Hollow Sun May special

[hollowsun]

As the weather is too miserable here to be gambolling around HS Towers' Maypole on this UK May Day public holiday, instead we've applied a 50% discount to DrumBox throughout May. It's now available for a mere £15.



Hundreds and hundreds of samples from 55 drum machines from the last couple of decades which can be mixed and matched, balanced, panned, tuned and layered, muted, solo'd and also assigned to mute groups for exclusive triggering (e.g. for hi-hats, open and closed triangles, etc.).

Unique to DrumBox are the PRESENCE and MUTILATE controls on each channel. With one simple control, PRESENCE adds a progressive hint of EQ, compression and saturation to add 'punch' to the sound while similarly, MUTILATE reduces sample rate and bit depth for lo-fi goodness (or awfulness depending on your point of view!).

Any channel can be assigned to any MIDI note and when two or more MIDI notes are the same, the samples are automatically layered to create BIG, powerful drum sounds.

This then passes to a multi-effects chain comprising amp and cab simulation, EQ, echo and convolved reverb featuring a wide range of custom impulses from springs to rooms and halls and massive ambiences...



DETAILS

Cheers,


Stephen

[nofrets]

Nice! Just picked it up (and Novalite,too, since I'm behind on my MLMs).

[woodslanding]

I just picked this up, and the sounds are fun, but I'm a little frustrated about how the script seems to work.

My hope had been to assign a controller to say channel2, and be able to scroll through all the snare drums. But it seems like this only works where a machine has a sample with the exact same name. So I can't scroll through snare3-5 on a machine that has them if the channel is set to snare1. And worse yet, if the instrument 'xxx' doesn't exist on that machine, it defaults to kick1. Not helpful!

Ideally, I'd be able to select instruments by type (snare, kick, hihat, crash) without regard to machine source. The only times I'd be concerned about the source machine would be with hi-hats and toms, where I typically want a matched set....

Part of the problem here is Kontakt's recall system, which has no provision for 'presets' within an existing sample set. The presets are only available as full files on disk, which is a problem live, for load times and memory footprint. I complained about this with the Novachord, where I tried to fill up a bank with novachord programs, (I thought 'why didn't they just provide all the sounds in a bank, just like any other synth'???) and maxed my memory after only a couple of dozen (now I know!) But seriously, this shouldn't happen!! NI are doing a real disservice to folks such as yourselves who are creating real virtual instruments, by not developing some kind of usable internal preset methodology.

Of course, if you assigned a control to every parameter in your instrument, you could save and recall presets via host automation. I'm now doing this to some extent with the novachord. I assigned my 9 sliders to the 9 most important parameters, and I can control it sort of like a B3, and save different presets via my host.

So now I'm wondering: do you think it would be possible to develop a mechanism to save and recall presets via scripting? That would be a really great enhancement to these kontakt virtual instruments, I would think.... I guess since there doesn't seem to be a provision for allowing user input to textfields in the scripting interface, you couldn't allow the user to name them, so maybe this is still a pipe dream.

cheers,
-eric

[EvilDragon]

Hello, woodslanding.

What you ask for would be extremely complicated to pull off within the script that was programmed for the Vintage Beatboxes. First of all, there's the inherent limitation in Kontakt that it does NOT allow dropdown menus to be automated via DAW or MIDI learn, at all.

Second, the script isn't really made to work by selecting the instrument type without regard to machine source. Why? Because not all machines have all the different instrument types, so it would be a downright NIGHTMARE trying to get everything to match (and just for your information, the script for that main control panel is around 5000 lines already!). The way this script works currently is that it remembers your last kitpiece selection for every drumbox individually, and for every channel individually.

Regarding presets, in Kontakt 4, you don't have an option for user text input, that's Kontakt 5 only, and we at Hollow Sun want to support Kontakt 4 as long as possible, without using any Kontakt 5 features at this point in time. It would be possible to add preset loading and saving, but I don't see it viable when I compare the amount of work needed to do it (a LOT) versus how many people would use it (you're literally the first one with that suggestion for the Vintage Beatboxes). We thought just saving the different presets to NKIs is the most reasonable choice for this library, considering how many work was spent on it already, so we went with that.

What I can suggest to you, though, is trying Kontakt's Instrument Bank feature. Load up your various NKIs in it and then just use MIDI Program Changes to switch between different presets. The Vintage Beatbox uses only 35 MB of RAM to load all its samples in (and those samples are shared between ALL loaded instances, so that's good), then you have an additional resources load of about 30-45 MB per loaded NKI. You should be able to load at least 16 Beatbox NKIs in an instrument bank without any problems (I can do so with 4 GB of RAM over here, and I have room to spare for more). That's about the only reasonable option I can suggest for what you want to do.


Cheers!