Rattly And Raw present Martin France Drums

[rattlyandraw]

After a long time in development we are super happy to launch the RaR Signature Range with an incredibly detailed and realistic-sounding drum kit instrument for Kontakt and the free Kontakt Player, featuring one of the world's finest and most technically skilled professional musicians - Martin France!




Watch the video below to see UK drum master Martin France playing our new soon to be released Kontakt sample library (which also works with the FREE Kontakt player!) in an acoustic jazz situation at the royal academy of music! The video features the raw drum sounds from the pack played live on the DTX-700 e-drum kit and mixed entirely inside our easy to use and powerful interface!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnZ24tqU4js


This video covers basic sounds and features:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GnKwh9gucs


This video features martin playing an improvised solo mixed entirely in Martin France Drums

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grwI_QM8ojA


Check out the website to learn all about it!

http://www.rattlyandraw.com/martin-france-drums.html




Endorsements:

Here's what some drummers and producers you may know have said about Martin France Drums:


Bill Bruford (King Crimson, Yes, Genesis)
“Martin France is a drummer’s drummer, a musician’s musician. His years of experience of music-making at the highest level and his personal touch at the drum kit have combined to produce this exceptional drum library.
The downloadable software package is aimed squarely at today’s drummers, composers and writers who need a wide range of potential application options in their choice of drum sounds. Martin has recorded great sounding kits, snares and cymbals with dozens of microphone selections and placements, and multiple dynamic layers, affording exhaustive sound flexibility in terms of mixing within different sonic settings.
With excellent trigger characteristics for a drummer using an electronic set-up, Martin France Drums is possibly the best ‘reacting’ drum software on the market today. The package offers not only an unusual but classic choice of drums which suit any music, but also years of experience in what they should sound like. I wish we’d had this when I was around.”

Jon Kelly (Kate Bush, Paul McCartney)
“Martin France is a very very good drummer, and this is his very very good sample library! These drums are as good as it gets, the quality of the sound and tone of the drums is exceptional.”

Damian Taylor (Björk, Prodigy, Arcade Fire, Killers, Frou Frou)
“This is a freakishly detailed and lifelike instrument for a real person to really play. Next level stuff.”

Jeremy Stacey (Sheryl Crow, Wayne Krantz, Noel Gallagher, Tom Jones, Robbie Williams)
“This sounds exciting and different, Martin is a fantastic and very individual player, and being from a jazz background has a lot of subtlety and finesse in his playing, and also has great taste in drums and cymbals, which all points to making this a very different sounding set of samples from a lot of drum libraries that are out there at the moment.”

Cameron Craig (Björk, Unkle, Sia, Duffy)
“An amazingly detailed drum library from an amazing drummer and the team at Rattly and Raw. The amount of control you can muster from this instrument is incredible, from tuning, damping and effecting the drums, it's like recording with real drums and so much more.”

Neil Percy (Principal Percussion London Symphony Orchestra, Karl Jenkins, John Williams)
“What a treat these samples are for all musicians ‘serious’ about using quality sounds from the drum set, recorded by one of the most in-demand drummers and a consummate musician.”

Frank Ricotti (Freddie Mercury, Tina Turner, Pet Shop Boys, Hans Zimmer)
“I look forward with anticipation to this soon-to-be-released drum sample collection featuring Martin France. I have worked with Martin for many years both recording and performing, so combining his unique musical style and dynamic touch will I’m sure produce a formidable, highly creative “one of a kind” product for both drummers & composers/producers.”

Paul Clarvis (Sting, Harrison Birtwistle, Michael Nyman, Michel Legrand)
“Anything Martin France turns his hand to will be great.”

Dave Mattacks (George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Joan Armatrading)
“Martin France - a top chap who knows exactly what he's doing on a set of drums!”



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@rattlyandraw

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Rattly-A ... 0772439554

Many thanks!

[DSmolken]

This looks very nice. Drum kits suitable for quieter styles like jazz or acoustic pop and sampled in detail are rare compared to kits intended for metal. These sound great, too.

[rattlyandraw]

Hi! Thanks so much for the kind words. They definitely work great with those genres, but also are pretty versatile generally and the FX section and larger drums are especially useful in making the sounds work in harder/tougher sounding genres!!!

Best to you

Em

[pljones]

Hihats Tip, Hihats Open, Hihats Shank, Hihats Pedal,

Shame the hi-hat looks useless. Does it have no CC4 tracking other than Open and Closed? Not even splash? A normal playing style for the hi-hat gets a huge amount of the natural drum kit effect from having a decent number of degrees of openness.

[rattlyandraw]

It's a shame you think that, we've had very positive feedback and amazing results from some of the finest drummers, engineers and producers in the world. I also use Martin France Drums regularly in my productions and session work... I think maybe "useless" is a bit extreme. Best to you anyhow.

[pljones]

But if it's only open and closed, you have no control - no hi-hat realism and hence, as a playable hi-hat it isn't useful.

[rattlyandraw]

Again, with shank, pedal, tip and open, a lot of grear players and producers are finding it very useful. Please check out the videos of Jazz master Martin France playing at the royal academy of music in an acoustic jazz setting to see it working. It's quite possible to get very convincing performances with Martin France Drums just as it is.

This pack isn't about the specifications of individual elements, it's about the overall effect of the instruments together. Just might not be what you're looking for, but saying it's useless is rather strange, especially with three demonstration videos in the link above.

We are looking at perhaps incorporating more levels of hihat articulation in an update though, depending on customer feedback.

Good luck to you and all the best anyhow!

[pljones]

It depends why you play sampled drums. For me, it's for pleasure of playing and so a lot of it's about feel. I expect to get feedback from a drum set so, if I move my hi-hat pedal, the sound should change. I'm used to it in all the other sampled kits I use and it jars badly when I come across a kit with an unresponsive pedal. It's the same with velocity layers -- you get used to the difference in response (i.e. realism) that you get hitting a tom harder, hearing the tone change and hearing the way it makes the rest of the kit sound (e.g. snare wires rattling). That level of detail - both across the kit and specifically on the hi-hat - is pretty common in cheaper kits (e.g. the Native Instruments Abbey Road kits and the Analogue Drums kits - despite the latter having pretty limited velocity tracking in places).

Of course, you may not see your product in the same space as those I mention, so it wouldn't then be a valid comparison on my part.

[rattlyandraw]

I guess if you like the sounds you hear in the three videos and you're interested in the opinions of great producers and drummers then this is the set for you. We did this pack with Martin France - Professor of Drumkit at the Royal Academy of Music, a drummer famous for his dynamic and sensitive playing and very very high standards sonically and musically and a recording/mix engineer working on a wide variety of high level modern projects in order to marry a naturalistic approach with a modern streamlined aesthetic. IF you don't dig that, then there's not much more to say

To more directly address your post though, there are a HUGE number of samples per articulation, many velocity layers, many round robins and a lot of attention to detail throughout. It has been efficiently designed to use the MINIMUM of resources for the maximum impact. If you don't like it, that's fair enough, but please comment on the sound and usability of the instrument itself rather than passive aggressively try to denigrate a product you haven't used and seem not to fully have a handle on. If you want to attack the core of this instrument, it's important to understand how the specifications of THIS product exactly interact with its playback engine and recording approach to produce the results that it does. Not everything works in the same way and the whole of approach of this instrument is different to other drum libraries in several respects - more is not always more...

best to you anyhow and good luck with your search for drum libraries!

[pljones]

Part of the problem is no matter how many "famous names" someone throws into a mix, it doesn't change the technical data nor does it provide any way to try something out yourself to see if it works for you. The web site could provide more details but you say this isn't the focus of the kit, which I can accept.

I like the concept and the sound but I have no way, other than these staged performances, to assess the product - in part due to the approach you've chosen (i.e. limited technical detail).

Honestly, I get nothing at all from people praising someone else's performance, however - it tells me nothing about my use of a product and is, thus, of no use whatsoever to me. (I've also had issues with Bruford's comments on sampled drum kits before, to be frank .)

Other than the hi-hat -- which is notably avoided throughout, particularly noticeably on the drum solo video -- the kit sounds pretty good. Where the hi-hat is used, its limitations in expression are pretty clear, hence my disappointment. It simply doesn't look playable to me.

Unfortunately, there isn't any sensible way for any producer of samples to provide a try-before-you-buy to every potential user: I wish there were. (Addictive Drums tried but their demo kit was so cut down it meant, as someone looking for the detail, I got nothing from it.)

[jancivil]

Well, regardless of marketing, as a big hihat exponent, this is a very thin articulations set. The things I load in BFD3 do 'open tip, close tip, 1/4 tip, 1/2 tip, 3/4 tip; open shank, close shank, 1/4 shank, 1/2 shank, 3/4 shank'. Also, for snare, no drag, no flam. So, rather than this nebulous 'streamlined aesthetic' I'd want more articulations. "More isn't always more"; It doesn't seem likely that 1 shank is not less than 5. That would be possible if the 5 are so shallow that 1 in the more deeply sampled product presents similarly, but that's not the case. Don't take it personally, it's not an attack. I'm not interested in opinions much either, and I don't know how anyone can comment on the usability before having purchased.

[jancivil]

it's important to understand how the specifications of THIS product exactly interact with its playback engine and recording approach to produce the results that it does.

this is interesting, it would be good to see that explained. It looks like some sort of breakthrough is implied.

[rattlyandraw]

Mr Jones.

Hihat 'avoided throughout'. Give me a break man. The videos at the Royal Academy and the drum solo show improvised, unedited performances by one of the finest drummers in the world, not some kind of crude advert made by a marketing agency. Martin played what he felt, when he wanted. The "basic sounds and features video" is just a groove based on the hihats...sooo...not really sure what you're banging on about here. Seems like you're trying to pick a fight and throw some crap to be honest!!

We feel that flams and drags are easy to play/program and kept the instrument simpler for less-technical drummers to use and the sample count massively lower also!

Anyhow, after such a voracious attack on our company (which you know nothing about), our product (which you says sounds good, but you have never used) and our associates, I think the least you could do is post a link to you playing a sample set that meets your standards or at worst exceeds the results of our instrument (which should be no problem as we can infer from your desparaging tone). Please focus on the hihat and your touch and finesse that really makes use of the extra open hihat articulations you make note of. I'll make sure Mr. Bruford gets to see/hear it so he can learn where he has been going wrong.

We eagerly await this, the only really reasonable response from you after such a determined assault. Please don't chicken out of this, it would be a shame for you not to back up your attack. If you want, we'll provide access for an afternoon to a film crew, high end recording studio and £5000 electric kit for you to record this on. You can even use the recording for one of your productions if you like. Sounds reasonable to me.

Best to you

[pljones]

Please focus on the hihat and your touch and finesse that really makes use of the extra open hihat articulations you make note of.

You're utterly missing the point with that statement.

[rattlyandraw]

I've not missed ANY point mate. I've been working professionally in this field for 20 years.

So...

Looking forward to your post with the demonstration. Would you like to book in the session? It would have a monetary value of around £3000 so is quite a generous offer on our part. Please have the courage to back up your shameless attack...

Best to you and looking forward to hearing what you come up with.