Ocean Way Drums Gold

Fantastische Schlagzeugsounds, aufgenommen in einem der angesehensten Tonstudios der Welt.

Das Konzept ist einfach - gib den fantastischen Sound des meistausgezeichneten Tonstudiokomplexes der Welt jedem ambitionierten Toningenieur, Arrangeur und Musiker in die Hand.
Ocean Way Drums ist das Werk des Studiobesitzers Allen Sides, einem der besten Toningenieuren Amerikas. Die Kundschaft seines Studios erstreckt sich von Sinatra bis zu Marilyn Mon... nein Manson! Eigentlich jeder von Rang und Namen hat sich mit Hilfe dieses Tonstudios verewigt - Mehr dazu findet man im Video oben im Kasten.

Diese riesige Library bietet 19 Drumkits, jedes bestehend aus 12 unterschiedlichen Presets, die wiederum unterschiedliche Mixes bieten. Jedes Drumkit liegt in zwei Varianten vor. Snare On und Snare Off - was bedeutet, dass einmal bei Schlägen auf Toms und Kick der Snareteppich mitschwingt - und in der anderen Variante schwingt eben nichts mit. Ausserdem gibt es zu jedem Kit eine passende Roland V-Drum Anpassung.

Damit nicht genug. Für diejenigen, die den Sound selbst bestimmen möchten, bieten sich schier unendliche Eingriffsmöglichkeiten. Jedes Instrument bietet verschiedene Mikrofone am Drumset und verschiedene Mikrofone an verschiedenen Raumpositionen. Somit hat man die selben Eingriffsmöglichkeiten, wie der Tontechniker vor Ort und hantiert mit einigen der besten Mikrofone der Welt, in einem der wohlklingendsten Räume der Welt.

Das so genannte Sonic Reality  I-Map™ Mapping bietet dem Tastenspieler eine sinnvolle und gut spielbare Tastaturbelegung, um seine Drumgrooves zu erzeugen.
Mit Hilfe eines Roland® V-Drums spielt man, als sässe man vor einem realen Schlagzeug.

Als Tonerzeugung dient Native Instruments Kontakt™ 2, der sich nahtlos in jede Studioumgebung und Programmen wie Cubase, Logic, ProTools einfügt..

Die Virtual Instrument Gold-Edition bietet 24 Bit 48 Khz und wird auf DVDs ausgeliefert (40GB)
Die Platinum Edition bietet 24 Bit 96 Khz und wird auf USB/FW Festplatte geliefert (80GB)
(Gold Edition ist in Platinum ebenfalls enthalten! Komplett 120GB)

The best drum kits!
     The best microphones!
          The best recording equipment!
               The best sounding studio!
                    The best engineers!
                          The best sample engine!
                                The best editors!
                                      That´s OceanWayDrums!

 

Video Demos

	Video: Control of the room
	Video with Allen Sides
	Video: Control of the sound
	Video: The Recording
	Tutorial video with Steve Miller
	Tutorial I-Map with Dave Kerzner
	Tutorial V-Drum with Nick D'Virgilio

Mehr Infos

User Interface
Manual

Systemanforderung

Dieses Produkt wird mit dem NI Kontakt Player 2 ausgeliefert!

Minimum:

• Windows XP/ Vista, Pentium 4/ Athlon, Single 2,8 GHz, Dual Core CPU mit mehr als 1.6 GHz pro Kern
• Mac OSX 10.4 oder höher, G5 1 GHz oder Intel Core Duo1.66, 1 GB Ram

Optimal:

• Windows XP/ Vista, Pentium 4/ Athlon, Quad Core CPU mit mehr als 1.8 GHz pro Kern
• Mac OSX 10.4 oder höher, alle Intel Macs G5, 2GB Ram

Ausreichend freien Platz auf der Festplatte - abhängig von der jeweiligen Library.

Sie können diese Library mit dem kostenlosen NI Kontakt Player 4 oder höher betreiben, der zu allen aktuellen Betriebssystemen auf Mac & PC kompatibel ist.

Download aktueller free Kontakt Player Windows (~ 450MB)
Download aktueller free Kontakt Player Mac INTEL (~ 600MB)

Support-Hinweis
Native Instruments bietet Registrierungs- und Aktivierungs-Support für KONTAKT PLAYER Produkte. Der technische Support wird von den Herstellern der jeweiligen Libraries übernommen.

 

System FAQs

Produkt Aktivierung:
Zur Autorisierung / Aktivierung des Produktes benötigen Sie eine Internet Verbindung auf einem beliebigen Computer (Challenge/Response)

Testberichte

Keyboard 5/2008
Elecronic Musician 10/2008

Keyboard 5/2008

Getting great drum sounds is as vital as oxygen. Without them as the foundation of your mix, it’s hard for other instruments, no matter how awesome they sound, to make your music get up off the console and live. A lackluster home studio recording of a drum kit instantly outs your tune as “not a real studio mix.” Ouch. Likewise, a low-rent sampled kit crashes and burns about as soon after purchase as the average Ferrari Enzo.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could block out time at L.A.’s legendary Ocean Way Studios (“Sorry Mr. Clapton, we’re booked up that week”), get a multiple Grammy-winning engineer, and use all the studio’s vintage and high-dollar goodies so you could kiss crummy drum tracks goodbye forever? Well, thanks to renowned engineer Allen Sides, equally-renowned producer Steven Miller, and Dave Kerzner of Sonic Reality, now you can — without ever leaving your desktop.

OVERVIEW
Couldn’t it all just be marketing hype? Not on your life — after a few weeks with OWD, I can assure you that this is the real thing. The snares alone offer 18 channels of audio. That’s not a typo. A whopping 14 mics covered each of the 19 snare drums during the sessions — a stereo pair each of condensers and dynamics at a slightly greater distance, a stereo pair of under-snare mics, stereo overheads, and three pairs of stereo room mics at increasing distances. In addition, there are two highly compressed sources called thwack, plus a stereo digital reverb tail from a vintage AMS RMX-16 unit. You have easy control over their mix with virtual knobs for each. Since the whole ruckus lives inside the included Native Instruments Kontakt Player 2, you can automate the mic mix in your host by assigning KP2 parameters to MIDI control numbers — on each drum independently. There’s so much sonic variety in just those two features that it’s difficult to overstate. The flip side is the enormity: 40GB, but hey, drive space is relatively cheap. The typical snare drum in OWD is represented by well over 2,000 samples. If you’re accustomed to virtual orchestras such as those from, say, Vienna Instruments, you already know what kind of amazing detail these mega-libraries afford. If you’re uninitiated, let me assure you it’s well worth the space.

Nineteen kicks (times two — you get each with snare buzz and without) offer everything from tight and punchy to “When The Levee Breaks,” and kicks have up to ten mics. Eleven toms — again, with and without snare rattle — go from slightly dusty and vintage-vibed to super-crisp and powerful, and offer nine mics each. Nineteen each of crashes, rides, and hi-hats round out the collection. It’s not a ton of instruments, which makes it easy to get to know the library quickly, but it’s enough to make it equally useful for small-potatoes producers like me and for those who use gold and platinum discs as wallpaper. You can also tune every drum individually: up to 36 semitones in either direction for subtle or extreme shifts. Each drum or cymbal has an Envelope section that offers separate control over the duration of the room sound sustain as well as the release time of the direct sound. This simple and elegant handling of ambience gives you the same net flexibility as a tacked-on reverb but with a much more natural feel. Smart.

Another clever bit of programming that’s much appreciated by folks like me whose computers barely meet OWD’s system requirements are the scripts by the Sonic Reality coders that turn off a voice when that mic’s volume is all the way down. A glass-is-half-empty sort would complain that if you prefer more ambient drum sounds, you’re asking more of your processor as it plays more voices than drier sounds demand, but unless your bag is Finnish epic metal, OWD isn’t going to fatally overburden your dual-core Intel 2GHz iMac with its piddly 2GB of RAM. It didn’t mine, anyway, but it sure gave it a workout. You can also pan each mic channel to create any stereo image, realistic or otherwise. Last but not least, velocity-to-amp amount control per instrument gets your controller and the sounds’ response connected in whatever way feels most musical to you.

If you like, you can load Multis of pre-configured kits, or you can load individual Instruments and build your own kits. Helpfully, sets of toms can be loaded as Multis into your custom-assembled kit.

IN USE
What a blast. Upon OWD’s arrival, I put it to work replacing some decent but not especially inspiring drum sounds I had already recorded on a funky cover of a certain tune by a certain iconic ’60s folk singer, both of which shall remain nameless so that I can post audio files (at the right). Building a kit from scratch, I discovered that there’d been a problem during installation. The Kontakt Player 2 plug-in uses an installer, but you drag and drop the rest of the library from five data DVDs into KP2’s Samples folder. There’s one file that needs to be in the root folder rather than the Samples folder, or else the plug-in won’t find all of the samples. Had I read the manual first, I’d have known this, but I was impatient to get going after watching the excellent demo DVD. Lesson: RTFM.

This tune wanted a snare with a bit of trashy ring; more Mitchell Froom or Tchad Blake than Quincy Jones or Roger Nichols. After auditioning several, Snare 2 fit the bill. I could get a nice balance of wallop and ring, without too much sizzle, by setting the top dynamic mic channel (a Shure SM57) at about 12 o’clock, with the overhead channel at about ten o’clock, and the two AKG C12s at about 12:30. Later I decided to add a little of the Room 2 pair during the last verse by assigning the virtual knobs to MIDI CCs and drawing automation in my DAW to enhance the illusion that the drummer was really laying into that snare and making it overcome the gate settings on other open mics. I don’t know of another virtual drum product that does this; most would make you commit to a sample with a certain amount of ambience, or force you to use effects to achieve a less realistic sound overall.

I first got familiar with I-Map — Sonic Reality’s alternative to General MIDI keyboard mapping for drum sounds — in the Dark Ages of hardware samplers; SR’s Interactive Drum Kits and Snares (where the “I” comes from) lived in my Akai CD3000. Because OWD gives you right- and left-hand hits on most of the drums, even in step programming or multi-pass programming you have the strokes available for a convincing drum performance without significant limitations. Stewart Copeland-like hi-hat parts? Can do. Intricate two-handed work on the ride cymbal à la the late Kevin Wilkinson? Check. Second-line funk, train beat, or circus rolls on the snare? Yup. It requires more work than GM-map entry, for sure, but it’s worth it. Check out the online audio for real-world application of many of these techniques.

CONCLUSIONS
Because of good experiences with other Sonic Reality products, I had high hopes for OWD Gold going in. With Allen Sides’ involvement, the chances that it would be some me-too drum library seemed bloody slim. In fact, OWD is so far from me-too that it’s, like, on the opposite side of the galaxy from the me-too place, on planet outstanding. Sure, you need a pretty juicy machine to make it sing, and yeah, it’s a 40GB drum library (the Platinum version is 120GB), but boy, does it sound good, and boy, does it make it fun to create a wholly convincing illusion that you spent some major label’s money in some major studio with a major engineer behind a major console. Unlike some other virtual drum products, however, this one won’t play grooves for you, so it’s up to you to create convincing parts. As long as you’ve got reasonably big ears and can steal from great drummers the way we all steal from our keyboard heroes, OWD should prove a more than worthy accomplice. For its unprecedented flexibility of manipulation of the acoustic space in which the drums were recorded, and for the producers’ impeccable taste in creating drum sounds that are timeless and not trendy, Ocean Way Drums is a clear Key Buy winner. There’s simply no way to get the same results for less time and less money. 

CLAIM CHECK
Sonic Reality’s Dave Kerzner says, “Ocean Way Drums is a high resolution virtual drum instrument designed to offer the best in audiophile fidelity and musical expression for creating realistic drum tracks in music productions. It’s the only drum software that offers the sound of Ocean Way (the world’s most awarded studio complex) — where top artists like Radiohead, Green Day, Dr. Dre, Paul McCartney, John Mayer, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers record. Ocean Way Drums’ 19 playable multi-channel drum kits feature the deepest level of individual mic mixing control per drum of any drum plug-in, as well as preset mixes done by Grammy winning engineer-producers Allen Sides and Steven Miller. Ocean Way Drums is top of the line when it comes to drum samples and offers an easy way to have ‘album ready’ drum sounds right out of the box.”

STATS
Drum sample library recorded with multiple mics at Ocean Way Studios, with embedded Kontakt Player 2 playback engine.

Pros
A new level of stunningly great drum sounds. Outstanding sample mapping. Very musical. Kontakt Player 2 used very effectively.

Cons
None significant.

By Ken Hughes

Review: Ocean Way Drums Gold  Keyboard Online Edition May, 2008Getting great drum sounds is as vital as oxygen. Without them as the foundation of your mix, it’s hard for other instruments, no matter how awesome they sound, to make your music get up off the console and live. A lackluster home studio recording of a drum kit instantly outs your tune as “not a real studio mix.” Ouch. Likewise, a low-rent sampled kit crashes and burns about as soon after purchase as the average Ferrari Enzo.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could block out time at L.A.’s legendary Ocean Way Studios (“Sorry Mr. Clapton, we’re booked up that week”), get a multiple Grammy-winning engineer, and use all the studio’s vintage and high-dollar goodies so you could kiss crummy drum tracks goodbye forever? Well, thanks to renowned engineer Allen Sides, equally-renowned producer Steven Miller, and Dave Kerzner of Sonic Reality, now you can — without ever leaving your desktop.

OVERVIEW
Couldn’t it all just be marketing hype? Not on your life — after a few weeks with OWD, I can assure you that this is the real thing. The snares alone offer 18 channels of audio. That’s not a typo. A whopping 14 mics covered each of the 19 snare drums during the sessions — a stereo pair each of condensers and dynamics at a slightly greater distance, a stereo pair of under-snare mics, stereo overheads, and three pairs of stereo room mics at increasing distances. In addition, there are two highly compressed sources called thwack, plus a stereo digital reverb tail from a vintage AMS RMX-16 unit. You have easy control over their mix with virtual knobs for each. Since the whole ruckus lives inside the included Native Instruments Kontakt Player 2, you can automate the mic mix in your host by assigning KP2 parameters to MIDI control numbers — on each drum independently. There’s so much sonic variety in just those two features that it’s difficult to overstate. The flip side is the enormity: 40GB, but hey, drive space is relatively cheap. The typical snare drum in OWD is represented by well over 2,000 samples. If you’re accustomed to virtual orchestras such as those from, say, Vienna Instruments, you already know what kind of amazing detail these mega-libraries afford. If you’re uninitiated, let me assure you it’s well worth the space.

Nineteen kicks (times two — you get each with snare buzz and without) offer everything from tight and punchy to “When The Levee Breaks,” and kicks have up to ten mics. Eleven toms — again, with and without snare rattle — go from slightly dusty and vintage-vibed to super-crisp and powerful, and offer nine mics each. Nineteen each of crashes, rides, and hi-hats round out the collection. It’s not a ton of instruments, which makes it easy to get to know the library quickly, but it’s enough to make it equally useful for small-potatoes producers like me and for those who use gold and platinum discs as wallpaper. You can also tune every drum individually: up to 36 semitones in either direction for subtle or extreme shifts. Each drum or cymbal has an Envelope section that offers separate control over the duration of the room sound sustain as well as the release time of the direct sound. This simple and elegant handling of ambience gives you the same net flexibility as a tacked-on reverb but with a much more natural feel. Smart.

Another clever bit of programming that’s much appreciated by folks like me whose computers barely meet OWD’s system requirements are the scripts by the Sonic Reality coders that turn off a voice when that mic’s volume is all the way down. A glass-is-half-empty sort would complain that if you prefer more ambient drum sounds, you’re asking more of your processor as it plays more voices than drier sounds demand, but unless your bag is Finnish epic metal, OWD isn’t going to fatally overburden your dual-core Intel 2GHz iMac with its piddly 2GB of RAM. It didn’t mine, anyway, but it sure gave it a workout. You can also pan each mic channel to create any stereo image, realistic or otherwise. Last but not least, velocity-to-amp amount control per instrument gets your controller and the sounds’ response connected in whatever way feels most musical to you.

If you like, you can load Multis of pre-configured kits, or you can load individual Instruments and build your own kits. Helpfully, sets of toms can be loaded as Multis into your custom-assembled kit.

IN USE
What a blast. Upon OWD’s arrival, I put it to work replacing some decent but not especially inspiring drum sounds I had already recorded on a funky cover of a certain tune by a certain iconic ’60s folk singer, both of which shall remain nameless so that I can post audio files (at the right). Building a kit from scratch, I discovered that there’d been a problem during installation. The Kontakt Player 2 plug-in uses an installer, but you drag and drop the rest of the library from five data DVDs into KP2’s Samples folder. There’s one file that needs to be in the root folder rather than the Samples folder, or else the plug-in won’t find all of the samples. Had I read the manual first, I’d have known this, but I was impatient to get going after watching the excellent demo DVD. Lesson: RTFM.

This tune wanted a snare with a bit of trashy ring; more Mitchell Froom or Tchad Blake than Quincy Jones or Roger Nichols. After auditioning several, Snare 2 fit the bill. I could get a nice balance of wallop and ring, without too much sizzle, by setting the top dynamic mic channel (a Shure SM57) at about 12 o’clock, with the overhead channel at about ten o’clock, and the two AKG C12s at about 12:30. Later I decided to add a little of the Room 2 pair during the last verse by assigning the virtual knobs to MIDI CCs and drawing automation in my DAW to enhance the illusion that the drummer was really laying into that snare and making it overcome the gate settings on other open mics. I don’t know of another virtual drum product that does this; most would make you commit to a sample with a certain amount of ambience, or force you to use effects to achieve a less realistic sound overall.

I first got familiar with I-Map — Sonic Reality’s alternative to General MIDI keyboard mapping for drum sounds — in the Dark Ages of hardware samplers; SR’s Interactive Drum Kits and Snares (where the “I” comes from) lived in my Akai CD3000. Because OWD gives you right- and left-hand hits on most of the drums, even in step programming or multi-pass programming you have the strokes available for a convincing drum performance without significant limitations. Stewart Copeland-like hi-hat parts? Can do. Intricate two-handed work on the ride cymbal à la the late Kevin Wilkinson? Check. Second-line funk, train beat, or circus rolls on the snare? Yup. It requires more work than GM-map entry, for sure, but it’s worth it. Check out the online audio for real-world application of many of these techniques.

CONCLUSIONS
Because of good experiences with other Sonic Reality products, I had high hopes for OWD Gold going in. With Allen Sides’ involvement, the chances that it would be some me-too drum library seemed bloody slim. In fact, OWD is so far from me-too that it’s, like, on the opposite side of the galaxy from the me-too place, on planet outstanding. Sure, you need a pretty juicy machine to make it sing, and yeah, it’s a 40GB drum library (the Platinum version is 120GB), but boy, does it sound good, and boy, does it make it fun to create a wholly convincing illusion that you spent some major label’s money in some major studio with a major engineer behind a major console. Unlike some other virtual drum products, however, this one won’t play grooves for you, so it’s up to you to create convincing parts. As long as you’ve got reasonably big ears and can steal from great drummers the way we all steal from our keyboard heroes, OWD should prove a more than worthy accomplice. For its unprecedented flexibility of manipulation of the acoustic space in which the drums were recorded, and for the producers’ impeccable taste in creating drum sounds that are timeless and not trendy, Ocean Way Drums is a clear Key Buy winner. There’s simply no way to get the same results for less time and less money. 

CLAIM CHECK
Sonic Reality’s Dave Kerzner says, “Ocean Way Drums is a high resolution virtual drum instrument designed to offer the best in audiophile fidelity and musical expression for creating realistic drum tracks in music productions. It’s the only drum software that offers the sound of Ocean Way (the world’s most awarded studio complex) — where top artists like Radiohead, Green Day, Dr. Dre, Paul McCartney, John Mayer, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers record. Ocean Way Drums’ 19 playable multi-channel drum kits feature the deepest level of individual mic mixing control per drum of any drum plug-in, as well as preset mixes done by Grammy winning engineer-producers Allen Sides and Steven Miller. Ocean Way Drums is top of the line when it comes to drum samples and offers an easy way to have ‘album ready’ drum sounds right out of the box.”

STATS
Drum sample library recorded with multiple mics at Ocean Way Studios, with embedded Kontakt Player 2 playback engine.

Pros
A new level of stunningly great drum sounds. Outstanding sample mapping. Very musical. Kontakt Player 2 used very effectively.

Cons
None significant.
By Ken Hughes

Elecronic Musician 10/2008

Ocean Way Drums Gold gives you a library of huge-sounding multimiked drums, with mix presets from Allen Sides and extensive user tweakability 
If I told you that there was a drum sample library recorded in a top-quality studio (Ocean Way Recording) by two highly respected producer-engineers (Steven Miller and Grammy Award winner Allen Sides) using a tried-and-true software platform (Native Instruments Kontakt Player 2) and the expertise of a major sound developer (Sonic Reality), you would expect a superior product. In the case of Ocean Way Drums (OWD), you would not be disappointed. OWD features numerous and varied multisampled kits, meticulously recorded by Sides and Miller using classic microphones in Ocean Way's vast Studio B. You get a library of drum sounds that are fat, punchy, and extremely realistic. These may be the best-sounding sampled drums I've ever heard.

OWD Gold ($895) includes a whopping 40 GB of sample data, which comes on six DVDs. Kontakt Player 2 (standalone and plug-in) is bundled with the library. (Also available is OWD Platinum [$1,795], which comes on its own hard drive with an astounding 120 GB of samples.) For both Mac and Windows users, a CPU with a minimum 2 GHz clock speed is recommended.

DRUM SOUND HEAVEN
The OWD Gold library consists of 19 kits, all of which offer samples derived from close, overhead, and room mics on each cymbal or drum (hi-hat, ride, and crash; kick; snare; and high, medium, and low toms). Each kit element features numerous Velocity layers for additional realism.

OWD's user interface lets you adjust the levels of the various mics used to record each element. On many of the snares, you also get a knob called RMX, which dials in a gated reverb sound. Many of the kicks have both RMX and Thwack controls, the latter being a heavily compressed signal. For instant gratification, there are six keyswitchable mix presets for each kit, mixed by Sides himself (see Web Clip 1), which give you progressively more room sound as you step through them. These presets can also be adjusted for individual elements.

The kits range in sound from clean and punchy to big and fat. Each comes in two flavors: the C 12A version, for which the snare was miked with a stereo pair of AKG C 12As on top, and the 57 version, which has a mono Shure SM57 on the snare. (You can get 57s and C 12As on the snare in both kit types through the knobs in the OWD interface.) Both kit configurations offer stereo Sony 55P mics under the snare. Each kit is also available in either a Snares On or a Snares Off version, which refers to whether the snares were on (and thus rattling) or off when the other drums and cymbals were recorded. Overall, an immense amount of mixing control is available here.

OFF THE MAP
All the kits are offered with keymapping for Roland V-Drums (featuring the TD-20 brain) and for Sonic Reality's proprietary I-MAP scheme. I-MAP is designed to make drum programming easier and more expressive from a keyboard (see Web Clip 2). Once you get used to it, it works extremely well. The version of OWD I reviewed did not offer GM keymaps, so it wasn't usable with preprogrammed MIDI drum sequences (or previously existing MIDI drum parts). However, the next update of OWD, which may be out by the time you read this, will add GM-mapped kits and a collection of MIDI files. Even before that comes out, a software patch that adds the GM-mapping feature will be available for download from the OWD site.

The PDF manual offers tips for using the library with Drumagog software (you need to download a free helper program before doing so). The idea of using OWD's sounds for drum replacement is tantalizing indeed.

DETAILS, DETAILS
I do have a few minor issues with OWD. There are no brush or Blastick samples, only stick hits. Depending on the musical style you're recording, that could be a limiting factor, although for straight-ahead rock and pop and a lot of contemporary country, these drum sounds are spot-on.

Another quibble is that the kits don't have descriptive names, only numerical ones (Kit 1, Kit 2). That fact made it difficult to recall what each kit sounded like; when auditioning the kits at random, it was tough to remember which ones I'd already listened to. Miller told me that he and Sides decided against descriptive names (especially brand names of drums in the kit) because they didn't want users to have false preconceptions of what the kits (which are all custom setups) sound like. Finally, I would have liked a printed manual, not just a PDF.

Overall, OWD is an amazing product. Yes, it's relatively expensive and requires a lot of disk space, but it offers world-class drum sounds and an incredible amount of mixing control.


"EM Hot Pick"5 out of 5 Review: Ocean Way Drums  Electronic Musician 10/2008Ocean Way Drums Gold gives you a library of huge-sounding multimiked drums, with mix presets from Allen Sides and extensive user tweakability 
If I told you that there was a drum sample library recorded in a top-quality studio (Ocean Way Recording) by two highly respected producer-engineers (Steven Miller and Grammy Award winner Allen Sides) using a tried-and-true software platform (Native Instruments Kontakt Player 2) and the expertise of a major sound developer (Sonic Reality), you would expect a superior product. In the case of Ocean Way Drums (OWD), you would not be disappointed. OWD features numerous and varied multisampled kits, meticulously recorded by Sides and Miller using classic microphones in Ocean Way's vast Studio B. You get a library of drum sounds that are fat, punchy, and extremely realistic. These may be the best-sounding sampled drums I've ever heard.

OWD Gold ($895) includes a whopping 40 GB of sample data, which comes on six DVDs. Kontakt Player 2 (standalone and plug-in) is bundled with the library. (Also available is OWD Platinum [$1,795], which comes on its own hard drive with an astounding 120 GB of samples.) For both Mac and Windows users, a CPU with a minimum 2 GHz clock speed is recommended.

DRUM SOUND HEAVEN
The OWD Gold library consists of 19 kits, all of which offer samples derived from close, overhead, and room mics on each cymbal or drum (hi-hat, ride, and crash; kick; snare; and high, medium, and low toms). Each kit element features numerous Velocity layers for additional realism.

OWD's user interface lets you adjust the levels of the various mics used to record each element. On many of the snares, you also get a knob called RMX, which dials in a gated reverb sound. Many of the kicks have both RMX and Thwack controls, the latter being a heavily compressed signal. For instant gratification, there are six keyswitchable mix presets for each kit, mixed by Sides himself (see Web Clip 1), which give you progressively more room sound as you step through them. These presets can also be adjusted for individual elements.

The kits range in sound from clean and punchy to big and fat. Each comes in two flavors: the C 12A version, for which the snare was miked with a stereo pair of AKG C 12As on top, and the 57 version, which has a mono Shure SM57 on the snare. (You can get 57s and C 12As on the snare in both kit types through the knobs in the OWD interface.) Both kit configurations offer stereo Sony 55P mics under the snare. Each kit is also available in either a Snares On or a Snares Off version, which refers to whether the snares were on (and thus rattling) or off when the other drums and cymbals were recorded. Overall, an immense amount of mixing control is available here.

OFF THE MAP
All the kits are offered with keymapping for Roland V-Drums (featuring the TD-20 brain) and for Sonic Reality's proprietary I-MAP scheme. I-MAP is designed to make drum programming easier and more expressive from a keyboard (see Web Clip 2). Once you get used to it, it works extremely well. The version of OWD I reviewed did not offer GM keymaps, so it wasn't usable with preprogrammed MIDI drum sequences (or previously existing MIDI drum parts). However, the next update of OWD, which may be out by the time you read this, will add GM-mapped kits and a collection of MIDI files. Even before that comes out, a software patch that adds the GM-mapping feature will be available for download from the OWD site.

The PDF manual offers tips for using the library with Drumagog software (you need to download a free helper program before doing so). The idea of using OWD's sounds for drum replacement is tantalizing indeed.

DETAILS, DETAILS
I do have a few minor issues with OWD. There are no brush or Blastick samples, only stick hits. Depending on the musical style you're recording, that could be a limiting factor, although for straight-ahead rock and pop and a lot of contemporary country, these drum sounds are spot-on.

Another quibble is that the kits don't have descriptive names, only numerical ones (Kit 1, Kit 2). That fact made it difficult to recall what each kit sounded like; when auditioning the kits at random, it was tough to remember which ones I'd already listened to. Miller told me that he and Sides decided against descriptive names (especially brand names of drums in the kit) because they didn't want users to have false preconceptions of what the kits (which are all custom setups) sound like. Finally, I would have liked a printed manual, not just a PDF.

Overall, OWD is an amazing product. Yes, it's relatively expensive and requires a lot of disk space, but it offers world-class drum sounds and an incredible amount of mixing control.


"EM Hot Pick" 5 out of 5