Our sound design label 99Sounds has introduced Kick Drum, a free collection of key-labeled kicks in 24-bit WAV format with pre-made patches for Native Instruments Kontakt 5 and all SFZ compatible sampler instruments.
The included kicks were created by Drew Lake aka 8-bit Logic, a talented sound designer and music producer from Hampshire, UK. He produces atmospheric trance music based on classic Roland TB-303 acid lines. You can hear his latest tracks on his SoundCloud page and follow him on Twitter. Drew did an excellent job with this 99Sounds release, providing an excellent set of electronic kicks that will help fellow music producers come up with better sounding tunes.
The library contains 120 key-labeled kicks in 24-bit WAV format, sorted into three categories: Minimal, Subby and Traditional. The included kicks are very well made, with a solid low end, clean and punchy attack transients, and enough sonic variety across the collection to fit a wide range of electronic music styles. If you produce anything from techno and trance, to house, electro, dubstep and any similar genre, you’ll definitely find some solid kicks in this pack.
The best thing about the 99Sounds Kick Drum sample library is that the samples are key-labeled, meaning that it’s very easy to match them to your project’s key. Simply load the WAV files in your sampler instrument of choice and transpose them to the desired key. If you map one of the included kicks across a range of notes (with the root not set to the one labeled in the filename), you can even play it as an instrument using your MIDI keyboard or your digital audio workstation’s piano roll. This way, your kicks can even follow your bassline, if you want to absolutely avoid clashing frequencies in the low end (not a big fan of this method myself, though).
If you use a SFZ compatible sampler such as Grace, Zampler, or TX16Wx, you can use the provided SFZ patches to quickly play the kicks in your DAW with almost no additional setup. Simply drop a SFZ patch in your sampler of choice and you’re good to go – the kick will already be set to the correct root note and mapped across a couple of octaves.
If you own Kontakt 5, you can take full advantage of the custom scripted NKIs that are included in the library (one for each kick), providing direct control over a set of parameters like amplitude and pitch envelopes and HP/LP filters. You can also apply several built-in effects to your kick drum and control the output volume.
Download
Kick Drum is available for free download via 99Sounds (5.83 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 120 kick drum samples in 24-bit WAV format, 120 instrument patches in SFZ & NKI formats, full version of NI Kontakt 5 required for NKI patches).
