by Tweak
excerpted from
http://tweakheadz.com/review_of_stormdrum.htm
The software sampler is the modern solution to inexpensive music production for film. The sounds are, depending on the package, recorded in top notch studios and halls by experienced engineers and producers. They come already mapped for you and accessible to your sequencers by MIDI as a VSTi or Audio Unit plugin. Not that many years ago this was impossible. Film composers had multiple racks of 16 bit samplers, each holding only 128 megs of samples recorded at 48khz tops. Now we can gang up multiple computers and run hundreds of virtual instruments if we want with a separate track for every instrument in your imagined orchestra. Even on a single fast computer you have enough horsepower to make big sound, given that you have the right sounds.
This is exactly where StormDrum fits in. I've had it at the TweakLab about a month and have used it in about 4 compositions. I'll tell you now, I like it. Storm drum has the percussion hits and action beds you need for dramatic, action-oriented film scores. Some of the hits are huge and perfectly treated with just the right blend of reverb to be monstrously cinematic. Heh, when I hit the F1 key in the Kompakt preset "Taikos Earthquake" the room rattles and shakes. Many keymaps, when viewed and dissected in Kontakt, show the richness of the mapping. Some drums have different samples for 8, 10, 12 levels of velocity. This lets each key respond beautifully to your touch, something you won't find in inexpensive sample sets or in synths.
StormDrum is so easy to use it feels like you are cheating. The kind of feeling you may have had when you first started using audio loops in Acid or Ableton's Live. But Storm Drum is much more than audio loops. You actually get two soft samplers with it--special versions of Kompakt and Intakt designed by Native Instruments.
