What’s up MM Heads!  It’s your dude BROADWAY here to review a bit of a different kind of “kit” today.  It’s called the “SMOKE” Kontakt library from the homie Delicate.  This is an all-drum library for Kontakt (everyone’s favorite Native Instruments Sampler housing).  The kit contains a small but DIESEL variety of drum sounds including a few kicks, hats, rides, but mainly focusing heavily on a SUPER strong assortment of unique SNARE sounds that will surely top most snare sounds in your current drum database. Let’s start first though with the Kontakt interface itself.

As you can see the sexy black interface designed by Delicate includes a variety of knobs controlling classic drum effects including compression, verb, filtering, tape saturation, and a built-in EQ.  This is great because it allows you to custom-design the kit sounds to your own unique liking and function.  All 5 of the features are quality tools that add a very warm and almost analog sound to the sounds themselves.  The interesting thing about this though is that it is a universal control, meaning that if you put turn the Reverb knob affects the plug-in itself, and not just the individual drum sounds themselves.  Meaning that if I add a reverb to the snare, that reverb is applied to every sound on the kit.  So programming could become tricky when printing to audio.  However, it is a function I am happier to have than not.

As for the sounds, again keep this statement in mind: this is almost a snare kit, but a GREAT one. There are 5 kicks, 2 hats, 2 rides, and 25 MUST-HAVE SNARES.  The snares, again are the key feature here.  Going through these sounds, one can reason that a dedicated amount of attention was given to each drum sound, and in that a very crisp, unique and powerful sound emerged.  The kicks, hats, and rims are nice sounds, definitely usable, but the snares are a different animal entirely.  It’s almost a specialty “go-to” kit, when you need a diesel ass Dr. Dre snare, look no further.  The sounds are intense, snap extremely hard, sonically great, and very unique.  These are the types of snares that will be a stand-out on any track.

One thing, possibly a set-back for some is that this library requires you use Kontakt version 5.4 or later (at the time of this writing).  Most library developers tend to design libraries on earlier versions of Kontakt being that libraries are not backwards compatible, but this wasn’t the case with Smoke.  Hopefully Smoke 2.0 will correct this.  But a great thing about drum kits as Kontakt libraries is that you can grab the individual sounds in the sample libraries like any other drum kit out, and apply them to whatever drum program or machine (pun intended) that you would usually drum in.

This gets the BROADWAY SEAL OF APPROVAL. And did I mention that its only $9.95? So go cop the library now and get busy on your drumming folks! Until next time, 100!

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