Ethereal Audio Ethereal Drums (One Full Drum Kit) Kontakt [FREE]

FREE | Kontakt Library | 1.26 GB
Built for customization, designed to inspire- enjoy the power of the most uncompromising acoustic drum instrument anywhere in your productions today. Every mix option from the full retail version of Ethereal Drums is included with one full drum kit (DW Exotic Tamo Burst + Vintage Acrolite Snare + Zildjian Hat/Cymbals), along with 120 unique MIDI grooves and 15 kit presets to help serve as your creative springboard. In addition to a fully-featured mixing console with volume, pan, phase, EQ, compression, and transient control offered per channel from within Kontakt (as well as per-channel ADSR and tuning controls), users have the ability to manipulate the acoustic space in which the kit is placed; using 1,260 impulse responses taken from 10 real acoustic spaces, as well as the ability to change the microphone used per channel with built-in microphone modeling technology.



Tweak to your heart's content.
Axis control: The axis control lies at the heart of the design in Ethereal Drums. Conventional drum libraries with a similar number of configurations can be hundreds of gigabytes in size, and in pursuit of giving the user as many tonal options as possible, complicated schemata like bleed matrices are offered as a way of controlling the attenuation of each microphone going into each drum sample. The consequence of this is an exponential increase in the size of the library; every audio file in the original recording process is passed into the end instrument, multiplying the storage size and RAM requirements of the library by the number of microphones used in the sampling process.

The axis control in Ethereal Drums controls an equal power crossfade on each channel between the monaural direct microphone signal and the stereo sum of all off-axis microphones. At center position, both signals are balanced exactly the way were when they were originally recorded; movements to the left and right respectively advance the ratio of signal toward the on-axis or off-axis signal of the drum sample. This achieves two effects: a more than fourfold reduction in the file size of the library (from over 75,000 original samples to 17,243), and a highly-intuitive tonal control that shapes the sound of each kit piece in a way that inspires. A radically different character can be obtained from the same tom drum (from tonally-centered to getting more resonance from the room), same snare drum (from a honky tone- more centered on the fundamental, to a wider sound- more centered on the wires), same kick drum (from a low thud, to more beater sound and more sympathetic ringing from the kit).




Unique options for each drum.
Kick: An analog-processed kick function is offered, which toggles between the original split signal of the kick and subkick microphones (split if additional attenuation is desired), and the summed kick signal of each sample being processed through an outboard analog chain. Although the processing changed slightly from kick drum to kick drum, each signal was passed through Pultec-style EQ processing, compression, saturation, and targeted comb filtering to generate a processed kick drum sound which, although it comes from the same source material and samples, sounds radically different than the unprocessed source, and would be extremely hard to recreate using standard DSP processing.

Snare: A reduce fundamental function is offered, which targets the fundamental frequency of the active snare drum and pulls it out with a very precise gain-compensated comb filter; effectively removing the melodic portion of the snare, and making it sit much more nicely in the context of a mix where the melodic portion may be out of key or interfere with the harmonic content of the material.

Hi-hat/cymbals: A variable choke speed function is offered, which allows the user to independently set the cut-off speed of cymbals being choked by hand, or the speed with which open hi-hats are choked by closed hi-hats.

Toms/cymbals: A moongel function is offered, giving the ability to deaden toms and cymbals to taste as though you were adding moongel. Samples of undampened and fully dampened toms were used as a reference to create a physical modeling process, whereby the dampening could be simulated in a way that lets the user set any decay characteristic they want independently for each tom drum. The same process was applied to cymbals, and a technique that lets the user do targeted overtone reduction was developed to remove ringing without affecting the decay curve of the sample.

Requires the FULL version of Kontakt 5.7.1 or later.