Rating: **** 5/5 Stars
Drum Fury is Sample Logic's latest addition to their extensive sample library/virtual instrument catalogue. The library is presented via a very slick-looking Kontakt front-end (Kontakt 5.8.1 or later is required) and contains over 100 instrument presets based upon nearly 11GB of sample content. And, as the title suggests, you are getting big, bad (in a good way) drum and percussion sounds designed for epic TV and film music creation.
The instruments span cinematic impacts, concert bass drums, cymbals, gongs, marching drums, snares, taikos, toms, timpani and a goodly collection of world percussion such as djembe, doumbek, conguita and udu. The organisation of the library is very straightforward, with a series of individual presets covering a specific type of drum or percussion instrument. Many — such as the concert bass drum or taikos — get multiple presets, each with a different set of characteristics but, overall, this simple structure makes it very easy to find what you might be looking for.
Equally straightforward is the front-end, although there is plenty here to allow you to sculpt the sounds further. All the key controls are contained within a single screen, giving you access to EQ, compression, delay and reverb effects (these all have pop-up control dialogues for detailed tweaking). You also get low-cut/high-cut controls and attack and release controls that are very effective for customising each sound so that it fits within your project and/or mix. However, perhaps the most fun are the Pitch, Energiser (a saturation/distortion effect) and Polisher (a kind of EQ, transient enhancement and stereo imaging effect rolled into one) options. As all these can be automated, there is plenty of creative fun to be had. Oh, and don't miss the MIDI transpose control. This allows you to offset the default mapping for an instrument so that you can create combination patches across the MIDI note range all triggered on a single MIDI channel.
In the documentation, Sample Logic use the word 'apocalyptic' to describe the sound of Drum Fury. That's a big word implying a big sound and, thankfully, across many of the presets, Drum Fury delivers exactly that. There are, for example, plenty of scary subwoofer moments to be had with the bass drums, taikos and timpani, and you can push them into sound design territory with a bit of pitch-shifting. However, it's not all boom and bombast and, in particular, the world percussion section offers lots of character and finesse.
Drum Fury is beautifully organised, the interface is a breeze to use and it is sonically impressive. Its price might put it beyond some but, for working composers of cinematic scores or epic trailer music, there is plenty of fresh sonic ammunition here and Drum Fury is well worth auditioning alongside the very best of the competition.
$199