Kaptive Audio has announced the release of a virtual drum instrument for Native Instruments Kontakt. Jules Tools features an artistically curated kit supplied and performed by esteemed drummer Jules Jenssen (Mad Midi, Tidus (Live), Transmute Accelerator) captured during a session for Dark City Agent’s album “The Witching Hour“.
The 11-piece drum kit was recorded with 17 phase-aligned microphones. It comes with 3-4 round-robins per piece and 5-6 velocity stages, and it includes 19 articulations with a total of over 2,000 hand-edited samples.
DCA requires a very unique approach to drum tones in that they need to have the massive body and transient punch of electronic music, but still sound real with a natural approach to feel and dynamics.
The plan was to set ourselves up to have real-world example recordings of Jules and his kit to define the sound and processing approach in actual use on the record, then apply this to a hyper-sampled capture to create a “Virtual Jules”. We mixed his performances into final state for the tracks in context, applied this analog processing to the samples we took and assembled a Kontakt instrument.
We made this for ourselves with a specific sound in mind, but to our surprise with the provided access to complete real-time control over all 17 mics plus a parallel crush channel, it wound up really being able to cover a lot of sonic ground!
Available for the full version of Kontakt 6 or higher, the Jules Tools library is a “name your price” download, including free.
