Review: It Might Get Loud - Assault Drums (with video sample)

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

This time we are reviewing the latest drum sampler from It Might Get Loud: Assault Drums!

The company once again offers a product that is in line with its trademark: instead of offering the usual, generic drum sample library, IMGL focuses on something that wasn't there.

Assault drums is a serie of 3 drum kits (divided in 11 presets) that aims to recreate the typical sound of the '80s and the '90s, with presets dedicated from the early Iron Maiden to the '80s arena rock, from the '90s thrash of Metallica and Megadeth to Pantera and much more (black, death metal etc). 

The project is really ambitious, probably the most ambitious the company has ever done, and the uniqueness of this plugin is really its selling point.

The samples are all pre-processed, a necessary step to create presets that sounded as close as possible to the reference albums, and I must say the kits are pretty much similar to the sound they are named after: with some fiddling is possible to obtain very good sounds even just by using the mixer integrated in the plugin.

On a side note, I prefer the mixer "all in one screen" like in other samplers of the same producer, this modular one is less intuitive, even if I understand that there are too many channels to show in one single panel (maybe the ui could be increased in size).

Another thing I would suggest is to start as default with all the channels of the vst routed to channel one, and to let the engineer route (or group) individually those he wants to send to a bus instead of starting by assigning to each drum part a separate channel, it would be more practical.

Technical details aside, Assault drums really sounds like those acoustic drumkits of the old times, the vibe is very similar (especially for some kits like the Iron Maiden style one), and this is a rare quality today, since often modern drum samplers tends to be processed to the point of resulting a bit "plastic sounding", or a bit too electronic. With the right amount of humanizer it's possible to create some very realistic drum parts.

Thumbs up!

Specs taken from the website:

- 11 Kit Presets which will cover a wide range of classic 80's Metal & Rock sounds.

- Classic Early 80's NWOBHM/West Coast Speed Metal Sound

- 3 Full Drum Kits, Multiple Snares, Lots of Toms (Set of Rototoms and up to 5 Toms, that's 8 toms in a single kit!!)

- 11 Kit Presets

- Multiple Routing and MIDI Mapping Options

- Add your own one shot samples


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