In a review of this length, it’s difficult to do justice to just how many ways you can mangle these sounds, but there are many. Both sets contain five instruments, each configured for a different MIDI channel, but the Performance Multis have been assembled by named artists.Īs mentioned earlier, the second key creative element comes from the options for sound manipulation provided by the Kontakt interface. The Advanced Loop section of the interface includes a ‘MIDI To Host’ button so you can simply drag and drop a MIDI phrase to your host DAW to trigger the loop and editing so you can create as many variations of the original loop as you desire.įinally, there are also two sets of Multi presets - Performance and Production - that organise the instrument presets into Kontakt bundles. These presets contain a single, beat-sliced, loop mapped across the MIDI keyboard. The final instrument type is the Single Loops. The ease with which you can instantly create some really interesting and fresh electronic beats is just a touch embarrassing. The latter are great fun to experiment with just hit a combination of keys and see what rhythmically interesting drum and percussion performances just pop out. Each preset contains multiple octaves of mapped loops, some focused on one instrument type (snares, kicks, etc.) while in others you get a mixture of different single-instrument loops. The Loop Menus group is also genre-themed, covering Electronic, Ethnic Mashup, Hybrid Scoring, Industrial Mashup, Urban Mashup and utility Elements. The Standard MIDI Kits map a selection of the Style Kits in a fashion suitable for standard third-party MIDI drum loops or a MIDI drum kit.
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The Impacts and FX group does something similar but with a series of much more unconventional sounds such as pitch dives, reversed hits, sweeps, sirens, risers and analogue hits. The Elements Kits each take a specific sound group - kicks, hats, snares, for example - and map a collection of sounds of that type across five octaves. I could easily imagine the basic sounds working in contemporary film score, almost any style of modern electronic dance music and through into cutting-edge electronica. In both these instrument types, the sounds themselves offer a huge variety, from fairly conventional acoustic drums through to electronic and analogue synth drum sounds with and without processing. There are plenty of these presets and they are organised into genre-based themes covering Drum & Bass, Dubstep, Electronic, Hybrid Scoring, Industrial Edge, Latin Organic and Rock. The Kit Groove instruments are based around the Style Kits but also include a series of patterns (for that five-lane grid editor). While you can trigger any of these sounds via the appropriate MIDI note, as we will see in a minute, the interface includes a five-lane grid editor for creating step-based patterns using these five groups of sounds. Within each kit, you get 12 different sounds in each group (12 different kicks, 12 different snares, etc.) mapped across five consecutive octaves of the keyboard. Many of the individual samples will appear in a number of presets, but the way they are presented, and what you can do with them, will be different in each case.įor example, the DM307 Style Kits instrument presets are each built on five groups of sounds: kicks, snares, hats, percussion and cymbals/FX. I’ll come to the Kontakt interface in a minute, but let’s start with the library structure.Īt the top level, the presets are organised into instruments and multis, with seven instrument and two multi types. While DM307 is built upon this extensive collection of loops and single-hit samples, it is various preset structures and the Kontakt-based sound manipulation tools that go a long way to defining what the instrument is about. Installation and authentication follows standard practice for Kontakt and I had no problems with any of these steps.
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The library is a download-only product and will work quite happily with the free version of Kontakt Player or, as I used for the review, the full version of Kontakt 5.
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In total, the library contains 7.5GB of uncompressed samples (although this only uses 4.8GB of hard-drive space with NI’s lossless compression) with more than 3600 samples spread across 1500 plus presets. DM307’s samples are derived from modular synth drums, live percussion and classic analogue drum machines.