4 Best Hans Zimmer Percussion Alternatives

The anchor's reputation rests on the room as much as on the drums, and this is the only library on the page that hands you the same decision. Close microphones, a mid pair, a clean modern position, a Decca tree main and a vintage ribbon set twenty five feet back, all available per instrument rather than as a pre-mixed compromise somebody else settled on.

That matters in a way feature lists do not convey. A taiko hit that sits too far forward in an arrangement can be pulled back by rebalancing toward the tree, and the same hit can be brought right into the listener's face by favouring the close pair. Doing either with reverb instead produces the washed, distant sound that identifies home-made percussion immediately.

The breadth is also wider than the anchor in several directions. A taiko family, a big drums section, gongs, clocks and a waterphone, metals, shakers, small drums and woods, drawn from the private collections of Mickey Hart and Remo. For a composer building a percussion template from nothing, that is one purchase rather than four.

The costs are the install and the player. Around 86GB with a fast drive recommended is a serious commitment on a laptop, and Opus means a separate installer and library manager rather than the Kontakt setup most templates already run. Neither is a reason to avoid it and both are worth knowing first.

A large share of what people buy the anchor for is one sound, which is several low toms hit hard at the same time. That sound carries the ostinato under an action sequence and the build into a trailer hit, and a composer can go a whole year using little else from a flagship percussion library.

This buys that sound directly. A surdo plus toms at eighteen, sixteen, fourteen, twelve and ten inches, with up to fourteen velocity layers and three round robins on each. Fourteen layers means a soft ostinato and a full hit are different recordings rather than the same recording at different volumes, which is the single thing that separates programmed toms from played ones.

Four master patches cover sticks, mallets, group hits and group big hits, and the articulation set separates right and left hand strikes, doubles, rolls and multi-stick hits under mod wheel control. The whole thing arrives in 4.9GB and runs in the free Kontakt Player, which is a very different proposition from an 86GB install and a second library manager to maintain.

What you are giving up is everything that is not a tom. There are no cymbals, metals, gongs or shakers here at all, so this cannot be a template's only percussion library and was never intended to be one. Bought with that understood it is the best value on the page.

The design decision worth paying for here is that most drums appear twice, once as a single instrument and once as a grouped ensemble. A snare part can be written for the section, then thinned to one player for the quiet bar before the hit, without swapping library or matching two different recordings to each other.

The list runs to more than forty drums with over a hundred articulations. Six snares, two bass drums, bongos, cajon, dhols, frame drums, toms of several sizes, rototoms and cymbals on the solo side, with grouped versions of the snares, bass drums, toms, doumbeks, dhols, riqs, frame drums, sticks and cymbals alongside them.

Four hundred MIDI grooves written by working composers ship with it, which is a more useful inclusion than it sounds for anybody who finds percussion programming slow. Fifty two instrument presets and seventy convolution impulses handle the space, and it all sits in around 2.15GB with the free Kontakt Player.

Where it falls short of the anchor is the room, and the shortfall is structural rather than incidental. There are no true microphone positions, so distance is created with a convolution impulse rather than chosen from what was actually recorded, and on an exposed hit that difference is audible to anyone listening for it. That compromise is exactly what keeps the library down to two gigabytes.

Every other library on this page is trying to sound expensive, which is what a scoring stage and a Decca tree are for. This one is trying to sound like a field recording of people hitting things hard in a room nobody treated, which is a genuinely different brief and the correct one for a particular kind of cue that the polished libraries cannot produce at any setting.

Over sixty Kontakt patches and more than 4,500 rhythm presets sit behind a sequencer with probability controls, so a pattern can be told to vary rather than repeat. The loops carry between eight and thirty two round robin samples each, which is what keeps a driving tribal ostinato from collapsing into one repeated hit after four bars.

The material divides into tribal, punk and folk categories, and the punk material in particular is unlike anything else on this page. It is not orchestral percussion with more distortion, it is a different set of instruments played with a different intention, and dropping it into a symphonic cue rarely works.

Two limits are worth stating plainly before anybody spends money. Core carries roughly thirty percent of what the Pro edition contains, so the ceiling is lower than the marketing around the name implies. The recordings also arrive with their character already decided, and there is very little rebalancing available because there is very little left to rebalance.