Natural, Lo-fi and Modest Sounding Drum Library

[ward0]

Can you name a natural sounding, simple and modest drum library?

I mean, a reasonable drum kit for a homestudio pleb, just like me and many others here, with a simple signal path and small room, and not the "best sounding drum library", with the most expensive mics passing through Neve 1073 pres, huge well treated rooms, etc., you know the drill.

Superior Drummer, SSD, BFD3 and many others are very good libraries, but they're so good, that in the context of a modest production, which is the case of most homestudios, it just "shines too much", for lack of a better term.

[DSmolken]

I love getting good sounds out of cheap stuff. I've made a couple like that in the past, and have just bought a whole drum kit with hardware and cymbals for the equivalent of $111.68 for sampling in the future - it's now restored enough to be functional, really only had to replace the snare wires and clean stuff up. My KVRDC entry is a Pearl Export kit with heavy muting, and Swirly Drums is just kind of whatever I could borrow from friends - there's some pretty good cymbals, a 50s marching band bass drum used as a kick, a cheap Ludwig snare, some good 80s Tama toms, cracked cymbals, a djembe that just happened to be sitting there when I was recording cymbals, and so on.

https://www.karoryfer.com/karoryfer-sam ... irly-drums
https://www.karoryfer.com/karoryfer-sam ... dze-phu-ii

It Might Get Loud Productions also do this kind of thing, with a focus on metal sounds. KVLT Drums is very 90s raw black metal, for example.

[pljones]

I still like naturalstudios ns_kit7 (subsequently available as Natural Drum Kit - not sure it's still available). It's "simply sampled" - mixed down to stereo, no "treatments". It's clean - so if you need it to sit in an acoustic space you're recording in, you'd need to treat it but it can take that treatment rather than clashing with it. You can also perform it live in a space without it sounding "pre-treated" (and hence unnatural for the performance space) - not that I've ever tried, just what I heard. Downside? 22,042 Files, 1,084 Folders, 18.7 GB. (But it's actually not just one kit and you get brushes, sticks, mallets and hands in assorted degrees of detail across various of the kits.)

My second is Native Instrument Abbey Road Modern Drummer White Full Kit "White Indie Rock" preset - it's fairly dry and doesn't over do the "so good it's too good" as it's not trying to sound like a "great sampled drum kit", it's trying to be useful (all the NI kits I've tried have one of their kit presets that's "trying to be useful" - some make it better than others).

A general point I've found with many commercial kits is the levels tend to be too high, so you get clipping the moment you hit hi-hat chick, kick, snare and crash together - if not well before. Getting that to "sit in" a mix means going back to the source and fixing the problem which can mean going through a fair bit of fiddling around. (I think I check my SFZ mappings for this when I do them... I'm meant to...)

[donkey tugger]

Been using the Addictive Drums 2 Blue Oyster kit a lot recently - nice late 60s early 70s type of sound. As above, the NI Kontakt stuff is good - 60s and 70s drummer are my faves (there's a theme here....)

[perpetual3]

Check out:

https://thephonoloop.com/collections/drums

[perpetual3]

Also:

https://www.mgthefuture.com/drum-kits

[thecontrolcentre]

Shameless self promotion ... you might like the kits on my website. They're set up as Drum Racks for Live, but all the samples are included as wav files. Use the link in my sig.

[ward0]

Check out:

https://thephonoloop.com/collections/drums

Also:

https://www.mgthefuture.com/drum-kits

I am actually looking for acoustic drum kits only

[SampleScience]

The Musyng Kite Standard Drums might be what you're looking for:

http://www.vst4free.com/free_vst.php?pl ... ms&id=2318

or Maxsynth Drumkit1 (Windows 32-bit only):

http://www.vst4free.com/free_vst.php?pl ... t1&id=1094

[an-electric-heart]

It Might Get Loud have a free one, it's pretty decent!

https://bedroomproducersblog.com/2018/0 ... rums-free/

[SoundPorn]

This is probably the best free accoustic drum sampled set. https://smmdrums.wordpress.com/
And also the Drum Mica library for Kontakt but works fully in the free Kontakt Player.

Also MT Power Drummer and Addictive Drums free version is good.

But to be completely honest I've never heard of drums sounding too good lol. I have no idea what you mean it sounds like you just need to mix the tracks better or something. Or you could just put a bit crusher on the drumset and reduce the sample rate. Theres a million ways to trashify drums.

[SoundPorn]

I almost forget SpiteFire has a free series called LABS and one of their releases is a really good sounding accoustic drum set.https://www.spitfireaudio.com/labs/

Also another recommendation is to download the free CakeWalk by Bandlab which comes with free vsti's called Studio Instruments that can be used in any DAW.

[DSmolken]

Well, you can always make good sounds sound crappy, yeah. But making good sounds crappy in a convincingly natural way is hard.

Another one I'll throw out is the Drumdrops Vintage Folk Rock kit. The late 60s Glyn Johns mic setup kind of made a comeback in the 90s with 4-track indie rock, so it's got a very limited-equipment vibe.

[Danilo Villanova]

https://youtu.be/ydaEiypcFiM

These were recorded by a guy in Russia in his garage. They sound gritty, unprocessed and awesome!

[goldglob]

https://youtu.be/ydaEiypcFiM

These were recorded by a guy in Russia in his garage. They sound gritty, unprocessed and awesome!

Thanks for the link, they sound great.

Just a bit of info:
As he explains on his YouTube page this kit is a re-working of the original Salamander Drumkit:
viewtopic.php?f=42&t=342951
In this Monster Drumkit version some of the original (un-processed) samples have actually been processed to sound tighter...that's fine, I'm not saying they sound better or worse, just different.
In the KVR thread linked above can also be found another re-worked version (by kinwe) . He fixed a few flaws of the original. I've noticed that this Monster Drumkit version still has at least one of the flaws (bass drum clicking at end of samples) which the kinwe version fixed non-destructively in the sfz file. The author of this version perhaps should have studied kinwe's sfz text file as a starting point.

Some other things compared to the kinwe version:
No HH chokes...could look at the way kinwe did it and probably edit this in the sfz file.
Leaves out the cowbell. He's deleted the cowbell samples from the orig OH folder but his ALL sfz file still references them and thus you get a message from Sforzando that it can't find them!
There's something wrong with his note 37 (Snare2OFF) in both the 'ALL' file and the 'snare' sfz files...no sound (although sometimes randomly triggers?).

Anyway, just info for those interested in this great sounding kit.