Chocolate Audio Imperial Drums

The medium-sized recording room used on Imperial Drums allows naturally warm ambience and direct mic signals with superb isolation. Many included instruments provide alternative ambient and direct mic sets for increased variety. Finally, 13 stick and beater types including hot-rods, webs, rutes and jazz brushes were used to play the instruments.

The included drums, cymbals and hihats are expertly set up and tuned by experienced session drummer Elio Rivagli. With over 150 loadable instruments in total, Imperial Drums’ sounds are suitable for all genres of music that demand powerful, musical-sounding drums.

Imperial Drums features  drums sampled from:

• 2 DW kits played with wooden, hotrod, brush, mallet no-wires, blastix and web sticks.
• 1 Ludwig Vistalite kit played with wooden, wooden no-wires, blades, blastix, brush, mallet, mallet no-wires, hotrod sticks.
• an extra set of 5 Remo Rototoms played with woode, blades, brush, mallet, hortod sticks.
• 18 Paiste cymbals, including 3 Hi-Hats and 4 Rides, all played with different kind of sticks.
• 7 snares from Ludwig, DW, Premier, Remo and Yamaha, played with different sticks.

Features

• 10 GB compressed sample content size
• 60272 samples
• 2 full drum kits played with 13 different sticks/beaters
• 150 drum pieces
• sampled in full detail: up to 300 samples per articulation and up to 10 round robin (Kontakt)
• recorded in a medium size dry room, very good to adapt the drum sound to many different mixing scenarios
• up to 4 close mics
• 4 room channels: based on the specific drum, up to 2 x Overheads and 2 x Room choices
• precise yet warm sound, recorded direct mic to pre to AD
• recorded at 24 bit / 88.2 KHz, released at 24 bit / 44.1 KHz

A no frills User Interface with just two simple pages:

• Load a full kit Multi NKM or a single kit piece NKI
• Select the controlling MIDI Channel
• Load the preferred sound
• Eventually:
  • Balance the microphones and optionally feed them into separate channels in your DAW
  • Set to taste macro and micro tuning, round robin, envelope and velocity-based interactions
  • Change the controlling MIDI keys in the Mapping Page
• Done!

Some applications

• Simplify workflow and reduce memory and CPU footprint when you do not need a full drum kit in the production you are doing
• Drum triggering:
  • Easily assign more than one drum or sample to the same MIDI Key allowing for real time drum replacement or layering using any of the available drum triggering plugins
  • Use the embedded audio to Midi functions present on many platforms (Logic, Sonar…)
• Stack as many drums as you want on a single Midi key
• Create hybrid kits using our sounds or integrate other developers’ kits with our drums
• Open up endless sound design possibilities having the chance to layer, re-direct, retune, change envelope on each drums separately
• Finely tune the velocity response of each drum allowing you to better complement a live e-drumming or finger-drumming or to create velocity split stacks of different sounds
• (Your own creative ideas here)