Recording - January 2015 - 57

The single most-used adjective I see in reviews and online
describing the D6 is "aggressive." As I mentioned, it has
helped define the modern kick drum sound, especially when it
comes to hard rock, metal and punk... although I have used it
on R&B, Christian pop, jazz fusion and more. Essentially what
Audix has done is to pre-tailor the microphone to ignore the frequencies that we engineers usually filter out at the board anyway. Thanks to its high SPL handling, it always yields a clean,
non-distorted sound.
I have two favorite positions for the D6. One is right up on the
beater head in multiple mic situations, as few microphones can
capture the beater click the way a D6 does. When using the D6
in a single mic setup, I prefer it in the sound hole, where it captures the top end of the beater in a slightly more subdued way

and blends it with an amazing amount of sub-thumping low end.
In addition to kick drum, the D6 is one of my favorite bass cabinet mics, where again it captures a stellar low end but also highlights the upper end tone of the bass strings nicely. It's also great
on floor tom, djembe, and anything else with a larger bottom!
At $200 this is a microphone that every sound engineer should
have in their bag of tricks, and if you want to be one of the lucky
750, think about grabbing one of the new limited-edition units at
$229. From all of us at Recording, congratulations on your first
30 years, Audix!
Price: $229
More from: Audix, www.audixusa.com

Ableton Live Packs: The Loop Loft Hip Hop Drums and Drumdrops A Fistful Of Drumkits
B Y M I K E M E T L AY

Created by Ableton and many third-party
vendors, Live Packs are easily-installed expansion libraries that can incorporate audio samples, loops, MIDI data, Drum Racks, Effect
Racks, presets for any of Live's instruments,
Max For Live patches, and/or automation
data. We recently got to try two exceptional
drum Live Packs, created by The Loop Loft and
Drumdrops and sold on Ableton's website.
Hip Hop Drums is a fantastic collection of hip
hop rhythm creation tools from The Loop Loft,
whose loop libraries were most recently
reviewed in our January 2014 issue. The package contains sounds, effects, and mixes for six
different hip hop "songs" from 91 to 150 BPM.
Hip Hop Drums takes advantage of all of
Live 9's mixing and grouping tricks-so
much so that it's practically a tutorial on how
to build seamless and powerful rhythms in
Live. Several different approaches are
offered for getting drum sounds, and they all
work beautifully.
For example, there are three Effects Racks-
Classic, Tweaker 1, and Tweaker 2-which

contain multiple nested Live effects that are set up to create a huge number of different
sounds. There's tape delay, serial and parallel compression, sub boost, flanging, bit
reduction, and a hear-it-to-believe-it effect called Hi Frequency Mess that contains EQ,
filtered delay, and Beat Repeat. There are simple Macro controls for all of these modules, and they can be put on any audio Clip, not just the ones in the Live Pack.
The Pack includes Drum Racks where each piece of the kit has its own audio
channel and sample playback, which are then grouped together for easy mixing-
complete with their own built-in multiple effects sends/returns and dynamics control
on each individual piece. These can be loaded on their own or automatically
added when you drop in MIDI clips that require them.
You can load individual audio clips with or without effects presets attached to
them, set up your own Drum Racks with one-shot samples from the library, or-for
the ultimate in crazy-load a Construction Kit, which features a channel with audio
clips routed into a channel of effects presets selected by loading clips, which in turn
routes into a third channel to capture the audio of your performance. Phew!
Hip Hop Drums has great-feeling loops and exquisitely flexible effects that go
from subtle to nasty with the turn of a knob. It's great for all sorts of electronica, hip
hop, and R&B beats, and as a tutorial in how to get Live to do the impossible, it's
worth the asking price and then some.
From venerable sound library company Drumdrops comes A Fistful Of Drumkits.
It's a deep and focused collection of drum samples and kits with nary a loop in
sight-the emphasis here is on the absolute best drum sounds possible, for you to
play with your own grooves.
There are some 1000 samples in this Live Pack, spread out over three different
drum kits with a number of variations. Each kit is presented as a Drum Rack with
29 to 31 different drum articulations including a wide variety of hi-hat, cymbal,
and snare styles, all multisampled with up to 16 levels of dynamics for maximum
realism.
The Big Dub Kit is a Rogers Big R kit with two different Ludwig snares, an Acrolite
or a Black Magic. The Heavy Rock Kit, a Mapex, has a choice of three Mapex
snares, a Black Panther Steel, Phosphor Bronze, or Machete, complete with flams.
The Vintage 1963 Kit, a Premier Outfits 54, is presented in four variations: snare
damped or undamped (which affects rimshot as well), each of which is recorded cleanly or in a Valve & Tape version, remixed through vintage tube gear and captured to
1
/2" tape. The latter sound is my favorite of all the kits-it's huge, warm, and dripping
with attitude.
All of these kits sound fantastic, though. They're recorded on a beautiful collection of new and vintage mics-AEA, AKG, Audix, B&K (DPA Microphones), Coles,
Earthworks, Electro-Voice, Microtech Gefell, Lomo, Neumann, RØDE, Sennheiser,
Shure, Sontronics, and a Yamaha NS10 speaker cone wired backwards-through
vintage consoles and processing gear. A PDF that comes with the Live Pack has 21
pages of droolworthy data on the gear, studios used, engineers, and players.
If you're building rhythms in Live and you want to work with a beautifully multisampled and lovingly assembled set of drums that range from clean and crisp to
fat, punchy, and filthy, you're going to love A Fistful Of Drumkits.
Prices: Hip Hop Drums, $49; A Fistful Of Drumkits, $69
More from: Ableton, www.ableton.com; The Loop Loft, www.thelooploft.com;
Drumdrops, www.drumdrops.com
RECORDING January 2015

http://www.audixusa.com http://www.ableton.com http://www.thelooploft.com http://www.drumdrops.com

Recording - January 2015

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