Recording - April 2011 - 58

RECORDING'S
By Mike Metlay

Zildjian Gen16 Digital Vault

SHOWCASE OF SOUNDS

Trivia question: What’s the oldest family-owned business in the USA? It’s Zildjian, the cymbal manufacturer, which opened its doors with the blessing of the Sultan of Constantinople in 1623. The firm relocated to the USA in 1929 and is now being run by the fourteenth generation of Zildjians. Zildjian launched Gen16 (named for the family’s recently-born sixteenth generation!) last year, with a two-pronged approach to bringing cymbals into the digital age. One of the two product initiatives was the AE Cymbals, a spectacular new design fusing real metal cymbals with sound modeling technologies to create a truly hybrid cymbal instrument. The other was the Digital Vault, which represents Zildjian’s entry into the world of percussion virtual instruments. Zildjian allowed several firms to take their best shot at recording and multisampling master reference cymbals from its vaults; the acid test of the final product was straightforward—the firm’s master cymbal testers had to be able to identify the cymbals being played, 100% of the time, in blind listening tests. The nod went to sampling expert John Emrich, a familiar face at the FXpansion booth at every NAMM show, and the virtual instrument chosen to host the sounds was a special version of FXpansion’s BFD Eco drum instrument. Since I reviewed BFD Eco in our July 2010 issue and I love the sound of well-played cymbals, I was happy to listen to the first three products in the Digital Vault line. Please refer to the July 2010 article to learn more about BFD Eco. This powerful and easy-to-use application, which runs standalone or as a DAW plug-in, has three operating modes: Kit, where you choose the pieces of your virtual drumset; Mix, where the drums are mixed with room mics and aux busses/effects; and Groove, where drum performance data can be selected, edited, and played back. The only difference between the original version and the new BFD Eco DV is an added button that puts the program in Cymbal Mode, where the 12 instrument channels in the mixer can all be devoted to cymbals. (See the screenshot above.) The Digital Vault line starts with Z-Pack Volume 1, a collection of 18 GB of samples bundled with BFD Eco DV and a large collection of audio and MIDI grooves from famous percussionists. For more variety, you can add SPack Volumes 1 and 2, two 9 GB additions to the library that don’t come with BFD Eco DV, with three more titles coming later this year. The libraries can be loaded into BFD Eco or BFD 2 if you already have either program; the sounds aren’t usable by other programs, and must be authorized before use, just like BFD Eco DV, with FXpansion’s License Delivery: Z-Pack 1, 18 GB on two DVDs; S-Packs, 9 GB each on DVD Manager app. BFD Eco DV doesn’t come with drum Format: Sounds work in BFD2 or BFD Eco/Eco DV, which run sounds; you can add other BFD content to the library in standalone or as VST, AU, or RTAS plug-ins on Mac OS X order to use it in drum kit mode (and the MIDI Grooves 10.5+ or Windows XP/Vista/7 require that to sound right), or you can just use the appliCopy protection: Serial number challenge/response via License cation in Cymbal Mode and combine the cymbals with Manager;required by BFD Eco DV and by all sound libraries. drums from elsewhere. Licensing: No royalties on original music created with the samples; All the cymbals are sampled with a variety of articulasingle user, single computer authorization tions, played with sticks, brushes, mallets, and/or rods. Documentation: Illustrated Quick Start Guide and descriptive The recordings are absolutely impeccable and the range brochure illustrating the cymbals in each pack of articulations is glorious; to my ears, these are the bestPrices: Z-Pack Volume 1, $249; S-Packs 1 and 2, $149 each sounding and best-played cymbal sound libraries to date, More from: Zildjian Gen16, www.gen-16.com. and they make great use of BFD Eco DV’s features.
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RECORDING APRIL 2011

The Z-Pack comes with 14 classic A-Series cymbals: a 10" splash, 16"/18"/20" crashes, 18" and 22" china cymbals, three different 14" hi-hats, and five 20" and 21" rides with widely varying tones. For rock, pop, jazz, and many other genres, these cymbals will prove reliable workhorses; it’s easy to hear why this series was chosen to be the default sound set for the Digital Vault. The S-Pack Volume 1 has nine of the K-Series cymbals: 16" and 18" crashes, 20" crash ride, prototype 20" pang, 19" china, 20" ride, 21" dry ride, and 13" KZ and 14" light hi-hats. These cymbals are a great choice for harder rock sounds, with their dark and “trashy” tones. The S-Pack Volume 2, my favorite of the three sets, has 11 unusual and custom cymbals: a 24" gong sheet that must be heard to be believed, a 24" monster ride, the 20" Oriental Crash Of Doom, 10" and 8" Oriental China Trash (yes, trash, not crash... hear them and you’ll understand), 19" and 17" Ultra Hammered Chinas, 14" Ultra Hammered Hi-Hats, and 12"/10"/8" ZXT Trashformer special-effects cymbals. These sounds are inyour-face, thoroughly offbeat, and surprisingly beautiful; I don’t think you’d build an entire kit with them, but they make fantastic accents and special effects to give a track something extra. The bottom line: if you really care about your cymbal sounds and you do your main composition and tracking work with computer-created drums, you need to hear these libraries. Four hundred years of cymbal design have just gone digital.

http://www.gen-16.com

Recording - April 2011

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