Black Cat Drums

A reworking of the acoustic drums and hand percussion from the classic Sensory Percussion V1 Sound Pack: “Black Cat.”

Recorded at Sunhouse HQ in Long Island City, Queens, Black Cat Drums includes super-detailed, nine-zone, four velocity level (with five layers of round robins per velocity-level) samplings of:

• 3 snare drums
• 2 kick drums
• 1 floor tom (repitched in the sets to expand to a bank of toms)
• 2 hi-hats
• 1 ride cymbal
• 1 conga (2 additional congas from the original pack were already included in the V2 core library, and are also included within sets
• 1 djembe
• A shaker and a tambourine (not-multi-sampled)
• The Black Cat Drum machine - a small folder of synth drum one shots that power the set “ElectroCat.”

Like many of our V1 packs the acoustic drums in Black Cat were recorded with future, unimplemented features in mind: for example, we recorded one of the snare drums and kick drums through a cassette player: in V1 we could only include these “cassette processed” samples in a separate kit, but in V2 the flexibility of layers and macros allows these samples to be assigned to a knob and blended alongside the “clean” samples. 

The fourteen sets include:

• Hyper-detailed acoustic mappings of the instruments described above, newly imagined to take advantage of Sensory Percussion V2 features.
• Reworkings of the classic V1 kits - these include V2 organizational improvements and features, and also implement the same sound design techniques and maintain the same spirit as the kits in the original pack.
• “Augmented” versions of the Black Cat acoustic drums - sets that are acoustic in nature, but have a little bit of magical realism embedded in their mappings. For example, ghost notes are pitched up nice and high, while accents are pitched down. These kinds of sets also make more creative use of macros and expressive FX control than the more “straight up” sets.
• “Sequenced” sets. These sets turn you into the heart of a sequencer - every time you hit a drum it moves the sequence forward, but it’s not just a single sample that is being sequenced…it’s the entire drum map. That means you can play super expressively, and the kit will respond accordingly.
• “Single Drum” full kit sets - these sets contain entire drumsets squashed into a single drum. Hit the center/edge of them to unleash a big kick sound; hit the rim for a cracking snare; rimshots will often be amalgamated accents on the kick/tom/cymbal. Quiet hits anywhere on the drum trigger a groovin hi-hat or ride sound. The kits include a complimentary, simple kick drum mapping so that your foot has something to do, too, if it wants.