>We’ve featured a huge array of Kontakt-based instrument libraries in these pages, most from third-party developers.
But this time we’ve something from Native Instruments itself (almost – it was created by drumasonic, the team behind a number of NI’s wellregarded guitar-based instruments).
In terms of naming, Session Percussionist is about as direct as you can get, and like many of NI’s libraries it offers more than just a bunch of decent drum hits. So, whilst it’s perfectly possible to play and programme the included samples directly from your DAW, this would mean missing out on a whole host of interesting aspects of this powerful instrument. Like In Session Audio’s Shimmer Shake Strike 2 (of which I am a big fan), Session Percussionist is really about creating believable, fully-formed percussion backing tracks. However, unlike ready-rolled sample loops, pretty much everything here is adjustable. That being said, the 5.8GB storage footprint combined with 232 instrument presets and 2,000 patterns means that you’ll have plenty of help getting started.
Session Percussionist is based around the concept of a five person percussion ensemble with each ‘player’ given their own octave on the keyboard. Five notes are assigned to pattern playback, five to single hits, and two to rolls. At the lower end of the keyboard, an octave is dedicated to global playback, with notes triggering pattern, hits and rolls across all five players. Each of the players can make use of instruments taken from 16 categories. These include the usual array of common percussion shakes and hits across metal, wood and skin.
Getting started is as simple as pressing one key, whereupon an impressively coherent groove starts playing. Pitchbend controls ‘Impact’ (linked to playback velocity) and there are controls for Swing, Shift (rush and drag the beat) and ‘Humanize’ as well as a neat
