New Software Review: Tom Holkenborg’s Percussion by Orchestral Tools
Tom Holkenborg’s Percussion gives you access to the exact same drums used in the composer’s template.
Tom Holkenborg, also known as Junkie XL, is one of the most in-demand Hollywood composers around today. He has contributed his unique hybrid sound to a bevy of films, including Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Mad Max: Fury Road, Godzilla vs. Kong, Alita: Battle Angel, and many more.
Generally known for his hard-hitting aggressive action scores, he originally teamed up with Orchestral Tools to put out a brass library that covered the needs of an A-list composer.
Now, Orchestral Tools and Holkenborg have joined forces again to release a signature percussion library. Today, we’ll be taking a look at this unique library to see how it performs.
Features and Use
This percussion library has been about eight years in the making. It was recorded in hallways and garages of studios that Holkenborg used to have. These samples are the exact ones Tom uses in his own scores and if you want access to his signature sound, this is the library you need.
While a lot of people will buy this library with the intention of making epic music, it also captures quiet dynamics in great detail for expressive performances. The percussion patches feature up to 100 dynamic layers configured in a unique layout.
A majority of percussion/drum libraries use velocity-mapping where playing a key lightly triggers a quiet drum hit. If you hit the same key harder, a louder drum hit sounds.
This library takes a different approach that I’ll refer to as pitch-mapped where, basically, if you hit a C5 you are triggering the loudest sample recorded and the lower you go (C5 down to C4 down to C3, etc.) you are triggering quieter and quieter samples. In other words, the individual drums are not velocity-sensitive, so you don’t need to guess what a 105 velocity or 90 velocity finger depress feels like.
In order, the library is made up of a Performance (Velocity-mapped) kit, Bass Drum 1 Low Tuning 20″, 4 bass drums, 4 surdos, 2 tupans, 4 concert toms, 8 Taye toms, 5 marching drums, 6 custom drums, and quad toms with additional low/high tunings available for most of the patches. Each patch also contains a front and back mic selection, so you can tweak the sound and/or set the library up for a basic surround configuration.
The sample-cutting is incredible with every patch. There are other libraries where I’ve needed to add a negative track delay to have my percussion land precisely on the beat. In this library, every drum and every individual sample is tight. It’s so precise that if you layer multiple patches together playing the same groove, you might run into unnatural flamming or phase issues.
Tom Holkenborg himself recommends randomizing your MIDI by about ten ticks to make the sound a little less precise in the way a real drum ensemble recording might sound. Doing so, while working with his library, I found my programmed percussion felt wider and more lively.
The dynamic range captured here is also remarkable. I love that you can program a quiet drum pattern and simply transpose it up an octave or two to get the same pattern louder and punchier. I also found this approach to mapping made it possible for me to program drum grooves just using Musical Typing in Logic.
I realized that when I’m traveling again in the future, this combo will work great for programming percussion on the go. The Performance Kit, which is velocity-mapped, works great. However, I wish it included more than 16 of the drum patches and included all of the individual drums in this configuration.
To Be Critical
The mapping of the drums is a wonderful idea and I don’t mind the lack of round robins as there are so many individual samples per each drum. I never ran into a risk of getting the infamous “machine-gun” sample effect. I do wish that each drum had a velocity-mapped option though. The Performance Kit that does this is great, but it only contains 16 drums. With 59 unique drum patches, I don’t understand why there isn’t a Full Performance Kit with all of them available in one velocity-mapped patch.
A lot of the percussion samples in this library are on the bigger side. Some might wish that there were smaller percussion instruments, such as bongos and timbales. However, that sort of defeats the point of this library.
Remember, it’s the exact same drum library that Tom Holkenborg uses on his projects. If you know his music, you know what you’re getting with this library. Still, obviously, these aren’t all the drums in Tom’s collection. If you watch his Studio Time series on YouTube, you will notice he didn’t include certain drums from his collection (like the daf, darbuka, frame drum, etc.). Maybe he’ll make those available in a future update or expansion pack.
My only other gripe with the library is that every drum and every patch is collection only, meaning you have to buy the whole library and cannot purchase individual drums. (This isn’t the case with other Orchestral Tools products.) With that said, once purchased, you can just choose to download specific patches.
Summing it Up
At approximately $338.99, this percussion collection is a terrific value, especially considering the amount of time it took Holkenborg and his team to create this sample library. If you want bombastic drums that will make your next film score, trailer track, or pop production explode with energy, this library is a must. Many people have been waiting for this collection for years, and now it’s finally available to the public.
Matthew Wang is an LA-based guitarist, producer, songwriter, film composer, and SonicScoop contributor.
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