Drumdrops releases the "60s Motown Kit" in four different sample packs

Drumdrops has released the 60s Motown Kit in four different sample packs:

• The Multi Sample Pack
• The Drum Replacement Pack
• The All Samples Pack
• One Shot Sample Pack
• The BFD Pack, Kontakt Pack & Kontakt Player Packs will be released soon.

Recorded in a large live room at Livingston 1 studio in London with producer Timmy Rickard (60s Gretsch Round Badge 'Soul Kit'), the room was mic'd up as if there was a full Motown band in the room – with a brass section a vocal mic and then two mics on the kit – a kick, and a kit mic placed above the bass drum, between the rack toms and below the ride. Drumdrops set these mics up around a 60s kit and voilà the 60s Motown drum sound is recreated.

For the kit Timmy used his 1960s Ludwig club date kit with a 20" x 14" kick drum one 12" x 8" rack tom and a 14" floor tom. Four snares were used – two Ludwig Pioneer Snares, a Ludwig Hollywood Snare and a Slingerland Shelbyville Snare. Drumdrops used two cymbals, a Zildjian Trans Stamp and a Zildjian Constantinople Hammered cymbal (both doubled up as rides and crashes) and some Zildjian vintage hi-hats. All the drums were fitted with Remo Ambassador heads.

Mic wise Neumann Valve U47s & 67s, Coles ribbon mics, a Sony C38b and an AKG Valve C28 were used. Mic pre's used were UA2-610s, Telefunken V76s and a Neve 1073. All of the mics were recorded without EQ or compression except the overhead microphone which used an EAR vale EQ and compressor.

Also included are some percussion samples in the packs - congos, a tambourine and hand claps. Due to the number of mics used to capture the sound the separate mic packs come with a lot of samples. In the Kontakt and BFD packs there are over 30,000 samples.

The "Multi-Sample Pack" is a sample pack containing mixed stereo samples of each articulation. Drumdrops have included up to 30 velocities with 3 round robin variations and the pack totals 2766 drum samples. You can either use the built in patches or build your own, using the samples included. All of the samples are mixed from a combination of the kick mic, kit mic and four 'band' room mics and recorded as 24-bit 44.1 kHz WAV files, meaning they can be loaded into almost any sampler or drum machine. Drumdrops have also included 16-Bit samples for legacy compatibility. To make things easier Drumdrops have included patches for some of the most commonly used software packages including:

• Kontakt v5.6.1.
• Battery v3.2.3.
• EXS24 vLogic 9 / Logic X.
• Ableton Drum Rack v9.0.5.
• Reason v7.1.1 Combinator Refill containing NN-XT sampler & FX & patches for Kong & Redrum.
• Maschine v1.8.0.
• Geist v1.0.0.7.
• Studio One's Impact v2.5.1 Soundset.
• iDrum v1.73.625.
• SFZ v1.0 Compliant (tested with Plogue Sforzando, Cakewalk SFZ and Linux Sampler.) TX16Wx v2.4.2 (Courtesy of Suleiman Ali).

Drumdrops also include 1543 MIDI Loops to this multi-sample pack, covering a variety of genres including over 124 60s Motown loops. The loops are mapped to the default MIDI map.

The Multi-Sample Pack of the 60s Motown Kit is available from the Drumdrops store for £ 22.00.

The Drum Replacement Pack contains patches for Slate Trigger, Drumagog 4 & 5 and DrumXChanger:

• The Slate Trigger patch has been created using the kick mic, kit mic and 4 room 'band' mics. There are samples for the kick drum, snares and toms. The samples in this patch have up to 30 velocity levels and five round robins totalling 9360 samples. The samples come in the tci format.
• The Drumagog 5 patch uses the same samples and you can choose the balance between the kit mic, kick mic and room mics. This patch uses up to 8 velocity levels with four round robins totalling 1664 samples. Drumdrops have included samples for the Kick, snare, toms and hi-hat. If your version of Drumagog contains the Auto hi-hat tracking feature then the samples will follow the opening and closing of the hi-hat. The samples come in the gog format. Drumdrops have also included a patch for Drumagog 4 which uses 234 samples.
• The DrumXchanger patch contains stereo mixed samples (a combination of the room mic, kit mic and kick mic samples). This patch contains eight velocity levels with no round robins totalling 100 samples. The snares also contain a rimshot sample that have their own adjustable trigger threshold. The samples come in the splx format.

The Drum Replacement Pack of the 60s Motown Kit is available from the Drumdrops store for £ 12.50. Head over here to find out more.

The "All Samples Pack" contains the "Multi-Samples Pack", "The Drum Replacement Pack" and all of the samples from the "Kontakt 5 Pack" (but not the instrument found in the Kontakt Pack). These separate kick mic, kit mic and four room mic samples are provided with up to 30 velocities of each articulation and 5 round robins and total 30900 24-bit WAV samples. Customers can build their own patches for their favourite samplers from these.

Drumdrops have also included an SFZ 2.0 compliant patch which utilises the separate mic samples and has been tested in Plogue Sforzando.

The All Samples pack of the 60s Motown Kit is available from the Drumdrops store for £ 32.00. Head over here to find out more.

The "One Shot Sample Pack" is for customers who want to check out the sound of this kit or only need one velocity of each sample. The pack includes one velocity of each articulation totalling 53 drum samples. These samples come as 24-bit WAVs and 16-bit WAVs for the legacy drum machines. All of the samples are mixed from all of the microphones.

The One Shot Sample Pack of the 60s Motown Kit is available exclusively from the Drumdrops store for £ 7.50. Head over here to find out more.

Listen to some examples of these samples here.

For the next month Drumdrops is offering these packs with a 20% discount. Use the voucher code 60smotown20 at checkout.