Toontrack has released a Superior Drummer 3 expansion built around a collection of drum kits recorded by veteran producer, engineer, and mixer Niko Bolas at The Village in Los Angeles.
LA Sessions SDX was recorded across four spots in two rooms of the studio’s Studio D: the piano area, the studio floor, the riser, and a sealed-off vocal booth, using an extensive microphone setup that even captured the resonance of the studio’s grand piano strings for extra ambience.
The kits themselves pay homage to Bolas’s session history, with several personally owned by drummers including Kenny Aronoff, Steve Jordan, Denny Fongheiser, Charley Drayton, Anthony LoGerfo, Russ Kunkel, and Stella Mozgawa.
One engineer whose sonic fingerprints can be found across an extraordinary body of music is Niko Bolas. Over the course of a remarkable four-decade career, his approach to the art of recording has helped shape seminal works by artists across the musical spectrum – from rootsy singer-songwriter and pristine AOR to loud, uncompromising hard rock.
In this SDX for Superior Drummer 3, Niko brings that lifetime of experience to the fore, realizing his vision of the ultimate drum expansion: nine carefully selected kits, many personally owned by some of the most iconic session drummers in the world, captured with the detail, character and uncompromising curiosity that have defined his work for decades.
LA Sessions SDX features
- Eight classic drum kits, totaling 14 kicks, 14 snares, 27 toms, 21 cymbals, and four sets of hi-hats.
- One curated percussion combo kit sampled with hands and mallets, featuring djembes, klong yaw, doumbeks, tablas, and djun djun.
- Four distinct room configurations: Piano Spot, Studio Floor, The Riser, and Vocal Booth.
- 45 mix-ready presets engineered by Niko Bolas, alongside additional presets from Toontrack.
- A collection of MIDI grooves and fills tailored specifically to the kits.
- Extra left- and right-hand articulations on snare, toms, and hi-hats for e-drummers with positional sensing.
LA Sessions SDX is available now for $179 USD / €179 EUR at Best Service and from the Toontrack store.
