Hertz Drums Bundle

If you like your drums heavy, the Hertz Drums Bundle might be just the thing.

Virtual instruments have become a part of everyday life for computer‑based music producers, covering many different instruments, styles and genres. Much like the iconic phrase from Apple back in 2009, “there’s an app for that,” nowadays “there’s an instrument for that.” Drums being a fundamental building block of modern music production and most people not having the facility (or budget) to record them, there are lots of virtual drum instruments on the market — often including a virtual drummer.

Hertz Drums are new kids on the block, and not a company I was previously aware of in what is a crowded market. Their instrument is the brainchild of brothers Wojtek and Slawek Wieslawski, owners and in‑house producers at Hertz Studios in Poland. Renowned for their work with many top metal bands such as Behemoth, Vader and Hour Of Penance, the brothers combined their knowledge and experience with that of software developer Alex Yashchaka, and Hertz Drums was born. It’s pitched unashamedly at a rock and metal audience, but Hertz Drums offers a great deal more than blast‑beat kick drums and gunshot snares, as we will find out.

Mega Hertz

The Hertz Drums plug‑in comes in a familiar ‘instrument plus expansion packs’ format; you purchase the plug‑in instrument host, then add the expansion packs that best suit your needs. It’s worth pointing out that the basic instrument doesn’t ship with any sounds, which is perhaps a little unusual, so you’ll need to buy at least one expansion pack to get started. My review copy is the Hertz Drums Bundle, which includes the plug‑in instrument plus three expansion packs, slightly uninspiringly named Red, Blue and White. These cover “classic rock, funk, alternative, progressive, classic metal and many more”. I found installation trouble‑free, and the process of pointing the plug‑in to where the expansion packs are installed is equally simple.

On opening the instrument, you’re presented with the main screen, which depicts an imposing double‑bass‑drum kit surrounded by five toms and a multitude of cymbals, along with a tambourine and the ubiquitous cowbell. This very much sets the scene for where these kits sit in the musical landscape, and it isn’t country & western!

Beneath the kit is the mixer, and to the right are editing tools for shaping the drum sounds. The mixer comprises 20 individual faders (one for each kit piece) and seven group faders covering kick, snare, toms, hi‑hat, ride, cymbals and percussion/misc levels. Three further faders provide control of the overhead, room and reverb levels. Each fader is equipped with mute and solo buttons, plus a Follow button that ensures room, reverb and overhead panning is kept ‘in line’ with any adjustments made to the direct signal.

Across the top of the window are tabs that select the Library and the comprehensive Sampler sections of the plug‑in (see the ‘Taking A Sample’ box), and also the MIDI Grooves player window. When selected, these elements appear in place of the mixer below the kit. Sample packs and preset kits are selected from a drop‑down menu, with typical load time a very passable 20‑30 seconds on my old 2014 MacBook Pro. It’s nice to have everything available in a single window and this design makes for a very usable interface, although unfortunately it is a fixed size and isn’t currently scalable.

Drums, once loaded, can be auditioned by clicking on them with the mouse or via MIDI input from a keyboard, electronic drum kit or other MIDI input source. Hertz Drums has a very neat trick up its sleeve when it comes to the tricky issue of which notes are mapped to which drums, and includes several presets that replicate the MIDI mapping used by popular electronic drum kits and software instruments such as Superior Drummer, Steven Slate Drums 5, Addictive Drums and Logic Pro X. In practice, this means that if you’re used to a different drum plug‑in you don’t have to remap the drums or learn a completely new set of keys. You can, of course, create your own MIDI maps, but Hertz cover many of the most popular options and may well add other MIDI maps in future updates.

No Silence In The Library

The Red, Blue and White libraries all weigh in at around 5.5GB, and each features five snares, five kicks, five toms, one set of hi‑hats, three china cymbals, three splash cymbals and three crash cymbals. These are configured into preset ‘genre’ kits in each library. Examples include Classic Metal, Power Metal, Art Rock, BritPop and Stoner Metal, each kit being comprised of a drum and cymbal combination that suits the genre in question.

Three different mics (A, B and C) were used to record each of the kit elements, all routed through the Hertz Studio Neve console.Kit elements are made up of several different samples, or ‘articulations’, which include centre, rimshot and shallow hits from both the left and right hands, and each of these articulations features multiple dynamic layers. (Cymbal articulations include bow, tip, bell, edge and choke dynamic layers). Each articulation is assigned to its own MIDI note so, with careful programming, drum parts can sound very natural and realistic. Adding further sophistication, all the drums and cymbals were recorded through Hertz’s Neve console using three different mics (A, B and C), giving access to a fantastic range of subtle sound variations.

Within the Lib/Sampler window each available drum sample is represented by a white square organised into three rows that represent the A, B and C microphone variations. As you click on each square to audition the drum, its description (Birch 12‑inch Tom, Custom Dark 18‑inch Crash, and so on) appears at the top of the window. When you’ve identified the element you like, you can simply press the Load Instrument button to place it in the current kit. Initially this looks like quite an odd way to view and audition a drum library, but in practice I found it worked incredibly well — a great way to quickly audition the various kit pieces and hear the subtle differences created by the three mics.

Total Control

To the right of the main kit screen are the instrument edit parameters. Clicking on any kit element loads its settings and displays its name at the top of the window so you know exactly which drum you’re editing.

The trim knob and pitch sliders (as you might expect) adjust the level and pitch of each drum, and the A, B and C buttons switch between the three mic options. Next are four sliders that adjust the DI, O(overhead), Sub and FX level of each drum. DI controls the level of the direct mic and the Oslider adjusts how much of the selected drum is present in the overhead mics routed to the overhead group fader in the mixer.

In the case of toms and kick, the Sub slider controls how much signal from an additional low‑frequency sub mic employed in the recording process is introduced, while if a snare drum is selected the same slider controls the level of the bottom mic on the drum. The FX slider introduces an additional sample to the overall drum sound, which can be blended in to help create the unique Hertz drum sound found on many recordings made in the legendary studio. All four faders have individual polarity invert buttons that could be very useful in overcoming any problems when importing and combining your own samples with existing Hertz drums.

Each kit element and mic variation can be auditioned by selecting a drum and clicking on a white square below the kit display. Each square represents a drum or cymbal and rows A, B and C represent the three mic options.

The Ambience section of the window uses an X/Y grid to control the amount of ‘room’ and reverb applied to each drum, with the room element being the actual sound captured in the Hertz studio during recording. As with the overhead level, room and reverb signals are routed to the corresponding faders in the mixer. Polarity invert buttons are also provided for each of these parameters.

The Velocity knob allows you to dial in a minimum and maximum level for each drum, to control dynamic range. Although this is actually dictating which sample layers are being used, its function is similar to applying a compressor to an analogue signal.

Finally, there’s the ADSR curve feature, whose intuitive interface enables you to shape the attack, decay, sustain and release of a drum or cymbal or, by way of a flip menu, the individual reverb, room, direct or overhead elements independently. This is a great facility that lets you tailor drum sounds in fine detail. A Reverse button is also provided, should you fancy a backwards cymbal or snare effect.

Blast Beats

Grooves have become a big part of virtual drum instruments, and Hertz drums doesn’t shirk its responsibility in this department. An impressive 1560 grooves are included, divided between intros, beats, fills and ends, and covering funk, rock and nu‑metal genres. Styles, time signatures and tempos are displayed to the left of the screen, and the grooves themselves are auditioned by clicking on white squares, in the same way that kit elements are auditioned.

Beats are divided into Hi‑hat, Ride and Mixed categories, and fills into Snare, Toms, Snare + Toms and Mixed categories, with the complexity and intensity of each increasing as you move from left to right.

Hertz Drums syncs to your DAW tempo, so the list of tempos is merely a guide to the original recorded bpm of the grooves. Any groove can be auditioned at half or double time by selecting the corresponding button in the transport. Unlike Toontracks’ EZ drummer, Hertz Drums doesn’t have the facility to create songs or edit grooves, so you will need to drag your selected beat to a MIDI track in your DAW.

The grooves are well played and there’s no hiding the genre in which this instrument is positioned — no hip‑hop or half‑time shuffles here! Initially, it can feel as though there’s a lack of subtlety in some of the grooves, and they definitely suit the heavier end of the drumming spectrum. However, once you drag them into your DAW and look at the MIDI data, you can see that the many dynamic levels and articulation have been put to excellent use.

In addition to the installed grooves, Hertz Drums also offer a ‘Not 4/4’ MIDI pack that features (you’ve guessed it) 520 grooves in time signatures ranging from 5/4 to 19/16 — should that be your thing!

Love Hertz?

Full disclosure here — I’m a child of the ’80s, and metal in its various forms isn’t really my musical genre of choice, but I do like great‑sounding drums, and Hertz Drums certainly offers plenty of those!

Right out of the (virtual) box, the drums sound excellent. Overall, they have a processed quality, but in a good way, and certainly one that lends itself to the rock and metal genres that they are primarily intended for. You won’t need to spend hours EQ’ing and compressing these drums to achieve professional results that cut extremely well through a mix of heavy guitars and basses. The Alt Rock and BritPop packs in the Blue library have a slightly less aggressive character and would sit well (as the names suggest) in guitar‑oriented pop, making this pack perhaps the best option for general use.

I was impressed by the level of detail available in the edit windows. The ability to audition three different mics is not something I’ve come across before, and the subtle yet noticeable differences they lend, in conjunction with the other editable parameters, significantly augment your sound palette.

As for the included MIDI grooves, there are certainly plenty to choose from and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the method of auditioning them. As a drummer, I tend not to use pre‑programmed beats and find that they invariably don’t fit perfectly with the song you are working on, but they are certainly great to jam to or as a basis for song creation.

Very clearly aimed at the metal market, Hertz Drums is a great‑sounding and well‑thought‑out plug‑in that offers an exceptional level of detail and editability.

The sampling is a neat and feature‑packed addition to the plug‑in that I doubt many people will take full advantage of, but it’s an impressively detailed way to add your own stamp to a kit. Interestingly, Hertz Drums also ships as a ‘Lite’ version, which keeps all the features of the Standard package and only drops the sampler — possibly the better option for someone simply wanting to add this type of drum sound to their armoury.

Very clearly aimed at the metal market, Hertz Drums is a great‑sounding and well‑thought‑out plug‑in that offers an exceptional level of detail and editability. Metal music can be a pretty serious affair, but this plug‑in is a lot of fun!