Drumatic Percussives | Future Music USA

While an enormous amount of creative work and fun can be unleashed composing with pre-existing drum loops, there's a do-it-yourself satisfaction that comes with programming your own beats and seeing what kinds of interesting, original patterns you can create. Sure, the trick in many genres is still to get heads nodding and feet tapping, but with the incredible amount of fresh sounds and samples available, it's tempting to push the envelope. After all, if Picasso were a drum programmer, do you really think his snares would always sound like snares?

Bunker 8 Digital Labs, a top supplier of fresh source material for serious producers worldwide for years now, recently began bringing theres wares to a wider audience at more cost -conscious price points, as evidenced by their excellent Foley sound effects collections for M-Audio's Pro Sessions earlier this year. Now they dish out a very generous collection of their best single-hit drum samples in a set that is custom arrange into folders and pre-rolled kit templates for Battery, Kontakt, Halion and Reason ReDrum and NNXT, as well in standard WAV file format.

These are great sounds, people. I tossed random WAVs from folders entitled "80's Kit," "Hard Edged Tonk," "Miami Sun Kick," "More Cowbell" and many others in Ableton Live's Impulse drum sampler and constructed several extremely unusual and inspiring kit setups within minutes. Similarily inspired results followed in Reason, where pre-rolled ReDrum kits like "Metal Percussives," "Electro Kit," "Kick Kit" and dozens of others yielded excellent setups for programming Reason's still remarkable drum machine interface. If you've been missing that "wow" factor you used to get when selecting new kits for your ReDrum patterns, Drumatic will get you excited again.

With 6,522 samples included on this DVD, you're not likely to go hungry looking for one-of-a-kind drum sounds. While those looking for great acoustic drums will certainly find plenty of joy in this collection, audio adventures and renegade beat maestros will really want to bunker down for the long haul. Highly recommended .