That Sound Hangar is a drum sample library featuring the sounds of an acoustic drum kit recorded in an airplane hangar. Wait, what?!

While with most non-orchestral instruments, close-miked or DI recordings are standard, with drums the room and microphone setup has been relevant since the beginning of multi-track recording. Drums in dead rooms sound more tightly controlled, while drums in more live spaces sound bigger. Hangar takes that “bigger” about as far as practically possible.

How Big Is Too Big?

So, are these drums too big to be usable? The kit sounds huge, so much so that even closed hi-hat samples take few seconds to fade out. However, for music which needs live drums that ring out, it’s still a reasonable room sound. Plenty of 80s hits had bigger snares, though the sound here is not 80s retro drums. Even when those were natural room reverbs, they were smaller spaces with heavy compression on the room mics. It isn’t the modern cinematic drum sound of a drum kit on a scoring stage designed for an orchestra, either. The hangar space is big, bright, and metallic. The closest I can think of to hearing this drum sound is some recent country songs – slower tracks by big names sometimes have sparse drumming with the space between the hits partially filled in by long reverb tails. Unsurprisingly, That Sound is based in Nashville.

I would not call Hangar a country drum kit, though. Like most libraries by That Sound, Hangar is built for genres which mix electronic with natural sounds, such as pop and hip-hop. It’s more about getting the right sounds than it is about sounding convincingly like a real drummer playing a real drum kit live. It almost makes more sense to think of this as a modern-day LinnDrum (the first drum machine to use samples of acoustic drums), only recorded in a very specific real space, plus a set of drum loops recorded in that same space. If you are looking for a ton of velocity layers or several degrees of hi-hat openness, you will not find them here.

There are downsides to recording in a hangar as opposed to a studio. I tried recording drums in a large non-studio space with tile walls once and ended up with the room mics picking up way too much noise from the neighboring bar. From the description on That Sound’s site, it seems the drums were recorded in one night – I suppose the airplane owners needed to use the hangar as a hangar during the day. While it’s possible to record quite a few samples in one night, a space with a long reverb tail means each hit, even something as short as a closed hi-hat, needs more time before the next hit can be played.

That’s the core compromise here – drums recorded in a space which sounds huge in a good way, but whose nature also limits the number of samples which can be recorded. So, how does that compromise work out in practice?

Technical Details

The kicks, snares, and hi-hats have three velocity layers and three round robins. The toms add a fourth velocity layer, and many of the other sounds only have three round robins with no velocity layers. Instead of providing many round robins, there’s a selection of four different kick sounds, four snares and two pairs of toms. Each kit piece sample comes in three mixes: natural (mostly close mic signal with reverb tails in the background – this is what reminds me of the modern country ballad sound), big (much wetter, but not epic movie trailer levels), and brutal (getting dirty and lo-fi, and with even more room sound). Also noteworthy is the 26″ kick drum – a rarity in drum kits these days. I’m not sure which of the four samples kicks it is, though, as they all sound enormous.

So, are these sounds too big to be useful? Well, I used one of the snares in a very indie track, not heavy or epic at all, and the singer definitely liked the “brutal” version of the snare the best. So, in practice, it turns out that even the most extremely “hangary” of the drum hits here have not gone too far to be usable.

There are also additional sounds you would not find in a normal drum kit. There’s a bucket being played like a drum with three articulations, a cowbell, claps, stick hits, vocal samples and even squeaking shoe soles. There’s also a folder of huge cinematic hits, some made with drum kit pieces and some with, apparently, other things, such as a door. These do have that typical cinematic sound, though brighter than usual, and they also make very nice organic risers when reversed.

There are also loops in various tempos, which are useful for that “looped a sample of a real drummer” sound. They are pre-marked for cutting and rearranging further, though the reverb makes quite a difference here, especially in the “big” and “brutal” versions, which means certain cuts will sound unnatural as some built-up reverb suddenly vanishes. The upside of this is that cutting one-shot samples out of the loops is a great way to get a variation on the 80s gated snare sound, where a huge reverb suddenly cuts off. Layer with the “regular” snare samples with their reverb tails for even more fun.

The “extra” samples can be divided into two broad categories – some were recorded specifically as samples, and these are consistent and have full reverb tails. The claps and group “hey” shouts are good examples of these. The claps are, indeed, very useful – there are three tight group claps, and three which are looser and more flammed. Others seem to be cut from the recording running while testing the space or between takes, such as the shoe squeaks and many of the vocals. These do not have their full reverb tails, but rather a huge reverb which fades away quickly. Those remind me of various samples on early 90s hip-hop albums, and while they won’t work for creating a sense of huge space, they’re great as a “woo” or squeak triggered somewhere in a drum part. I won’t complain about the missing tails – they’d be nice to have for some applications, but as “extra” recordings these are fine. I do wish that this folder had been split into two, to make navigation faster, but the only thing I can really complain about is what seems to be a cowbell hit during one of the voice samples.

All this adds up to 1,079 samples individual samples, 100 loops, and takes up just over 2 GB of disk space. The samples have a larger average file size than most kits would for the same kit piece because the reverb tails add several seconds to each sample.

The Big Boom

The very idea of setting up a drum kit in the middle of an airplane hangar and whacking it hard has a certain primal appeal. The sounds here certainly deliver, as long as you accept this kit’s nature and don’t try to use it for something it’s not meant to do. As a realistic emulation of an acoustic drum kit, it’s limited by the low number of round robins and velocity layers, but for music where having lots of those is completely beside the point, this is a big selection of even bigger sounds.

More info: That Sound Hangar ($55)