Kaptive Audio has announced the release of Jules Tools, a free/donationware acoustic drum sample library for Native Instruments Kontakt.
Jules Tools is Kaptive Audio’s first-ever release; it brings a curated kit by drummer Jules Jenssen, captured during a session for Dark City Agent’s album “The Witching Hour”.
Dark City Agent requires a very unique approach to drum tones in that they need to have the massive body and transient punch of electronic music, but still sound real with a natural approach to feel and dynamics. The plan was to set ourselves up to have real-world example recordings of Jules and his kit to define the sound and processing approach in actual use on the record, then apply this to a hyper-sampled capture to create a “Virtual Jules”.
We mixed his performances into the final state for the tracks in context, applied this analog processing to the samples we took, and assembled a Kontakt instrument. We made this for ourselves with a specific sound in mind, but to our surprise with the provided access to complete real-time control over all 17 mics plus a parallel crush channel, it wound up really being able to cover a lot of sonic ground!
The work behind this instrument is impressive: 150 hours of recording with 17 phase-aligned mics, 11-piece kit, 3-4 round-robins per piece, 5-6 velocity stages. They had to edit 2,000 samples and spent a lot of time designing and coding the GUI for Kontakt.
Jules Tools is basically free, but if you can donate something, it will help the developers going further. This virtual instrument requires a full version of Kontakt 6 or later; it will not work in the Kontakt Player.
More information: Kaptive Audio
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