Korg Forums

I just had a great time on the Purgatory Creek Page going through some free sounds available there.

However, what I'm really interested in finding are some additional drum sounds. I don't really seem to find any that won't cost me more than I can afford.

I really love the drum sounds on the Garbage 2.0 album and recent Depeche Mode drum sounds.

But really, I'd take a look at anything you guys know is out there. Thanks

Exactly looking about the same.

I've been thinking that the DSI Tempest could achieve this especially for Depeche Mode style analog drums but this machine is very expensive. So, would like to have the opinion of current Tempest owners before going for it.

By the way, extra analog drum sets would be great for the Kronos.

While I love the old analog DM stuff, I was thinking of the more recent DM material, like "Precious" or the Exciter album stuff.

I don't know how clean these productions are but the Kronos is a sampler.

Wagnergrad96 wrote:I'm really interested in finding some additional drum sounds.

Have you seen that ? http://wavesart.eu/KronosEXs/Studio%20Drums.html
just in case ...

There are thousands of sets of free or very cheap drum .wav or aiff sample libraries available on ebay and elsewhere on the net - every vintage drum box you could think of, plus loads of modern sets.
I would suggest downloading a wide selection of them, and making your own kits.
It will take you a little time to do it, because you will want to audition the sounds, and will then need to load them, map them and save them as programs.
It is really worth that small initial investment in time - once they are in the Kronos, it will sort your drum problems out for ever. I currently use any of around 80 drum programs that I have made - about 5,000 different drum sounds in all - and they give me almost everything I need. Occasionally I add another kit if there is something I find particularly interesting, but that is pretty rare.

Pete.

pete.m wrote:There are thousands of sets of free or very cheap drum .wav or aiff sample libraries available

I don't want to disagree but just to point out something about "free" drum kit samples (or any) !
Do you ever believe that someone will pay for studio & Musician to sample/record a high rated full studio drum set , spend months
of work in order to proccess & adapt 8 velocity layer samples per key in a specific workstation and then share it for free ?
I do not think so ... and all low cost samples I've heard from my mates are just poor re-sampled DK parts from VST with zero
processing and velocity layers/crossfades , except if you don't really care about it on altar of cheapness ...
As Sander said , Kronos is a sampler , DIY !

Just my opinion !

I would like a tempest as well but it is very expensive, now there is the drum brute, much more cost effective, then items like the 808 and 909 remakes by roland if any of those click your boxes. Kronos has some nice drums and when you start adding effects and tweaking the can go a long ways.

Hi Anthony,

You make a fair point, and I agree with much of what you say, but I hope that I can explain myself a little more fully in this post.

With regard to the idea of doing things on the cheap, my response was tailored to recognise the fact that Wagnergrad mentioned that money is a consideration for him. However, my basic point wasn't actually to do with cheapness, but with encouraging people to explore the use of drum samples on the Kronos.

I think that you and I are coming at it from two different musical angles here. By that, I mean that - for many electronic musicians, including me - trying to emulate a live drummer through replicating a high-end studio kit (with all the crossfades and velocity layers etc that necessarily form part of that process) isn't really what they are trying to achieve. It is absolutely right that you should pay the producers of that kind of material a decent whack for all the work they put in. But the route I was referring to inevitably takes you down the road towards the more obviously electronic drum sounds that I imagine would work better with the kind of music that Wagnergrad mentions.

It is of course possible to introduce a more expressive feel to the kind of basic samples to which I was referring, through filtering, pitch bend and effects etc. But, again, that isn't always the effect that some electronic musicians want. I don't think that either path - the high end, or the cheap option - fully captures the fantastic energy of a great live drummer, though.

By the way, your (and Sander's) comment about the Kronos being a sampler...DIY! has inspired me. Thank you for that. When the weather picks up, I'm going to do what I've been meaning to do for years and take my mics round to my neighbour next time he gets his drum kit out in the garden! (It only happens once or twice a year, thankfully).

Pete.

pete.m don't just sample the drums there are a lot of other things that make wonderful percussive whacks!

Pete , my 2 cents for your perspective and totally agree , when we talk about electronic drumkits and actually there
is no meaning to try hard to develop a 808 DK sound that is already a simple digital sound and easy to reproduce , but
believe me , a natural high-end drumkit is very sophisticated to be reproduced with captured mic leackage for a workstation !
I'm talking mainly for natural music intruments where is my field and just wanted to say that in this life , except human feelings ,
nothing is actually for free , always a motivation is deeply hidden and this was always a term in psychology

Anyway all of you try to explore sampling (even re-sampling) to discover the real "thing" that is hidden into a professional work
of sound developers and why it's very difficult to simply approach it !

Some really nice posts on this subject - one of the reasons I love this forum. I feel like we're drifting away from the initial topic, though, so I won't post any more on it here after this comment.

Bertotti - you're so right. I do sample other sounds, and it's great fun. One of my favourites was to sample the grill in a friend's oven, suspending it on strings, hitting it and then detuning the results to produce some great, long tones for a drone piece. I also make field recordings to help inspire me to create piano improvisations.

Antony - I totally agree. For me, sound developers and instrument makers are composers in a way. That is because it is usually hearing some element of a sound that triggers the initial creative impulse for me. Sometimes, it is me who has created the new sound, but when I am using a sound that someone else has created, I feel as though I owe them a debt of gratitude.

I was mainly referring to electronic or EDM style drumsounds. Obviously it's not trivial to create a natural sounding drum kit. But if you're programming some pop tune and you can find a clean kick somewhere on a track that you love, it's easy enough to use it.

Different ideas for different applications

When I am recording a song - original or cover - I usually use separate MIDI tracks for Hats, crashes, snare, kick, toms & Misc.

This is because for each song, I am usually using different sets for each of those. This makes is impossible to use the patterns, though I sometimes will take a pattern and copy it to each MIDI track for my drums and painstakingly edit out the notes except for what is on that track (eg. kick, snare etc.)


I know I should just make my own custom set, but even then I would probably find something else that catches my ear for that particular song.

@Antony: for acoustic samples you are right.

But the present generation of EDM tools like Machine, Battery, Arturia Drumstep etc. contains LOTS of high quality samples of analog and other edrum gear. And many of them are NOT used as multi-velocity samples: lots of simple one-shots there (of course you can layer some of these if you want), completely sufficient to provide what's needed, for many purposes.

If someones owns some of these libraries (plus other high quality stuff from the net - available both free and commercial), he/she can build own synth music edrum kits for the Kronos based on these samples to their liking, anytime. There's definitely no need to buy dedicated hardware just to get some more edrum sounds on board of the Kronos or besides it.

Expensive analog edrum hardware only makes sense, if you make full use of it by moving controllers during play etc. And then you are still limited to one kind of basic analog sound character, with each analog drum machine. It's only worth it if you are exactly after that, and make use of the full functionality.