Impact Steel: Cinematic Metallic Percussion

Concept of Impact Steel: Cinematic Metallic Percussion by Impact Soundworks

Impact Steel was intended to fill a gap found in popular commercial sound libraries. While several other products have metal hits and “found” percussion, none are extensively sampled and usable as individual, expressive instruments. The goal of this project was therefore to create a unique, detailed, and playable library with the same amount of multisampled detail one would expect from a high end percussion bank.

There are six main patches, eight special/alternately-mapped patches, and sixteen FX patches in all, totaling 73 articulations of extensively multisampled hits, scrapes, rolls, and designed textures. The instruments were recorded in a medium-sized recording booth, insulated yet retaining some ambience and “air” in the samples; this facilitates mixing for small ensembles and rooms as well as large orchestral forces.

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Interface

Impact Steel was designed to be as playable as possible, on both drum controllers as well as MIDI keyboards. As such, all main patches are keymapped without overlap, and can be loaded on a single channel for instant playability of all instruments. On a MIDI keyboard, hits are mapped to black keys, while scrapes, rolls, and tremolos are mapped to white keys. This increases ease of playing for composers without dedicated drum controllers. An additional set of “L/R” patches is included as well, with left/right hand hits separated onto adjacent notes to facilitate playing fast passages.

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Requirements

Kontakt 4 (full version – NOT player) or above

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