Autodafe has released Mega Drum Machines, an epic free drum sample collection for NI Kontakt, featuring the sounds of 134 different vintage drum machines.
It’s 2017. Electronic music producers have a panoply of drum samples to choice from. The “thumpiest” of kicks, the crispiest of snares, crunchy clap sounds, I could go on and on.
See also: Free Roland Drum Machine VST Plugins!With that in mind, it’s a bit harder to find authentically retro drum sounds that harken back to the era of early electronic music making i.e. Analog samplers, old-school synthesizers, Linn Drums even GameBoys! However, AutoDafe has done exactly that in their free release of “Mega Drum Machines Collection” for Kontakt. What’s more is that the library of 134 old and obscure drum machines is organized and mapped into kits, allowing you to quickly create cohesive and authenticly vintage sounding drum sequences. This would be especially useful when wanting to swap between different kits and not wanting to realign all of your MIDI.
Some examples of the drum machine manufacturers whose products are featured in the library:
- Acetone
- Casio
- Electro Harmonix
- Ensoniq
- Kawai
- Alesis
- Korg
- Sequential
- Vermona
- Linn
- Video Tech Rhythmic
I was excited to find that even the Casio Rapman, my childhood keyboard, had some drum samples included in the library. When browsing all of the drum machine options, you’ll be happy to find that there are quite a few percussion and SFX samples included as well. These often played a big role in the “old school” sound of those drum machines and I would recommend experimenting with them along with the traditional kick, snare, and hi-hat samples.
It’s worth noting that you’ll need the full version of Kontakt 5.6 in order to use the kits and the custom tuning, panning and level adjustments. Alternatively, you could use the WAV files in the sample folder to create your own custom kits in an alternative sampler instrument instead of inside Kontakt.
Mega Drum Machines is available for free download via Autodafe (195 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 160 drum kits in NKI format for NI Kontakt, 3,286 audio samples in 16-bit WAV format).
Last Updated on January 9, 2017 by Tomislav Zlatic.
