What do you want to see in a Kontakt drumkit sample library? (acoustic and electronic)

[Architeuthis]

Hello guys,

I am an upcoming sample library developer interested in your opinions. What is wrong with drumkit sample libraries, what is missing, what do you want? Interface-wise, sample-wise, etc.

Edit: Oh also important, price-wise.

[Gonga]

I've been looking for a really high-quality set of drums that have a patch for each drum, and each drum is pitch-mapped to the keyboard so you can play melodies on them. This would include percussion such as cymbals and cowbells also. Basically I'd like to be able to play each drum as a totally separate instrument rather than a set.

But then, I might be the only one interested in something different like that.

[Shy]

What is wrong with drumkit sample libraries

Most of them are recorded in idiotic conditions like for example in huge rooms/"studios" with a ton of ambiance by people who don't realize that the samples need to be as dry as possible, usually using improper mics and positioning. An example for superb recording is the Zildjian Digital Vault sample library collection. Those are the ONLY extensive cymbal samples that are really worth anything. Learn from it, seriously.

[Architeuthis]

I've been looking for a really high-quality set of drums that have a patch for each drum, and each drum is pitch-mapped to the keyboard so you can play melodies on them. This would include percussion such as cymbals and cowbells also. Basically I'd like to be able to play each drum as a totally separate instrument rather than a set.

But then, I might be the only one interested in something different like that.

This suggestion is more brilliant than you realize. I have my own ideas why this would be useful. Tell me, what sound are you going for? What genre of music? Tell me more.

Most of them are recorded in idiotic conditions like for example in huge rooms/"studios" with a ton of ambiance by people who don't realize that the samples need to be as dry as possible, usually using improper mics and positioning. An example for superb recording is the Zildjian Digital Vault sample library collection. Those are the ONLY extensive cymbal samples that are really worth anything. Learn from it, seriously.

Hmm, well I can't promise my first few products will be recorded in an an awesome recording space with the best mics and mic techniques, but your points are definitely noted. As a matter of fact, maybe I could allow customers to comment on the recording sound/quality before the production of a sample library... hmm... I like this idea.

[Xenobt]

On a practical level, having volume, tuning, pan and effects send per drum are the real meat and potatoes.

Being able to remap midi notes for each kit piece is always nice, as well as mono or stereo outs for processing, and as Gonga mentions, having a mini program with basic eq, filtering and adsr controls for each drum would be VERY welcome. But I'm a finger drummer, so General Midi mapping please!

Two or three effects per instrument, insert style, plus sends to the master effects should do it for FX. And having a stereo room mic for each sample, (even for machine drums, recorded thru studio monitors in a live room) to blend in would be cool too. If you could turn it off and save CPU headroom/RAM, that would be even better.

An option for the keyboard GUI to show sample zones is always helpful, as well as displaying the sample name and midi note number being played somewhere. Real time note velocity displays aren't seen much, so maybe that's a niche!

But if I had to choose ONE thing, it would be the ability to pass midi notes to another drum VI for layering outside Kontakt. Virtual midi thru would be HUGE, and save having to duplicate midi tracks to get it done.

Just a few (ha!) thoughts. Good Luck!

KVR/eSoundz: Xenobt

[chokehold]

The most important features by which I instantly value or disqualify drums, be they for Kontakt or not, are these:

* As many velocity layers as possible - real samples, not just volume scaled.

* Multiple Round/Random Robin samples per velocity layer (to avoid machine gun FX)

* DRY samples. That's why I choose Superior Drummer over Slate and others 10 times out of 10 - its samples have probably been polished a bit, but they sound rough and dirty, like they come right out of the recording room through a big fat console and into my lousy home studio. I get to work with exactly the kind of material that "the big ones" work with - and not what some mixing guy thinks sounds cool, and I have to put up with his pre-processing.

* Multi-microphone recordings. One or two mics per drum are cute, but if I play the kick I want it to come out of the overheads as well. Don't care if it's "artifical", i.e. internally processed and routed, or if it was really recorded that way. As long as it sounds authentic and as long as I have the possibility to control the amount of this bleed. For quiet ballads it might be desirable to have a lot of room sound going on, but for some tense metal blastbeat orgy not so much.

* Routing - I want the possibility to mix or at least route the single microphones (not drums) out of the plugin. I like to send everything out of the plugin "dry", and use the EQs, Comps and Reverbs I already have and know within my DAW.
I prefer having the single microphones (Kick in, Kick out, Subkick, ...) available on separate tracks in my DAW (=Outputs in the plugin) rather than pre-mixed and separated by drums per Output (Kick bus, Snare bus, ...), because what YOU might deem a good and useful mixed drum sound might be worth nothing to me.

* Flexibility as mentioned above is king - but don't forget ease of use.
Just putting a helluva lot of functionality into something and confronting everybody with a screenful of cryptic controls and knobs and sliders is not the right approach. So a well thought out Interface with maybe pages/tabs or "extended menus" and 2 or 3 useful preset sounds can help the plugin to attract both a completely unexperienced audience as well as the nerds like myself.

* Articulations! I know they're a pain, but having pre-recorded things like Flams and Ruffs and Rimshots and Ghost notes that can be triggered might not interest the 4-to-the-floor Pop composers, but a real musician ( ) like me needs those small details to work effectively.

* Scalability. I prefer buying single drums or single sets to get exactly the assortment I want, and I hate paying for a lot of useless content I'll never need.
XLN sell kit pieces like single Snares etc., which is a radical but very flexible approach and I wish Toontrack would do something similar with Superior Drummer. Having to buy a $120 library just for "that 1 Kick sound" ... meh.
So maybe create a sort of framework or player with a basic set, and provide expansion packs (=libraries) for it.

* 64-bits. Sorry, this is about samples, loading things into RAM (even with DFD) and a person who uses one sampled instrument is liable to use some more, so that cries for 4+ GB which means 64 bits. C'mon, this isn't the 90s anymore. (sadly)

* Price depends on what you have to offer. I'm not paying a penny for a machine-gun one-shot Kick or Snare that was recorded in a practice room and its samples are flooded with bad room content, or where maybe two hits in a row of Round Robins sound too different and so on.
But if you have a decent kit together, offer some desirable features as I listed above and if you can produce (or let someone produce) convincing demos to show off what your instrument can do, then that's another story.

[Ligidium]

Ability to muffle / mute snares and other drums either through switching samples or through clever eq, a knob for controlling the length of the tonal sound of a sample so I can shorten the fundamental tone of a snare but preserve the reverb or sizzle, ability to save and load patches and if it's Kontakt then within the Kontakt instrument, round robin, articulations for different strikes, non-standard micing and playing like hitting a drum with a fist full of uncooked spaghetti with the sound of the noodles cracking, presets that come close to imitating various songs and well known breakbeats like an Orange Krush Action preset, impulse responses of various rooms, individual knobs for the volume and phase of each mic (overhead, beater, back, top, bottom, room, etc) for each drum, a complete drum set instrument and also individual drum instruments, and an extremely low noise floor so I don't get a bunch of noise at the end of each sample if I compress it hard.

[Architeuthis]

On a practical level, having volume, tuning, pan and effects send per drum are the real meat and potatoes.

Definitely.

Being able to remap midi notes for each kit piece is always nice, as well as mono or stereo outs for processing, and as Gonga mentions, having a mini program with basic eq, filtering and adsr controls for each drum would be VERY welcome. But I'm a finger drummer, so General Midi mapping please!

But of course! Although individual outs is something the end user has to setup in Kontakt.

Two or three effects per instrument, insert style, plus sends to the master effects should do it for FX. And having a stereo room mic for each sample, (even for machine drums, recorded thru studio monitors in a live room) to blend in would be cool too. If you could turn it off and save CPU headroom/RAM, that would be even better.

Indeed, and when you say machine drums I assume analog/synthesized.

An option for the keyboard GUI to show sample zones is always helpful, as well as displaying the sample name and midi note number being played somewhere. Real time note velocity displays aren't seen much, so maybe that's a niche!

Yes, I hate it when I don't know what keys have samples on them. That's easy to do. Midi Note/Articulation/Velocity display? Piece of cake. It would be a crime not to include these suggestions.

But if I had to choose ONE thing, it would be the ability to pass midi notes to another drum VI for layering outside Kontakt. Virtual midi thru would be HUGE, and save having to duplicate midi tracks to get it done.

Ok, I just did a search for using Kontakt to output midi, found this. But what I am thinking is that the sample library itself should include layering options.

Just a few (ha!) thoughts. Good Luck!

[Architeuthis]

* As many velocity layers as possible - real samples, not just volume scaled.
* Multiple Round/Random Robin samples per velocity layer (to avoid machine gun FX)

No doubt! We also have to think about the current technology, the size of samples, RAM, etc. I may have to create options for disabling the number of repetitions or even the number of velocity layers if I want to approach an "as many as possible" number of velocity layers and repetitions.

* Multi-microphone recordings. One or two mics per drum are cute, but if I play the kick I want it to come out of the overheads as well. Don't care if it's "artifical", i.e. internally processed and routed, or if it was really recorded that way. As long as it sounds authentic and as long as I have the possibility to control the amount of this bleed. For quiet ballads it might be desirable to have a lot of room sound going on, but for some tense metal blastbeat orgy not so much.

Or how about the snare through the kick mic?

* Routing - I want the possibility to mix or at least route the single microphones (not drums) out of the plugin. I like to send everything out of the plugin "dry", and use the EQs, Comps and Reverbs I already have and know within my DAW.
I prefer having the single microphones (Kick in, Kick out, Subkick, ...) available on separate tracks in my DAW (=Outputs in the plugin) rather than pre-mixed and separated by drums per Output (Kick bus, Snare bus, ...), because what YOU might deem a good and useful mixed drum sound might be worth nothing to me.

The problem with Kontakt is that this is doable, but you would have to go into the instrument edit window for some of these suggestions. My job then, is to setup the kontakt instrument/patch/scripting so that power users like yourself have an easy time manipulating all these parameters.

* Flexibility as mentioned above is king - but don't forget ease of use.
Just putting a helluva lot of functionality into something and confronting everybody with a screenful of cryptic controls and knobs and sliders is not the right approach. So a well thought out Interface with maybe pages/tabs or "extended menus" and 2 or 3 useful preset sounds can help the plugin to attract both a completely unexperienced audience as well as the nerds like myself.

Absolutely, and this requires a good GUI artist which I definitely am not, that doesn't mean the functionality won't be there, maybe just it won't be as easy on the eyes. As my sample library company grows I hope to hire GUI artists who can deliver what you're looking for. See that pun? yep.

* Articulations! I know they're a pain, but having pre-recorded things like Flams and Ruffs and Rimshots and Ghost notes that can be triggered might not interest the 4-to-the-floor Pop composers, but a real musician ( ) like me needs those small details to work effectively.

What kind of person would I be if I was too lazy to record such basic articulations? (Err, well, actually the drummer recorded them, thank you drummers!). Edit: Hmm, some of those articulations may be more "triggerable midi sequences" than actual recorded samples.

* Scalability. I prefer buying single drums or single sets to get exactly the assortment I want, and I hate paying for a lot of useless content I'll never need.
XLN sell kit pieces like single Snares etc., which is a radical but very flexible approach and I wish Toontrack would do something similar with Superior Drummer. Having to buy a $120 library just for "that 1 Kick sound" ... meh.
So maybe create a sort of framework or player with a basic set, and provide expansion packs (=libraries) for it.

AB-SO-FREEKIN-LUTELY. I want to sell kits and individual drums, or maybe even have all drums purchasable individually, but also package them into kits. Also, the way I create the kontakt instruments should allow full modularity. Yes, you should be able to load up 5 snares 2 kicks 3 hats in one kontakt instance without having to "load all the kit pieces each drum belongs to".

* Price depends on what you have to offer. I'm not paying a penny for a machine-gun one-shot Kick or Snare that was recorded in a practice room and its samples are flooded with bad room content, or where maybe two hits in a row of Round Robins sound too different and so on.
But if you have a decent kit together, offer some desirable features as I listed above and if you can produce (or let someone produce) convincing demos to show off what your instrument can do, then that's another story.

Got it.

[Architeuthis]

Ability to muffle / mute snares and other drums either through switching samples or through clever eq, a knob for controlling the length of the tonal sound of a sample so I can shorten the fundamental tone of a snare but preserve the reverb or sizzle, ability to save and load patches and if it's Kontakt then within the Kontakt instrument, round robin, articulations for different strikes, non-standard micing and playing like hitting a drum with a fist full of uncooked spaghetti with the sound of the noodles cracking, presets that come close to imitating various songs and well known breakbeats like an Orange Krush Action preset, impulse responses of various rooms, individual knobs for the volume and phase of each mic (overhead, beater, back, top, bottom, room, etc) for each drum, a complete drum set instrument and also individual drum instruments, and an extremely low noise floor so I don't get a bunch of noise at the end of each sample if I compress it hard.

Dood, BELIEVE IT OR NOT, you are speaking my language. Crazy. Edit: Although the number of mics in my first few products won't quite be that extensive, but that doesn't mean I won't include all those mics in future products. Also, not all my products will be carbon-copies of each other (meaning, not every product will have the same number of mics, same articulations, same mic setup, not even the same room, not even the same drummer! etc. etc.)

Edit2: And yes, drum rolls need round-robins too. WHO WOULDA THUNK?

[jancivil]

* Articulations! I know they're a pain, but having pre-recorded things like Flams and Ruffs and Rimshots and Ghost notes that can be triggered might not interest the 4-to-the-floor Pop composers, but a real musician ( ) like me needs those small details to work effectively.

What kind of person would I be if I was too lazy to record such basic articulations? (Err, well, actually the drummer recorded them, thank you drummers!). Edit: Hmm, some of those articulations may be more "triggerable midi sequences" than actual recorded samples.

there is one very essential thing missing, perhaps missing completely. at any rate I'm missing it and I have a lot to work with. a single bounce of the stick; not a buzz, a single bounce, and as left/right placed on the drum. so one can construct rudimentary drummer in midi. flamadiddles and all of this would be convenient, but I'm fine with making things happen. and you could extend it, three bounces up to whatever rep constitutes the 'buzz' articulation. two single strokes is not the same action off the head as a bounce, you can fake it with velocity but it isn' the same sound.

[Architeuthis]

there is one very essential thing missing, perhaps missing completely. at any rate I'm missing it and I have a lot to work with. a single bounce of the stick; not a buzz, a single bounce, and as left/right placed on the drum. so one can construct rudimentary drummer in midi. flamadiddles and all of this would be convenient, but I'm fine with making things happen. and you could extend it, three bounces up to whatever rep constitutes the 'buzz' articulation. two single strokes is not the same action off the head as a bounce, you can fake it with velocity but it isn' the same sound.

I'm not sure I know exactly what you're talking about. I know that there's a difference between hitting the snare with the intention to leave the stick on the head and hitting the snare with the intention to make a clean bounce, but I thought the drummer usually goes for clean single bounces.

What I have done with my upcoming products is included ghost notes and really quiet notes that do sound like clean single bounces where the hit is light enough and clean enough to the point you no longer hear the snare sizzle and it almost sounds like the "snare" part of the snare was removed.. Maybe this is what you're talking about?

Edit: But if you have specific articulation ideas, I'm all for it as well.

[Zombie Queen]

What would interest me: acoustic, dry, K4 compatible, not too big in size, with some sort of twist that would make it different from other sets. Price about $50.

[electro]

BFD is a much better interface for drums than Kontakt.

[strayboom]

sorry for cheap marketing, but you might want to check this out for some ideas: http://www.strayworx.com/drumod/

read the description, maybe there are useful things that might work for you.