First Look: MAD RocknFunk by HandHeldSounds
In a world of hyped and super processed sample libraries, it’s nice to have an option for real live-sounding drums. With its 3 diverse drum kits, MAD RocknFunk delivers such versatility that it could cover all your rock and funk drum needs.
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First Look: MAD RocknFunk by HandHeldSounds
The “Blue” kit, one of the 3 drum kit nkis included in MAD RockNFunk
After the success of HandHeldSound‘s first MAD drum library the developer is back tripling down so to speak! More than just a drum kit library, this Kontakt instrument contains 3 individually sampled drum kits recorded in 3 different environments for 3 different and diverse sounding instruments.
After checking out the instrument in a first look, I really loved the sound of these drums and especially loved how the engine reacts to fast playing and rolls on the the snare and tom drum.
The library is fairly deep sampled with lots of velocity layers and extended articulation. MAD RockNFunk features a pretty powerful engine sporting “legato” snare parameters that really shine, as well as a an extensive Hi-Hat engine with 6 degrees of modulation for close-to-open articulations, auto foot stomp, and “layer transition technology”.
There is a dedicated mixer panel
A highlight here for me is the snapshot function in the mixer panel which allows quick access to mixer presets and the ability to save/load your own mixer configurations.
Though I found the main controls for mute/solo/volume/send etc easy to use you may need to reference the manual to find out some of other options for controlling the compression or eq per channel and how to individually select and alter pitch for each drum.
MAD RNF includes a groove engine (with drag-to-midi functionality) which make it easy to jump in and start working with the instrument. There are even individual drum “mutes” in the groove section which give you even more options for the grooves that are provided. Although the presets grooves are nice, I felt like I could have used even more grooves to help me jump start my tracks.
In a world of hyped and super processed sample libraries, it’s nice to have an option for real live sounding drums. Over all this is a pretty diverse set of kits in one instrument and although I felt some of the cymbals will need a little work to get the most realism out of them in playback, MAD RocknFunk packs a lot under the hood with customized scripting that makes some realistic playback very easy to achieve.
MAD RocknFunk sells for $199 from HandHeldSound
Facts
MAD – RocknFunk contains focuses 3 Separate Drum Kits as individual nkis with a focus on Rock and Funk styles.
The library downloads as 31.39 GB and does require the full retail copy of Kontakt version 5.5.
MAD RocknFunk sells for $199 from HandHeldSound
