Post Description

DM307’s samples are derived from modular synth drums, live percussion and classic analogue drum machines. In total, the library contains 7.5GB of uncompressed samples (although this only uses 4.8GB of hard-drive space with NI’s lossless compression) with more than 3600 samples spread across 1500 plus presets.

The library is a download-only product and will work quite happily with the free version of Kontakt Player or, as I used for the review, the full version of Kontakt 5. Installation and authentication follows standard practice for Kontakt and I had no problems with any of these steps.

While DM307 is built upon this extensive collection of loops and single-hit samples, it is various preset structures and the Kontakt-based sound manipulation tools that go a long way to defining what the instrument is about. I’ll come to the Kontakt interface in a minute, but let’s start with the library structure.

At the top level, the presets are organised into instruments and multis, with seven instrument and two multi types. Many of the individual samples will appear in a number of presets, but the way they are presented, and what you can do with them, will be different in each case.

For example, the DM307 Style Kits instrument presets are each built on five groups of sounds: kicks, snares, hats, percussion and cymbals/FX. Within each kit, you get 12 different sounds in each group (12 different kicks, 12 different snares, etc.) mapped across five consecutive octaves of the keyboard. While you can trigger any of these sounds via the appropriate MIDI note, as we will see in a minute, the interface includes a five-lane grid editor for creating step-based patterns using these five groups of sounds. The Kit Groove instruments are based around the Style Kits but also include a series of patterns (for that five-lane grid editor). There are plenty of these presets and they are organised into genre-based themes covering Drum & Bass, Dubstep, Electronic, Hybrid Scoring, Industrial Edge, Latin Organic and Rock.

At $299, DM307 is perhaps not a casual purchase for many. However, I’d have no hesitation in saying that it represents good value for money. And while Damage was most obviously aimed at media composers, this is a library I could easily imagine using in a wide variety of contexts from music-to-picture through any modern electronic dance genre and off into pop or rock. Whether it’s for film/TV or for straight music production, if you want to create modern electronic beats that you can tweak to within an inch of their life, DM307 is a hit.

•7.5 GB uncompressed (4.8GB on Disk with NI lossless compression)
•3,600+ samples
•1500+ NKIs
•85 Kits
•180+ Kit Grooves
•55 Loop Menus
•1200+ Single Loop Presets

•300 Performance Multis
•The Grid™ drum machine for easy beat creation
•Playable Trigger FX™ for real-time control
•Loop Mutator™ for real-time re-composing of loops

nJoy!