Puremagnetik has announced the release of Snare Designer, a freely downloadable snare sculpting sound library for Native Instruments Kontakt, Ableton Live, and Logic.
Snare Designer is a detailed sample library featuring the sounds of three different acoustic snare drums (Ludwig Acrolite, Mapex Birch, and Pork Pie Little Squealer). The team at Puremagntik captured 576 individual samples and packed them into three separate ready-to-use virtual instrument patches for NI Kontakt, Ableton Live, and Logic. Even if you don’t own any of the three supported platforms, you can still use the provided WAV samples for layering or even to create custom mappings for your favorite sampler.
The best thing about Snare Designer, though, is that this library is more than just a collection of good sounding acoustic snare samples. Puremagnetik’s intention was to provide a flexible virtual instrument that will allow the end-user to shape the snare sound to their liking. Having tested the Kontakt version of Snare Designer, I was quite impressed by the instrument’s versatility and ease of use.
The front panel features six microphone volume controls (bottom, top, room, overhead, far, trash) and phase flip switches for each mic. A transient shaper is also included, along with a built-in reverb effect. All three snares are extremely dynamic and respond to input velocity in a natural-sounding manner. The samples are mapped across the entire MIDI range, so it’s easy to perform snare rolls using multiple fingers. The tone and the overall vibe of each snare can be adjusted rather drastically with the six included microphone channels and additional effects. The three sampled snares are provided as separate NKI patches, but the best sounding one, in my opinion, is the Three Snares patch which combines them all into one fat sounding snare. The stacked patch features a mixer panel for adjusting the volume of each snare, along with three additional panels for adjusting their individual tone properties.
The library can be downloaded completely free of charge from the product page linked below. The download link will be delivered to your inbox as soon as you sign up for the freebie with a valid email address.
Snare Designer is available for free download via Puremagnetik (93.7 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 576 snare samples in WAV format, compatible with Native Instruments Kontakt, Ableton Live, and Logic).
