The concept for Cinematic Synthetic Drums (or simply, “CSD“) was simple enough: many modern film, TV and game scores use a rich variety of both acoustic and electronic material. In particular, composers often seek crisp electronic drums that fit nicely alongside orchestral and melodic synth sounds. However, most electronic drum libraries consist of rehashed drum machine sounds as opposed to new and exciting material. So, we made our own, using subtractive synthesis, FM, wavetable, additive and many other types of sound generation and mangling techniques.
Every drum hit has 10x variations and a smooth, snappy velocity response. We created multiple categories of sounds, all mapped intuitively across the keyboard menu-style: bassy hits/kicks, snares and mid/high-range hits, hats, thips, splashes, and crashes. We also included custom bass drops (great for trailers!) and even a set of textural sounds like bass drones, big reverses, and stabs. All drums are 100% synthesized from scratch – we’re talking entirely new material. No tired drum machines or rehashed recordings.
To accompany this arsenal of 65+ sounds, CSD includes a custom scripted UI. Each individual drum has its own individual pitch and volume control, along with global controls for pitch, volume and release. Five special FX keyswitches allow for live triggering of distortion, amping, bitcrushing, phasing and rotation, while an ensemble-maker turns single hits into thunderous groups. Plus, the library is lightweight; only a few hundred megabytes requiring very little RAM.
But perhaps the best part of CSD is its price. A mere zero dollars and zero cents. The honest truth is that we created this library because, well, we wanted to use it ourselves. So, we figured, why not share it with you? We hope you’ll enjoy CSD and use it in many of your own compositions, be they film scores, game soundtracks, pop, trance, dubstep or anything in between!