Post Description

The 1970s Rogers Big R Dub Kit is the kit that we used to record Drumdrops in Dub Volume 3 and Drumdrops in Ska. This is the ultimate sounding dub kit. It is available to purchase in three different packs and is a must for anyone wanting an authentic dub drum sound. The kit was sampled in The Ironworks, a vintage tracking studio in Brighton, UK that has been used by Horseman, Little Roy, Prince Fatty amongst others. The acoustics of the live room has been masterminded by the ex-Olympic and Radio Caroline tech Mike Craig and it provides a great controlled sound for a Dub kit.

The drum kit was played by legendary and Drumdrops resident reggae drummer Horseman. Drumdrops head honcho Mike Pelanconi was on the recording duties making sure we came up with the best sounding dub kit possible. If you are looking for dub kit samples then this is the best place to start.

The Mixer Section

The Drumdrops Kontakt mixer gives you total control over the individual drums and percussion. Each drum is on a fader along with the overhead mics and room mics giving you total control of the levels of the kit. Each channel can be solo'd, muted, phase reversed or panned and there are two aux sends per channel to use with the included convolution reverbs. All of the channels can be routed back to your DAW on seperate outputs (where supported). The Master fader has LED bar graphs. This is seriously a nice mixer.
Randomisation

For added realism on top of the round robin samples that have been added you can also manipulate subtle parts of the sound to make the drums sound really life like. Although we have included around 5352 samples to reduce this risk the randomisations make it even more impossible to tell that there is not a real drummer in your studio. The controls allow to vary the tuning, velocity, timing and EQ you can also dictate how much each control can be varied.
Custom Velocity Curves

You can change the velocity curve of each drum. This gives you the ability to change the sound of each drum further. We have put in some fixed curves that you can use or you can draw your own curve to experiment with the sounds further. The curves will work drum by drum or you can choose to select them across all the drums.
Mix Presets

The Rogers Big R Dub Kit comes with a number of mix presets included. A number of engineers have saved their own mixes of the kit which you can access by using 'load preset'. This is a great starting point if you want to quickly and easily get a different sounding kit and tweak it. You can save your own mixes using the 'Save Preset' button. Why not save your own mixes and email us the preset? If we like what we hear we may add your preset to the kit.

Default Mix Templates:
Acrolite's Affair - Martin Cayless
Dark Verb Kit - Andy Gray
Dead Kit - Andy Gray
Default Mix
Lo Fi Kit - Andy Gray
Prince Fatty Dry - Mike Pelanconi
Prince Fatty Wet - Mike Pelanconi
Punchy Kit - Andy Gray
Roman Dub - Joe Hirst
Sandy Bear - Adrian Breakspear
Shoalin Kit - Matt Foster
Single Malt - Matt Foster
Solid Dub - Ben Thackeray
Sun's Light - Martin Cayless
MIDI Groove Player

There are 1790 MIDI loops included in the Groove Player that are taken from various grooves played by a variety of Drumdrops drummers and cover multiple time signatures and a range of tempos. We have also included 354 grooves played by Dub specialist drummer Horseman. Double click a file from within the Groove player and press the play button to audition loops. The groove player can work in either stand-alone mode or can be synced to your DAW. Your selected loop can be exported directly from the “Selected Groove” box onto a track of your DAW to be used immediately in your current session.
Step Sequencer

Also included in the Drumdrops Kontakt instrument is a step sequencer. The sequencer has eight channels allowing any eight of the articulations of the Rogers Dub Kit to be selected and played. The sequencer contains 32 steps for each channel and clicking on a certain step in the sequencer window allows you to draw in a trigger. You can adjust the velocity of the trigger and adjust how often it will trigger. There is also a move function which will move the sequence randomly back or forth and a groove delay feature that allows you to delay each of the 32 steps in you sequence. Combining all of these features together means that the sequencer becomes much more than a straight forward sequence player but really allows the user to create moving, fluid, ever-changing drum patterns quite effortlessly. The Sequencer can be played in stand-alone mode or synced to your DAW and your patterns can be saved and reloaded at a later stage. This is a great step sequencer.

nJoy!