Review: Drums on Demand Top 10 Rock by Mark Kondracki
What makes New York City so special? It’s the bedrock. The foundation.
Drums on Demand Top 10 Rock packs 800 loops, fills, and one shots.
It’s the material in the ground that enables skyscrapers. It is the secret element that allowed Manhattan island to be so densely built up and to harbor so many great people, places and things. And the bedrock for music, especially rock music, is drums.
I love playing with a real drummer. They can bring creativity, nuance, and musicality to a piece of music. But, with incredibly short deadlines for music composition, hiring, miking, tracking, and mixing a drummer for a cue is downright impossible. That’s where drum loops and programming have come in.
My work at Outloud Audio includes scoring film, TV and radio spots. All of which require drums. I am a strong programmer of drums, but, for me, there is nothing like a well mic’d kit, played by a talented musician, in a great room. The feel, the sound, the push pull, all the microscopic movement, form the ground upon which the music flourishes. There is a nuance to a drummer, the way he hits the snare, his feel, and the sound of the entire kit interacting with itself and the room that is missing in programmed drums and, for me, can make or break the feel.
When Drums On Demand first hit the scene, I was amazed and bought many of their libraries. Their loops can be purchased via download or on shipped discs containing stereo loops available in 24-bit and 16-Bit Acidized WAVs, Apple Loops (24-bit) and REX format (pre-mixed and ready) or as 16 bit or 24 bit multi-tracks . This gives the mixer or composer micro or macro control.
But control without artistry is nothing and that’s what makes these libraries so compelling. Quite simply, they rock. They sound amazing. And, most important to me, they are inspiring, intuitive, and easy to use fast, which is probably why they are used by the best in the business when composing and finalizing their tracks.
Worth the Time
I recently was lucky enough to try out one of their newer libraries called Top 10 Rock ($49.95).
The available multi track or stereo discs have the loops separated by folder with Bit Rate, BPM and name for identifying the feel. Top 10 Rock arrives with 800 loops and fills and one shots broken up over 24 different grooves.
Names like the “Liftoff” and “Gray Dawn” can be somewhat difficult to imagine musically when you read their titles, but once you scroll through (my favorite way is just use the arrow keys and space bar on the Mac to preview) you can quickly figure out which groove is going to work best for your given project.
Just to be clear – these grooves are all rock all the time. So if you are looking for anything else, you will have to search another library.
Here’s what separates Drums On Demand, for me in general and specifically for Top 10 Rock:
1. The Grooves are great, musical and inspiring.
2. They are recorded, edited, and, in the case of the stereo grooves, mixed excellently.
3. They can have upwards of 40 different loops in one loop folder.
This means that, for example, 122 BPM Cranium, has 47 different loops to mix and match when building your song: 4 Intro loops, 4 Verse Loops, 6 Verse fills, 4 Chorus Loops, 9 Chorus fills, Bridge loops, snare loops, outro loops – you get the picture. That is an amazing amount of variation for one song!
All of this means that if you take five minutes, using just the stereo loops, you can build a track that sounds like a real drummer played on each section of your song appropriately. If you take 10 minutes (which I suggest) you can get super picky and make something even more special.
One of my favorite tricks is to find a verse that I love and then find a segment (maybe 1 bar) from another verse loop that has a small variation and cut those in here and there, basically allowing me to exceed the 47 loops they gave me by customizing them myself. I re-wire Live into Protools HD and build the loops in Live lickety-split.
Because everything is looped and expertly played, you can do any edits you want on a grid, while retaining the feel of the original performance. This, for me, is why loops work better than programming, especially in Rock, where the drums power your music. I have used their multi-tracks, but quite frankly, their stereo mixes are so good, I often just try them first and find I am totally happy.
The Final Countdown
If you are looking for drum loops, I strongly encourage you to look at Drums On Demand. The Top 10 Rock is a great new addition to their growing loop library and the production is top-notch. The current $49.95 price is a steal for loops of this caliber and this quantity. If you were to add up the cost to hire a drummer and track 20+ grooves at varying temps with alternate sections and pay to license his performance, it would be obscenely expensive, and I’m not sure you’d get this kind of quality.
If I were to have a con, it would be that I don’t find their names to be descriptive enough for me to know what I will find until I preview it, but that is the only quibble I have. Their loops are a must-have for my composing and songwriting.
— Mark Kondracki
Hear DOD Top 10 Rock for yourself:
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