I'll be the first to admit, rhythm is not my strong-suit. While working on my various musical projects I can spend days shaping up big colourful sonics and exploring the nuances of various effects. But, when it comes to beat-making I often get confused by the interplay of the various drums - and how to get a good, human-like performance from samples and virtual players. Modalics MINDst Drums though, arrived like the perfect breath of fresh beat-making air.
Today, this sublime and highly customisable drum sound designer is yours at the knock-down price of $79 (it's usually $149 - a $70 saving!) It joins our favourite Black Friday software deals of the year.
So, just why is this such a fantastic piece of software? Well, the most important thing is its bewilderingly realistic sound that harnesses ‘smart playback algorithms’, and basically adjusts mic bleed levels and drum hit positions and more. This makes the resulting sound very true to life, and not at all like your typical run-of-the-mill drum sampler.
When I spoke to the men behind MINDst Drums - Modalics' head-honchos Or Lubianiker and Eyal Amir - they told me that MINDst Drums stemmed from their shared passion for making a drum sampler that generated results that actually sounded like a real player: “Our base point was that a sampler needs to be intelligent and needs to be able to reconstruct reality in a very convincing way without the user needing to go through a lot of learning," Or told me. "The instrument needs to give a sense of reactivity. When you put your hands on the keys, you should be pleasantly surprised. It’s been brewing for a long time, so we felt that after doing several plugins that it was time for our flagship moment, that we were capable enough to produce this drum suite."
This ambition certainly paid off, with our own review not holding back in its praise. Former Computer Music editor Andy Jones concluded by saying "This is one of the easiest and classiest-sounding drum instruments in its price range."
MINDst Drums is built around just one kit - but blimey, what a kit. "We settled on just one incredibly well-sampled kit with the most immense sample depth and variation that we were able to produce. We really wanted to explore what we can achieve with just one kit with our sample depth and reactive algorithms. Each drum was sampled from silence as well as from a previous resonance. Eyal brilliantly programmed a mechanism that keeps track of all that and triggers the correct samples according to the context," Or told me.
You can grab MINDst Drums now via our friends at Sweetwater, meanwhile on Modalics own website, a range of their extraordinarily unique (and superb!) plugins are now on offer.
