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.
Gold, $995; Platinum (120GB library pre-loaded on included hard drive), $1,995
Sonic Reality, www.sonicreality.com, www.oceanwaydrums.com