Natural Drum Kit (NDK)

I managed to buy Natural Drum Kit full version today. It feels surreal because I have actually quite a long relation with the sound of that drum-kit. I have been using the free version occasionally in my projects for years. Formerly known as ns_kit7 the kit has circled in Internet for decades. In fact, years before I started to make music I even grew into metal by listening music made with these same samples about 15 years ago when I listened Metroid Metal songs by Stemage. (I also got the mentioned freebie kit personally from him when I commented about drum programming some years ago.)

I have been trying many other free alternatives during my time as a musician. (The closest option for NDK that has suited my taste in terms of metal sound is probably NSA Custom Series Drumkit by Dean aka Nekro. Its raw sound is a bit demanding for editing though.) Even though I have my reasons to prefer free solutions, most of the commercial options nowadays have also encrypted the samples and restricted the use into exclusive software that are seldom available in my Linux workflow in the first place. So, I cannot use them even if I’d want to. So, basically I have run out of good professional level options. Since NDK is quite old sample instrument I have also been afraid that it has become outdated in modern standards. However, it seems that it is still quite exceptionally remarkable work and the sound quality is still there. Or maybe my ears have just accustomed to the sound too much. Whatever the case, it was time for me to return back to roots.

Despite my principles of free software music making I am also very Puritan when it comes to expressive percussion. I am not very good at playing drums myself and I have almost always had to rely on programming. Even though I also listen to some electronic music, oftentimes I just can’t get over the sterile plastic sounding drum beats. Dynamics are everything with percussion. I could be merciful maybe for chiptune music not having dedicated velocity layered samples, but other than that I personally don’t see excuses to stick too simple. I am still working on custom synthesized drum-kits that I might use on my electronic projects in the future. There are truck loads of electronic drum sample options in Internet but every one of them has turned out to be astronomically far from my personal standards. I have to make those sounds on my own if I manage to do that some day.

In Daemon I designed every sound all the way from waveform basics, except the drum sounds. So, I had to come up with compromises with them. If I now get to finally use some proper acoustic drum samples with NDK there is only some quality electronic percussion missing from my repertory. I might create it as a preset bank for Zyn (or maybe even do it with VCV Rack). Despite having experience making custom sample based drum-kits it can be a lot of work to manually chop down all those velocity layered samples. In my standards there would be at least hundreds of them.