Anarchy Drums By It Might Get Loud Productions Now FREE!

It Might Get Loud Productions has re-released their Anarchy Drums sample library as a completely free download for all interested users.

Anarchy Drums by It Might Get Loud Productions is a drum plugin which was originally released commercially but has recently been set free. The developers are metal guys who are home studio producers, and all their products reflect that – the sound is gritty and the focus is on sounds and techniques that rock/metal drummers use a lot. This specific plugin aims to capture the sound of 90s California punk, but I think it’s also good for a broader range of rock sounds. The drums are on the loud and gritty side, but not extremely so – they’re not good drums for jazz, death metal or funk, but they can certainly do a lot of rock drum sounds from the 70s to today.

The download contains a monolithic plugin, with VST, AU, AAX format options and both 32-bit and 64-bit versions available. The download is approximately about 280 MB in size, varying slightly by format, and contains about 2,800 unique samples inside. So, this is one of the more detailed free drumkits available, considerably larger than for example MT Power DrumKit 2 or the recent Spitfire LABS drums, though smaller than DrumMic’a, Scott Drums or SM Drums.

A few things separate this drumkit from the freebies mentioned above. One is that everything’s recorded with close, overhead, near room, and far room mics. Also, the kick and snare have a second close mic on the other side. I wish the snare bottom mic was recorded for the kick and toms, too, as that kind of sympathetic buzz can sometimes be good for adding even more grit, but that’s a minor complaint.

Secondly, for rock music, avoiding “machine gun” repetition is often very important, and the samples here appear to have a fairly small amount of velocity layers, but a whole lot of round robins, which helps with that. In other words, this kit trades some realistic dynamic response for the ability to play loud, repetitive parts that don’t sound robotic.

The third major difference with Anarchy Drums is the selection of cymbals. There’s only one type of snare hit (no sidesticks) and two toms, but there are lots of cymbals: a hi-hat, a ride, two crashes, two splashes, and a China crash. The hi-hat has foot chicks and three degrees of openness, the ride has three articulations (ride, ride bell, and ride crash), and the crashes also have chokes recorded. The hi-hat is self-muting and the crash chokes also mute any “regular” crash sounds currently playing. The cymbal samples don’t contain their full natural decay tails (in the real world, a ride can ring for an entire minute), which is OK for rock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YkZTi5LXeU

The plugin is It Might Get Loud’s own drum-specific sampler, which has some advantages. The interface is pretty simple and contains three tabs: a photo of a drum kit in a room on fire, a mixer for all the microphones, and the final tab contains a routing matrix and a keymap editor. The routing is great – there are three options. The first option is sending everything to one output (for simplicity when laying out tracks), the second separates the kit pieces into six outputs, and the third allows sending any mic from any kit piece to any of the sixteen outputs. This might seem too complicated or overkill to producers who are used to mixing electronic music, but when mixing acoustic drums, this kind of thing comes up a lot. For example, the top and bottom snare mics are often equalized differently before being routed to a common channel, and the room mics get compressed to turn the cymbals into an aggressive wall of hiss. It’s really nice to be able to do all that stuff with drum samples, and it makes it possible to get a more processed hard rock sound out of this kit, too.

Anarchy Drums is available for free download via It Might Get Loud – sign up for the email subscription and then click one of the download links in the welcome email.