Native Instruments Abbey Road 70s Drums PC/MAC
Following the recently released Abbey Road | 60s Drums, Native Instruments has released Abbey Road | 70s Drums ($119). This new Kontakt instrument contains two renowned vintage drum kits -- a roomy, open sounding kit and a tight, dry kit -- sampled in detail and recorded in Abbey Road's Studio Two.
Produced in collaboration with Abbey Road Studios, Abbey Road | 70s Drums is built of thousands of sampled hits of vintage drum kits and equipment from the 1970s; you won't find any emulations or modeled sounds here.
From the upper panel of the Drum Page (in Kontakt), you can adjust the tuning, overhead, and room microphone mixes for each drum individually. The kick drum has additional controls for adjusting the balance between microphones inside and outside the drum, while the snare has controls for adjusting the balance between the snare top and snare bottom microphones. When percussion is selected, you can choose the tambourine, clap, stick hit, shaker, and cowbell (for the Open Kit), or maraca and rototoms (for the Tight Kit).
On the bottom panel, you can choose articulations for the selected drum. For example, selecting the snare drum will give an articulation menu showing the different types of snare hits such as center, halfway, rimshot, flam, roll, and others. Each articulation has its own volume envelope, with knobs for Attack, Hold, and Decay. Each articulation can also be assigned to a MIDI note, allowing you to customize your kit mapping. What's more, A selection of drum mappings from other popular software and electronic drum setups are included under the new MAP menu.
The Mixer Page lets you control the levels of the various microphones; adjust panning, output routing and solo / mute. On the left side are the direct microphone channels with the overhead and room microphones on the right. Each track can also be routed to several outputs using the drop-down menu below each fader, depending on your soundcard and your output settings in Kontakt. The buttons Drums and Percussion switch the direct mic controls from the regular drums (kick, snare, hi-hat, and toms) to the percussion instruments (tambourines, claps, shakers, cowbells, roto toms, and stick hits).
Lastly, Abbey Road | 70s Drums provides further options in the Options Page, like fine-tuning parameters, making adjustments to MIDI Velocity curves, and more. The Kontakt instrument also includes mapping templates for instant play via E-Drums and drum software.
