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Laura N Gerard
Clever film-making it may not be, but there can't be many media composers who would spurn the opportunity to insert a gratuitous bang in their soundtracks if it helped the screen action along a bit. I'd also wager that the same composers wouldn't turn up their noses at some driving, hard-edged rhythm loops, nor turn their backs on a large collection of iconoclastic percussive sounds, noises, textures, hits and kits. Happily for them and the rest of us, Damage, the new sound library-cum-virtual instrument from Heavyocity, combines all three.
If you're wondering where you've seen the name before, Heavyocity are the US team Neil Goldberg, Dave Fraser and Ari Winters. As well as collectively trading under the name of Heavy Melody to produce music and sound design for film, TV and video games, the trio are also the driving force behind the virtual instrument company Heavyocity Media. Back in 2008, they brought us the film-friendly Evolve sample library; this was followed in 2011 by the all-new sequel Evolve Mutations, and its evil twin Evolve Mutations 2. (See the SOS reviews at /sos/oct08/articles/heavyocityevolve.htm and /sos/sep11/articles/evolve-mutations.htm.)
The Heavy guys' latest offering fulfils its threatening title by focusing on hard-hitting percussion, with the emphasis on big, explosive impacts. Hundreds of rock, ethnic, industrial, electronic, junkyard and 'found sound' percussion sources were used, often in tandem with extreme processing, with a view to making the samples as aggressive and in-your-face as possible.
Recording sessions for Damage began at 'The Church', a facility owned by Prism Sound Studios of Massachusetts. The reverberant acoustics of this old building provided the requisite large, ambient room sound for drummer Mike Mangini's performances. Later sessions took place in a lively-sounding, 1000 square-foot wooden room at New York's Skyline Studios, while more intimate and detailed sounds were recorded in Heavyocity's own studio. The sample quest culminated in a Connecticut junkyard, where the producers captured clanking metals, exploding car windscreens and even falling school buses!
Damage is formatted exclusively for Kontakt 5 and the free Kontakt 5 Player; software for the Player is included with the library, and can also be downloaded from Native Instruments' web site. The library's 30GB of samples have been losslessly compressed using NI's NCW (Native Compressed Wave File) algorithm, which uses a 2:1 compression ratio. An advantage of this system is that the samples remain compressed when loaded into RAM, with decompression occurring only at the playback stage. This reduces all the patches' RAM consumption by 50 percent, and also means that the samples require only 14.9GB of disk space.
The library is divided into two main sections, the first containing loops and the second housing single hits. Heavyocity have grandly titled the first section Rhythmic Suites, a rather highfaluting name that belies the wild, banging nature of some of the material it contains. The loops are divided into four stylistic categories: Epic Organic, Epic Tech, Industrial and Mangled Pop. Each category has a 'Full' patch and three 'Elements' folders; the Full loops (which number 195 in all) are made up of between three and five layered elements, each of which is a full-blown loop in its own right. All loops are four bars long, beat-sliced and tempo-sync'ed, which means that they faithfully track song tempo changes without altering their tuning. Bliss!
I quickly found material that I liked a lot in the full loop menus; the Epic Organic set is strong on dramatic, bustling, martial action-scene loops, many of which feature aggressive-sounding toms and big, ambient snares driven by 16th-note, hi-hat-like parts played on unidentified metals. By way of contrast, the more spacious, open quality of 'Tiger Eye' (based on a ride cymbal quarter-note pulse punctuated by large, slamming, reverberant toms and ethnic drums) provides a perfect rhythmic setting for a brooding orchestral accompaniment. I also enjoyed the mysterious 'Stealth Pulse', in which light hand drums and brushed metals ride over a shuddering 16ths pulse created by rhythmically noise-gating the reverb tail of a large, native drum-like instrument.
The fun continues with the Epic Tech loops: 'Shrpshtr' (sic) is driven by a combination of a berimbau-like stringed instrument and a niftily-programmed clay drum, both given extra momentum by an eighths delay with lashings of feedback. To this are added a massive electro kick, a cross-rhythmic cowbell part and a severely degraded, ultra-lo-fi hi-hat, creating an unusual and enticing sound picture which combines old-world acoustic with modern electronic. Electronic sounds come more to the fore in the Industrial section, where scary, Eraserhead-esque foundry hits rub shoulders with low-res 'Son of Tron' amusement-arcade synth noises, BT-style stutter edits and some truly walloping, heavily processed drum samples.
I'm always on the lookout for new kicks and snares, so was pleased to find some very tasty specimens in the Mangled Pop Full loops. This category's sound palette may be somewhat less complex than the others, but the beats are no less strong. 'Snoop', for example, uses clacky bamboo hits in place of a traditional hi-hat part, creating a fresh, new kit sound and a loop that swings like crazy. Great stuff.
While Damage's stacked full loops are inspiring and fun to play, they only scratch the surface; to get the best out of the library, you'd be well advised to delve into the individual loops in the Elements folders. Rather than grouping these together according to their usage in the full menus, Heavyocity opted to map them from low to high pitch, with kick and low tom-based loops at the bottom end, and hi-hats and metals (and so on) at the top. This pitch-based layout (which was instigated in the company's earlier products) is logical and intuitive, and facilitates speedy programming. With over 700 loops to choose from, I shudder to think what would happen if they were randomly mapped.
The range of sounds used in the individual loops is astonishing, and a little experimentation can produce fantastic results. I greatly enjoyed the heavily processed, sometimes reversed, unidentifiable sound slices that permeate the library's loops. They bring the rhythms to life, and help to transform run-of-the-mill patterns into irresistibly funky beats.
Overall, I found Damage's loops to be extremely well programmed, sonically imaginative and brimming with feel, excitement and musicality. While the musical content is exemplary, I feel the presentation has one minor flaw: the only way you can readily find out what elements are employed in a full loop is to open Kontakt 5's mapping editor, locate the active zone and make a note of the names of the samples inside it. Since the Kontakt 5 Player lacks such editing facilities, that procedure can only be done by owners of the full Kontakt 5 program. This means that if you're running the library on the Player and want to identify the individual elements of a 'full' loop, your only recourse is to wade through the elements patches, playing the samples one by one in order to identify them by ear, which is a little tedious.
Moving on to the single hits section, we find a total of 60 kits featuring hundreds of percussive sources and textures. The kits are divided into five sub-categories, the first three of which (Epic Organic Drums, Ethnic Drums and Metals) are devoted to multisampled, round-robin hits. There's a large amount of excellent material here: ambient orchestral bass drums, hefty mallet toms, belting snares and deep, resonant frame drums for your next moody soundtrack gig.
Other items that caught my ear include a high-pitched, zingy Hex cymbal (whatever that is), dramatic, tension-building crescendo snare rolls, some nice industrial bell-like sounds, slithery, screechy bowed cymbals, and a tidy selection of expressive cymbal performances which include crescendo mallet rolls. Drummer Mike Mangini also distinguishes himself with some ridiculously fast rototom and octaban rolls, proof (if proof were needed) of why he has held the WFD (World's Fastest Drummer) 'Fastest Hands' title for the last 10 years.
The Damage Kits section of the library houses a tremendous collection of processed percussion hits presented in 13 chromatically mapped patches. Massively powerful, distorted and brutal kicks and snares, heavily tweaked hi-hats, clangs, crunches, glitches, electro-industrial noises and a huge array of electronic percussion sounds make these kits a programmer's paradise, and no-one with a pulse could fail to be excited by them. I particularly liked the fact that most of the sounds are so mangled as to be unidentifiable. Though that adds to the descriptive burden for your humble reviewer, it gives the kits a mystique which would be lacking in a more traditional percussion collection. All in all, a great collection of first-rate hits with a hard, fresh, contemporary edge.
It's not all crash, bang and wallop: the Damage Hit Tails patch provides a fine set of evolving atmospheric textures, created (in part) by removing the initial attack transient from big percussive hits. These ghostly, groaning, tortured-metal soundscapes would be ideally suited to film scenes involving a haunted tube station or spooky abandoned factory, and will make very effective building blocks for all manner of creative sound design.
The massive impacts, explosions and bruising, ultra-heavy clangs in the Hybrid FX Hits sub-category are another highlight of the library. If you want to bludgeon your audience into submission, look no further! Some of the content is actually quite alarming: in addition to the usual waveform display, the 'Damage Hits MW' patch sports a second, disturbingly flickering black and white TV screen on which one hopes a ghastly, Ring-style apparition will not appear any time soon. With this patch, pushing up the mod wheel adds wild, twisted after-effects and mad-sounding trails to the decay of the impacts. More agony is piled on in Damage Hit Impacts, wherein gigantic, industrial slams and bangs are given added clout and angst by some pretty wild processing.