Product Review - Drumasonic 2

Rather than presenting kit presets as numerous patches in Kontakt’s library browser, Drumasonic provides just two Kontakt instrument patches, Damped Room and Large Room, each recorded in different ambient spaces. Of the two, the Damped Room provides the largest collection of what Drumasonic call ‘kitpieces’ and articulations: three bass drums, six snare drums, one tom set comprising five different sized toms, four hi-hats, five rides, nine crashes and various percussion instruments. The percussion category includes five synth bass drums and three synth snare impacts, intended for layering with their acoustic counterparts (see the ‘Kitpieces’ box for a detailed list). The Large Room offers a choice of one bass drum, three snare drums, five toms, one hi-hat, two rides and eight crashes (no percussion), and with slightly less detail in the number of articulations available — notably no rods, brushes or ‘wires off’ for the snare drums.

Loading either of the Rooms brings up a default kit (which sounds good before any tweaking) and from there you can either start editing straight away, or else choose one of the off-the-peg factory presets. Drumasonic’s built-in Preset system is accessed via its GUI, and offers a selection of factory presets based on musical genre. There are 30 slots for User Presets, and if that isn’t enough, you can also save kits to a file anywhere you want on your hard drive. The system is very flexible when loading Presets, allowing you to load specific attributes of any other preset, so you could, for example, keep the same kitpieces but load only the mixer settings or effects from another preset, making it very quick to apply different mix scenarios to the same drum set.