iStandard Ayatollah Collection Review

     Here we are again, stuck between a rock and a hard place. The rock being “I’m tired of hearing and using the same ol’ drum sounds,” the hard place being “Got 2 kids, and my baby mama late.” What if I told you there was an inexpensive way to get some new drums to get into your library? Well look no further! Our friends over at iStandardProducers.com have got an outstanding kit for you. The Ayatollah Collection (Mos Def, Royce Da 5’9”, Talib Kweli) is a smacking drum kit with 48 kicks, 48 snares, and 4 hi hats, straight out of Ayatollah’s personal library for your finger banging pleasure.

As I always do when I get a new drum kit I go right to the kicks. The backbone, and sometimes the tone setter for most rap music. There is no shortage of character in any of these kicks what-so-ever. Nothing added to enhance the sounds what-so-ever. No compression, no limiters, no reverbs. Just raw, gritty kicks over here. You find everything in this kit from the very open ended acoustic kick, to the thump heavy kick. It appears that most of the samples are sampled directly from vinyl drum breaks, though I could be wrong. Another reason I believe this is so, is because many of the kicks do have a hi hat on top of them. None-the-less, there is a good variety to choose from and users of this collection won’t be disappointed.

Moving onto the snares, I find a few of them good and a few not so good. Starting with the good (cause who doesn’t want to hear good news first), the snare I like have a very boom-bappy feel on them. Very clean and dry with the ability to really make a neck snap when paired with the right kick. Even though the snares are good, they still could use a little EQ to give them that extra boost to stand out in your mix. And now we move onto the not so good. I feel like some of the snares were chopped with a bit too much layered on top of them, or were just flat out not good sounding snares. They lack a bit of warmth, or that crack that you look for in snare. Some were just not sampled so well. However, it is easy to say that the good definitely outweighs the bad here.

All in all, for those of you looking to add to your drum library dirty kicks and snapping snares this is the kit for you. Make sure you head over to www.istandardproducers.com and while you’re over there, SIGN UP FOR THIS! http://istandardproducers.com/istandard-blog/istandard-presents-hits-from-the-kits-constest/ Closes April 16th 2013

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James Jaxin
Forum Moderation MaschineMasters.com
Product Review Specialist MaschineMasters.com