More or less since day one when, drums have been the hottest target of the sample CD creators. And it's no wonder why. Instead of buying yourself a real 909 - you spend a few lousy Euros/Dollars on a sample library and you have something that is almost as good. The same thing goes for acoustic drums - instead of miking up and recording a real drum kit, you buy a bunch of pre-fixed samples. Or if you can't play drums - you buy loops, or recordings of a real drummer banging on real drums.

Fistful of Drummers is a 12 gigabyte library of the latter, and it doesn't take more than a couple of seconds before you're transported back to the 1970s where funk, soul and bombastic rock where the big thing of the time.

In my personal - highly limited - knowledge of funk and soul, two names directly comes to my mind. James Brown and Coldcut. Many of the recordings could easily have been lifted from one of Mr Browns recordings. And as for Coldcut - well, let me just say that if a voice suddenly would announce "This is a journey into sound" anywhere during this library, I wouldn't have been surprised one bit.

Although I try to avoid using terms such as swing and phatt, it's hard to not to. If my first though went to James Brown, my second thought was that I had to extract the groove into a template in Ableton Live. The swing feels utterly natural - and when playing the recordings with normal hard-quantized bass lines and arpeggios you can clearly hear/feel the ebb and flow of the timing.

It's always a pleasure hearing somebody who is talented doing their stuff, and this is one of those occasions. The recordings have been taken through the process of analogue desks, tape, old microphones, equalizers and compressors. Neve, Pultec, Fairchild - the whole lot. Naturally it doesn't sound even close to the whimpering rhythms I manage to make - even with high quality samples.

This reminds me of an interview I made with Sven Bornemark after the release of the third version of his Groove Agent. One of the new features in GA3 was the new drumming engine called Special Agent. Special Agent is nothing else than a sample engine playing pre-recorded drum tracks. The reason for this, as Sven explained to me, was that although MIDI and triggering samples are powerful and flexible methods - nothing can beat a real drummer banging on real drums.

Welcome to the real life
The 12 gigabytes of recorded drums are spread over 36 complete drum tracks in multitrack format in full lenght. We are not talking about a few second long loops here - but minutes of continuous drumming. That the drums tracks are in multitrack format means that you get all the different elements as separate recordings - which is great for your own processing and mixing. The musician born and fed by computers will probably be shocked that every recording contains leakage from the other drums. With the kick drum, you can clearly hear the snare going off. Somewhat distant and somewhat muffled - but still. It's there. Good? Bad? That's how it is.

Keeping the music in sync was another interesting issue I ran into. As I said - in sync with a hard quantized bass - you can clearly hear the timing move all over the place. Sometimes it's spot on - sometimes it is way off. If you're the type who freely jams, this will obviously not be a problem, but if you are one of the Computer Generation who automatically hits the quantize button after each recording, you'll have to find a way to keep your music in sync with the drummer.

This can be done by using the enclosed tempo-maps for ProTools, Logic or Cubase. There are no mapped-up files for Ableton Live, which is sort of a shame, as Live is a great application for jamming and experimenting. But Live does a fair job of finding out the groove on its own, so it's not really a huge problem. If you really want to get down to the business, it's not a bad idea to set the beat markers by hand. Yes - it's tedious work and totally boring, but as I said. The grooves here are great, so creating groove templates for your own grooves is not a bad idea.
But all theory and fancy computer tricks aside - the easiest way is of course to cut out the parts that you like and loop them.

Conclusion
Fistful of Drummers is a library that is useful in many ways. Firstly, if you are making electronic music with the aid of computers, the chances are that you don't have a clue on how to get acoustic drums to sound realistic and alive. Secondly, even if you are educated and a gourmet when it comes to acoustic drums, the chances are pretty slim you'll end up with a sound like this. Fistful of Drummers solves those problems in a most elegant manner. You get good grooves, tuned and processed, played by good drummers - and you get them in multitrack-style. Also, with the distribution by Loopmasters, you don't need to buy the whole 36 tracks - the tracks have been divided up into nine different sample packs, so you can pretty much choose your favourite ones and save a bunch of money. There is not more you can ask for.

Drumdrops Fistful of Drummers
Web: www.drumdrops.com
Price: 153 Euro for all the loops (17 Euros for each loop pack).
Format: 24 bit audio files.
Good: Extremely well played and produced.
Bad: Costly.