Bogren Digital releases Krimh Drums, a free heavy metal acoustic drum sound library for Kontakt Player.
It’s been an oddly great month if you’re into acoustic drum libraries. First BFD Free, and now Bogren Digital has joined the fray with the release of Krimh Drums.
This release is a little bit narrower in scope compared to BFD Free, though. But the good news is that it’s a freeware Kontakt library that’s fully compatible with Kontakt Player, so you won’t need the full version of NI Kontakt.
So, what is Krimh Drums?
Bogren Digital is no stranger to creating impulse responses and amp sims for metal guitarists. The developer also sells one-shot drum samples and drum kits.
Krimh Drums is a bit of a departure, acting as an enclosed all-in-one metal drums solution for Kontakt Player and Kontakt.
The library is sampled from performances from Kerim Lechner, otherwise known as Krimh. Krimh has quite a storied history in the metal scene with tenures in groups like Decapitated and Behemoth, so these have got to be some insanely good drums.
Now, from my brief time fiddling around with Krimh Drums, I can confirm that this is a solid drum kit for heavy metal. I could see it being perfectly at home with more polished black metal, death, and even some stoner/doom provided you soak the whole kit in the biggest plate reverb you can find.
While the free edition has a significantly cut-down set of samples, you’ve still got plenty of options when it comes to great sounds for drums.
Krimh Drums Free has a single snare, kick, three toms, and seven cymbals. The MIDI grooves and mixer panel are where it departs from its paid counterpart.
You don’t get a whole lot of control for mixing, but everything should be production-ready. You only get around a dozen grooves, which is still more than I would have expected for what is essentially a demo of the full product.
I thankfully have a glut of random drum grooves for rock and metal uses, and they work great. I never really felt the need to adjust things or tinker with the velocity of certain hits. There’s likely some clever scripting at play to keep things sound nice and natural.
Krim Drums Free is available for Kontakt Player and Kontakt, so Windows and Mac users are well covered.
Download: Krimh Drums (FREE)
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11 Comments
Santo
onKrimh Drums is sick. Can’t believe they made this available for free, even with all the free version limitation it’s still amazing how it sounds.
Tomislav Zlatic
onThank you to BPB reader Királyfi for the info!
Patrik Roncolato
onDoes anyone have the old GGD free drum kit kontakt inst? I am lookng for it to compare it to krimh drums, and unfortunately is not available anymore :(
Apart from that, sure this will be my new go-to metal drum kit (even if I have sampled my drummer to a kontakt inst :P)
Mitch Hitchenson
oni think GGD no longer offers the lite version of the original Halpern kit, which is kind of shame but understandable because it’s their first foray into the acoustic drum sample library.
Alex
onUnreal quality for a free instrument. As far as free drums go, I use the free Slate Drums, Manda MT Power Drum Kit, Monster Drum by Agus Hardiman Purafied Audio Liquid Death Snare. With those plugins, you could do pretty much anything you want with rock/metal drums. This one is great, only thing is the snare wires are little floppy sounding for my taste but for free good lord it’s amazing. Bogren Digital are real ones for this
Alex
onSean Pandy drums and Modo drum kit by IK are also pretty decent. Pandy kit has no cymbals however
Rox Roll
onNice drum sounds,but the mixer is unavailable,which is quite annoying.
sir isO
onSo, I guess I’ll add NI anything to the list of things I won’t be bothering with ever.
I actually wanted to try those drum samples. Oh well.
Hint for NI, You might want to consider having an OS check with your Kontakt installer and such. Sure, I should’ve outright rejected the notion of trying that stuff…but since I’m optimistic I didn’t check (and I often don’t believe, from experience) the requirements and just tried to install it. I was then met with an endlessly stalling “Dependency installation seems to be taking longer than normal…”
How about check if the OS is compatible before trying to install? That’d be nice.
Frank Labuschagne
onJust in case someone has similar constraints (windows 7 or 8 for whatever reason):
https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/2715/can-i-purchase-kontakt-6-6-1
sir isO
onAdditionally, I tried to install Kontakt 6, checked the “Activate” button and it be like “Bro, you need windows 10 to run this super rad totally meaningless installer hub thing for your windows 7 compatible app”
Kind of annoying.
Frank Labuschagne
onPurafied Liquid Death snare is currently free (luckily for me randomly found that, considering I can’t use Kontakt stuff) on the Purafied site. It seems pretty good.