Hyperfocus DSP has released Niner, a free open-source kick drum synth with a parallel 909-style clap voice for Linux, macOS, and Windows.
It’s been a while since I last covered a free drum synth specifically focused on kicks. I recently wrote about Sender Spike’s DR.89, which goes for the full 909 kit experience.
Niner is a different beast because it specifically emulates the 909 kick drum and adds a lot of extra stuff on top, including its own clap voice, a flexible distortion palette, and a bounce-to-disk function.
So even if you’re already covered on the 909 front, this one is worth a look.
The kick engine is built from three layered voices. SUB is a sine oscillator with a pitch envelope. MID is a sine and noise blend with tone and color controls. And last but not least, TOP is a band-passed click transient with a metallic ring control so you can add a bit of sizzle to the kick.
The cool thing is that each voice has its own tuning, amp, and pitch envelopes, and an optional per-trigger drift for analog-style pitch jitter.
The CLAP voice runs in parallel and is modeled on the 909 clap circuit, using white noise into a 2-pole SVF bandpass with a baked 3-burst envelope and an exponential tail. You can tune it between 500 and 5000 Hz, with a 50–400 ms tail.
For coloration, there’s a five-mode saturation palette covering hard clip, asymmetric diode, tape with drive-reactive low-pass and hysteresis, transformer drive with a 60 Hz bloom, and an auto tube warmth that engages above 0 dB on the master.
There’s also a per-voice clip stage inside each kick voice, which works on the attack-rich content before the amp envelope. I found it pretty useful for taming the transients and keeping everything under control.
The master bus has an RMS compressor with three macros and a precision strip (independent attack, release, and soft knee), a tilt/low/notch EQ, and a brickwall limiter.
What I wasn’t expecting at all is the 16-step sequencer that syncs to host transport in a DAW or runs internally in standalone mode, plus a BOUNCE button that renders the current sound to a 16-bit / 44.1 kHz WAV or AIFF file.
Both are awesome to have in a plugin like this, but bounce is especially cool if you want to export your kicks for resampling.
Niner is GPL-3.0 licensed, and the source is on GitHub. It’s also free forever, per the developer, and you get a direct download with no signup or activation, which earns it bonus points from me.
The main caveat is that there’s no Audio Unit support, so Logic Pro users can’t load it. The plugin’s underlying framework (nih-plug) doesn’t support AU, and the developer says porting would require a full rewrite. Other macOS DAWs are fine via VST3 or CLAP.
Niner is available as a free VST3, CLAP, and Standalone build for Linux, macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), and Windows. Current version is v0.7.7 (beta).
Download: Niner (FREE / open source)
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Last Updated on May 13, 2026 by Tomislav Zlatic.
