Virtuosity Drums

Virtuosity Drums is an open source (Creative Commons 0) contemporary Jazz drum kit library, performed with sticks, recorded at Virtuosity Musical Instruments in Boston, MA. It features performances by drummer Austin McMahon on the shop's "house kit", indicative of a typical setup in a live club or venue, recorded in the style of a live recording. The library is available in SFZ format and designed specifically to work in Sforzando and ARIA Player.

The snare, toms, and kick were recorded with a 'wave' technique, where rather than attempting to record discrete dynamic levels, the drummer freely played louder and softer notes in a series of dynamic swells which were then cut and sorted. The result is up to 36 dynamic levels with no round robins, which makes these instruments very suitable to live playing on keyboard or virtual drums as they will benefit enormously from the natural variation in velocity. The cymbals on the other hand use a smaller number of discrete velocity layers at 4 round robins, to help in situations of high repetition.

Also included are a range of Latin percussion and traps drawn from the VSCO 2 project, making the library almost fully GM-compliant. The full kit patch includes several additional articulations such as partially and fully muted snare, several steps of semi-open hi-hat, and snare buzzes, roll, and flams:

• 1,000 unique samples [per mic position]; 4,900 total sample files.
• 1.5 GB total size with 48kHz/24-bit samples and FLAC (lossless) compression.
• 6 mixable microphone positions: Kick, Snare, OH, Mid (stereo ribbon), Room, and Vintage.
• Runs in the free Sforzando player by Plogue, simply drag and drop the 'Virtuosity Drums.bank.xml' into Sforzando and it will appear as a set of options when you click 'Instruments'.
• Full snare on/off control (including for kick).
• Additional percussion from the VSCO 2 project for near-complete GM compliance.
• Extended non-GM drum techniques available for Snare, Hi-hat, and toms.
• Adaptable for electronic drums with optional hi-hat CC4 keymap.

License info:

This library (Virtuosity Drums) is released under a Creative Commons 0 (CC0) license as a corollary to the VCSL project and its core objective of creating a 'baseline' set of consistently high-quality, publicly available samples. Composers, musicians, and artists of all kinds may use this product for any purpose, commercial or not, without the need for attribution, permission, or any other roadblocks of any kind.

While we gladly welcome and encourage derivative works, we urge any derivative virtual instrument projects to consider providing attribution and notes on what changes were made, so as to maintain provenance of the samples and disambiguate your work from its roots. We also encourage derivative works to release under CC0, 'Free Culture', or similar licenses and at no cost to users, in keeping with the spirit of the samples.

{See video at top of page}