Review of Native Instruments Maschine Drum Selection, a drum kit sample library for Kontakt Player

Native Instruments recently launched its new Kontakt Player, a free high quality sample player based on Kontakt.

It comes with Kontakt Factory Selection, a free sound library which contains 650 MB of premium sounds and instruments from Kontakt 3.

Now you might think Native Instruments is being very generous offering these fine sounds free of cost, but of course they have a cunning plan: Get you hooked on Kontakt and make sure you will expand your sound library with commercial Kontakt Player libraries.

Maschine Drum Selection is one of the two first libraries available for the new Kontakt Player. As its title suggest, this product features a bunch of drum kits from Maschine’s sound library.

This collection contains 20 full drum kits adapted from the hot new MASCHINE library. With hard hitting urban kits, sounds recorded from specially produced vinyl dubplates, heavily processed acoustic drums and vintage analog samples, MASCHINE DRUM SELECTION truly provides a broad palette of modern club and electronic music styles.

Maschine Drum Selection features

Contains 20 drum kits from the MASCHINE library.
5 Urban, 5 Digital, 4 Analog, 2 Vinyl and 4 Production Kits.
Each kit consists of 16 high-quality sounds to which tuning, filter, saturation and other effects can be applied individually, allowing for plenty of sound-shaping potential.
The drum kits can also be loaded into the full versions of Kontakt 3.5, Battery 3 and Kore 2 as well as in the free Kore Player.

Maschine Drum Selection is available for purchase for $59 USD / 49 EUR. An audio demo is available from the product page.

So what do I think?

I liked the drum kits in Maschine so obviously I like them in Maschine Drum Selection as well. Even though Native Instruments says in the manual that the samples used are the same as the ones in the Maschine library, some of the kits do sound a little different since they use effects like saturation, lo-fi, reverb etc. I didn’t do a full comparison but just noticed this for kits I knew from the Maschine library.

Maschine Drum Selection includes a step sequencer (Drum Computer in the screenshot) which will let you create new beats with just a few clicks of the mouse, using the Remix function for instant variations on patterns.

In short, a very nice collection of drum kits.

The only thing I am not too sure about is the price. I feel $59 USD might be a little steep for 20 drum kits. This has nothing to do with the quality of the kits provided, but rather with the fact that there is a lot of choice when it comes to drum sounds.

What do you think? For those who bought it, is the price right?

More information: Native Instruments

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