The Room

After a through analysis of the best selling singles from the 90s we realized, contrary to our belief, that drums featured a rather large real room sound, even if sometimes very low in the mix. So we opted for an historical room in Italy that is not operating anymore as a recording studio. When we were granted access to this space, we had just a few days to setup and capture the drums.

The Drums

Another recognizable sign in music of the '90s is the importance in the mix given to the kick: if the '80s saw loud snares, the '90s where all about kick sounds, mixed rather up front and with a lot of work on both the "click" and bottom of the kick sound. For this reason, we opted for an extensive use of microphones on the kicks and we prepared the two kicks we had at disposal in no less than 13 different ways.

The 6 snares offer a range that goes from piccolo snare to lowly detuned and muted either using a cloth or various damping materials, resulting in 13 very usable sounds.

Even if slightly different in regard to recording technique, the single drums from each kit can be easily mixed since they share the same room, mics and positioning in the room.

Drummer for Kontakt - a custom engine

When we decided to support Kontakt we knew we needed to offer a custom interface for drums. Development took a bit under two years and now we are proudly shipping the first version.

The user interface is thought out to be easy and quick to learn and use while featuring the power-user tools some of us love to tweak when working with drums.

Behind the curtains of the engine allows us to:

The Style Player in Kontakt

We developed a custom Style Player for the Kontakt version.

In depth info is available in the walkthrough video above or read through for some more info.

3 ways of interacting with the MIDI Player

Modify each pattern in realtime (and modifications are kept when assigning to a MIDI Key or dragging to the DAW) at the global or atomic level in terms of:

Styles Galore

With 19 Styles and 1119 patterns, our focus for Modern Retro was in delivering a collection of bread & butter grooves and fills fit to the drum sounds: don't be fooled though, when we use the term "bread & butter" we refer to the highest quality french bread and danish butter one can buy in terms of quality and usability, so much that we crafted all of our product demos with those Styles.

The Styles are freely inspired by some of the most successful singles from the 90s and, again, we were amazed at how much creativity and variety we ended up discovering in those hit songs, to which we added our production style and the musical taste of a first-call session drummer.

Reverb, with class

The IR Reverb module in our engine currently features 36 unique proprietary impulse responses. These are originated from vintage plates, hardware and coveted real rooms, which, when used with drums, push the limits of what can be done with a single drum kit.

Ready-to-go

25 global mix-ready factory presets ease your way into using these drum kits, to which we add presets for each channel, including the reverb path.

... Or mix it your way

Each channel inside our Kontakt engine can be routed to a separate output, when properly configured in Kontakt, leaving you with the freedom to mix the drums using your own plugins or external outboards.

The drum kits

Sonor Designer 1997 Kit

Tama Starclassic Kit

Articulations

Each articulation features no less than 16 velocity levels, all the way up to 32.

Microphones

Preamps and processing

Now includes Drum Singles - Modern Retro Edition - FREE!

A no frills User Interface with just two simple pages:

Eventually:

Some applications

Drum triggering:

Quality you can tell

We released the first multi-mic drum library in 2003, with Scarbee.

We know drums. We know drum-sampling.

We know how to turn a drum recording session into a set of coherent, greatly playable sampled instruments. Not just a collection of sounds. This effort needs a lot of love for drums, time, ear, knowledge, dedication and experience.

Our drum samples have been used on countless tracks in the last 13 years, counting on an ongoing success still sprawling from our first library, Imperial Drums, re-released in BFD format through FXpansion at the end of 2013, our ever-growing product line and the large large number of companies we worked with along the years: Native Instruments, Ableton, Steinberg, Arobas, Cakewalk and Presonus to name just a few.

DISCLAIMERS:
- this Instrument requires the FULL RETAIL VERSION OF NI KONTAKT 5.5.2 or higher
- this Instrument DOES NOT WORK with the Free Kontakt Player
- this Instrument may be acquired only in downloadable format, download size is about 15 Gigabytes, so expect longer download times on slower connections

Features

Kontakt Features