Invictus Audio – metal drum samples
I recieved the DVD package from Invictusaudio one month ago. Enough time for testing so to speak. It comes in a professionally designed double DVD case. The protection is a serialnumber which is found inside the DVD.
Difficulties and technicalities
No problems occured during installation. It’s delivered in gog, trig and wav format, everything is clearly labeled and it made instantly sense to me.
Sound
Coming from homebrew sample-libraries and the biggest contender Steven Slate samples it was really fascinating to hear them at a first glance while mixing a death metal project. Compared to the Steven Slate stuff you would never imagine, that the invictus would fit in a mix. They sound very unprocessed and home-style at first. I put them into drumagog 5 and trigger (no not at the same time, after each other to check differences). I liked them both equally.
What I found out so far:
the samples have a lot of 140hz. You need to take that out a bit and they will work great. The midrange is kikin, the highend is klikin (sorry to sound like 50 cent) and the lowend is not over the top. You can really do drastical changes with the samples without hurting yourself (not so with steven slate; they are very processed and if they fit, they fit, if they do not fit in the mix you have to change to another sample. The Steven Slate have a lot of 200 Hz and way too much lowend for Metal in my opinion).
What’s really cool is, that the individual kits are not only coming in different beat-strenght (hit-strength). NO, they come as low-kick, mid-kick, high-kick so you can stack them invidually. That works like a charm but you really need to invest time in changing the tonality with additional tools.
For my taste the delivered combos weather in drumagog or in trigger had way too much klik but with some tweaking you could get easily rid of the disturbing high-end.
Conclusion
Best metal-only libary in pre-delivered gog/trigger format I found so far. Even the toms sound good. You still need a lot of additonial tweaking (eq, compression, limiting) to make the samples work but if you want to mix something and not just plug and pray, it’s THE library for you. I fell in love.
Thanks for this review, it sounds like something I need and could use and have fun with !