect product for everyone, on every setup, is what I aspire to. The first weeks after a launch are where I get closest, because that's when the most different setups meet it at once.

If something doesn't work on yours, write to me at philspeiser.com/support. I answer support myself.

I own THE_PATTERN. What happens now?

THE_PATTERN stays yours and keeps working.

Its kits live on in THE_PATTERN 2's CORE library, and THE_PATTERN 2 uses the same MIDI notes, so your clips still line up. As an owner, you'll find an upgrade price for THE_PATTERN 2 in your user area.

The drum machine I want now

THE_PATTERN was the drum sequencer I wanted in 2022. THE_PATTERN 2 is the drum machine I want now.

So if you read somewhere what THE_PATTERN couldn't do, that was version 1. Everything on this page is THE_PATTERN 2, version 1.2, October 2026.

I can't wait to hear what you make with it.