After recording the drum kit for or 60s Funk Kit samplepack, I recently spent more time in Gizzard studio with Rich from Tombongo.com, and we spent a day multisampling an absolute peach of a vintage drum kit – a Ludwig 70s Classic kit set up with the much-admired Ludwig 400 snare. This kit had a distinctly different sound to the Gretsch kit we used for the 60s Funk Kit, and that Ludwig 400 definitely has some serious balls to it. Add a bunch of vintage mics and 2 inch analogue tape and we ended up with some seriously gritty drum recordings on our hands.
After a couple of weeks of editing and programming, the result was ‘The Raw 70s Kit‘, a very realistic representation of that original Ludwig drum kit, all laid out into finger drumming friendly MPC programs and Maschine groups, with multiple velocities mapped to each pad as well as ’round robins’ in the MPCs that support them. On the MPC side of things, it’s been thoroughly tweaked and tested with all models of MPCs, including all versions of JJOS and all the really old legacy models, while for Maschine it supports software versions 1.8 and 2.x. Here’s a demo I programmed in my MPC1000 (JJOSXL) that utilises 4 layer round robins and 3 layer velocity mapping – if you listen to the hi hat patterns you can hear how those velocity level and round robins really make a difference to the realism:
As for the finger drumming side of things, I hand you over to Mr Tim Kroker, a very talented finger drummer and drum teacher from Germany who put the kit through its paces on Maschine Mk 2 (Maschine doesn’t support Round Robins, but does have much better support for velocity zones, so there’s up to 18 different samples per pad). You can check out his finger drumming video at the top of this post.
This is actually the second volume of an ongoing series of multisampled kits I’ll be releasing, with a Sonor Designer Kit already recorded and currently being edited. In future articles, I’ll give you some more insight into the actual process of creating these multisampled kits, both at the recording and editing/programming stages.
You can find out more about The Raw 70s Kit over at MPC-Samples.com, including a detailed user guide and a video review from Maschinemasters.com.
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