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08/08/2004 |
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Native Instruments' Battery Ian Waugh involves himself in aping Buddy Rich, Ian Paice and Ringo Starr – yes, it’s drums on your PC!
Have you noticed how often software "themes" seem to pop up and then we see a spate of similar programs? First there was the soft synth, then the soft sampler and now it seems to be the turn of the soft drum machine. Battery is one of the latest. One nice feature is that you get both PC and Mac versions in the same box. There must be many people who have a PC and maybe an iMac tucked away in the corner. It can run as a stand-alone program or as a VST plug-in. As the VST plug-in format is supported by most major - and many minor - sequencers, it means you can control it from with a sequencer very easily.
You get a CD containing over 20 drum kits constructed from over 2,000 samples. There's lots of room for customisation and this is extremely easy because you can load individual samples directly into each cell. In fact, you can load several different samples into each cell. Apart from creating a Frankenstein drum sound, the real purpose here is to trigger different samples according to the velocity of the notes. The theoretical limit is 128 samples per cell, one for each velocity level, but more practically, you could fine tune samples so as you hit the drum harder, the sound changes. It supports several sample formats including AIFF, Wave, SF2 (SoundFonts) and LM4 (used by Steinberg's 24-bit software drum sampler). The program also supports Akai S-1000 samples and can load them directly from Akai CDs. As well as giving you access to the Akai sample CDs already out there, it may tempt Akai sampler users to try the program and maybe go soft entirely. Below the cells are the controls and here you can tweak all sorts of parameters, adjusting the pitch, tuning, volume, and adding modulation which can be applied to a whole range of parameters. There are controls to help you create good loops and a neat envelope display for creating both volume and pitch envelopes. You can use Battery right out of the box and it will sound great because the samples are excellent but you'll get more out of it if you customise the settings and create your own drum kits. In fact, if you enjoy doing your own thing, you'll really love it! |
Battery has one screen showing a 9 x 6 matrix of
"drum pads". Each one can hold a sample and while this can
be any sample at all, you will probably want to use drum samples
'cause that's what it specialises in. However, there's nothing to
stop you adding something a little more outré to complement the
drum kit.