Battery 2.0 Library

The Battery 2.0 Library should consist of 2 Library CDs where the first CD includes the standard Battery 1.0 kits (unchanged) and the second CD contains the additional 2.0 kits. This way, people who own Battery 1.0 can easily get an upgrade kit with only one library CD for Battery 2.0 (second CD).

Current size of Battery 1.0 Library (CD 1): 591 MB (31 drumkits)

Possible size of Battery 2.0 addon (CD 2):   650 MB

Total size of Battery 2.0 Library: 1241 MB (1.2 GB)

Content of the Battery Library CD 2:

NEW DRUMKITS

Acoustic Drumkits (maybe from Studio Drums, some with multi-mics(BFD?))

Artist Kits (Battlecat, Tool)

Synthetic Drumkits (maybe from Synthetic Drums)

Simple Waveforms Kits (with extensive efx usage) 

Kits from our other synths

Classic Drum Machines (compete with "Dance Music Mega Drums" collection?)

Percussion kits (world, ethno, mallet, orchestral percussion)

Human / Mouth drum/percussion kit ?

GM drumkit (complete set with high quality) ( how many cells max. ?)

NEW .KIT FILES

KIT-files for CD1 drumkits (special effect versions that use the new features)

ALL-files (all bassdrums, all snares, etc.)

Specification for kit creation:

bound to GM layout

cell layout !

wav-files

naming !

Demo MIDI file, MP3 file for each kit

----- ----- --------- Karsten ----- ----- ---------

Taken from original specification:

"Describe kind and volume of the content the product has to be shipped with. This issue is important for setting the time schedule, in order to consider a sufficient amount of time to create the content. The kick off for the creation of content corresponds directly with release of the beta version (a "bug-free" beta version is a precondition for the creation of content)."

The original Battery 1.0 sample library that is shipped with the product contains 30 Battery kits and has a total sample size of about 510 MB. That was absolutely sufficient by the time of the first release - and the quality of the content was decent. But in comparison with other sample libraries of competitors that does not seem much any more - sampling content below 3 GB has become rare these days.

But Battery being a drum sampler, we are only talking about short one-shot samples that consume much less space than for example multisampled instruments, and honestly said, the original Battery library is very good, useful and covers most of the sounds and styles that the user expects.

The original Battery library should definitely be included in the Battery 2.0 content, as well as portions of the Native Instruments sound libraries "Electronic Instruments" and "Battery Studio Drums". Dependent on the sales of these products, it's maybe a good idea to include larger portions if sales are not very profitable anyway to give the user maximum value for money.

Altogether, these three libraries will form a very solid basis to start building the new content on. A big variety of musical styles is included, for further information on styles see "stylistic variety".

Additionally, there should be entirely new content to at least double the sample data space (that said, we would be heading towards a massive 2 GB (DVD?) library consisting of one-shot samples - that should make EVERYBODY happy - all the new users, the "Groove Catholics", Battery 1.0 users and even those that have both Battery and the two sampling CDs!).

The new content could be divided in three parts:

1.) Excessively velocity-layered "platinum" kits

In this field, we can license ridiculously accurate velocity-layered drum kits from external sample developers (e.g. "bread & butter" sounds, useable pop/rock drums, authentic jazz kits with sticks, with brushes..).

Following the latest approaches by competitors such as FXpansion's "BFD Drum  Module" or Toontrack Music's "DFH Superior", the velocity layering should be taken further with some of the brand new Battery 2.0 kits - for maximum realism.

Main focus:  Authenticity

Delivered from:  Licensed from sample developers (Zero-G, East West,..)

2.) Contemporary, modern & experimental kits (e.g. Reaktor kits)

As the "acoustic drums" path is covered quite well with NI's "Studio Drums" samples and as there are competitors in this field that are nearly impossible to beat regarding quality and quantity (e.g. BFD and DFH Superior have up to 8 GB!), it's probably a good idea to put emphasis on the more contemporary and modern styles: all "urban" music, or better said: music that DJ's in clubs like to spin - from house and electronica to r'n'b and hip hop and back, from mainstream to underground & experimental stuff.

And let's be honest: Nobody needs the 24.212^th rock snare or the 9.802^nd boring bass drum sound.. style & uniqueness must be Native's territory!

Main focus:  Uniqueness

Delivered from:  Internal & external sound sources

(tons of sampling CD's which content can be built in kits and licensed, sound libraries of internal and external sound designers and musicians)

And that brings us to the most exciting field: Why should all the creative (famous and not-so-famous) users of NI software not contribute to Battery's success? Why shouldn't they do something for all the NFRs that they get? Most of them use Battery for years and have tons of kits that they created..

3.) "Artist" Signature Kits

We should approach a large number of famous artists, producers & DJ's that use NI software on a regular basis to spend some minutes and get one or two signature Battery kit(s) with their favourite samples together!

If we could collect about 30 (or 50!) of these kits, all containing unique (and, of course, royalty-free!) material, that would bring Battery 2.0's sample library ahead of many others! This could be a big advantage in marketing as well and offer great possibilities.

A "royalty-free" sample can also be a sample that is not royalty-free in its origin, but honestly: if it is differently EQ'd and / or processed through some effects, the origin of the sound can never be traced.. and which famous artist or producer uses sampling CD sounds without processing or abusing them?

Bela from NI L.A. is already in contact to some artists and producers - she has really good connections that will be a great help during this process.

For further information on possible sample contributors, just check the "artist" section of the NI website:

https://www.nativeinstruments.de/index.php?artists_de

Main focus:  Style, originality and.. last, but not least: marketing value

Delivered from:  Artists, producers & DJ's, users of NI products

Just a few examples out of many:

Amon Tobin

Antipop Consortium

Mark Bell

Carl Craig

Deepsky

Depeche Mode

Fear Factory

Hans Zimmer

DJ Hell

Junkie XL

Kabuki

Linkin Park

Mogwai

Richard Devine

Richie Hawtin

John Tejada

Timo Maas

TokTok

Yello

Bela and probably also employees from NI Berlin (Dennis, Martin, Mate?) with good artist relations should write a convincing & "musician-friendly" mail that is sent EARLY to all of the artists. Then, we have to stay in personal contact with them and make sure not everybody "forgets" about it or doesn't find some minutes to collect some sounds. Also, a simple written permission to use the sounds in the product has to be collected from every participating artist.

We should try to make a short(!) and easy-to-follow specification for the artists on how many samples they should include approximately or how to map sounds. Additionally, they have to be told not to use ANY "out-of-the-box" sounds that somebody else owns the rights to!

The NI sound design department will collect all of the Battery kits, clean them up and make the sample mapping and naming more consistent (or even following the GM standard mapping, if appropriate).

Apart from these really famous (and busy) people, there are so many not-so-famous, but ambitious producers who would love to help out with their Battery kits. The selected highlights should find their way into the product.

4.) Instrument kits

Following the good idea of some powerful competing products (e.g. Spectrasonics Stylus), the NI sound designers will prepare "instrument kits" that consist just of one instrument group, e.g. a variety of snare or kick drums. The file size of the sample content is not increased - the kits access the same samples that are included elsewhere in the library - e.g. in the stylistically sorted kits. As Battery 2.0 will feature tons of sounds for each group, each instrument group could get multiple kits with descriptive names to achieve a thematically sorted structure.

Examples:

Beefy Snares

Urban Snares

Underground Snares

Vinyl Snares

Dance Kicks

These instrument kits are chromatically mapped - on every single key is another sound of the same group. That way, switching quickly between 50 different kick drums is a breeze for the user.

Main focus:  Quick real-time sound exchange

Delivered from:  Other Battery kits

5.) Percussion & World sound kits

Apart from all kinds of natural (acoustic) and synthetic (modern) drum sounds, Battery should offer some big percussion kits that are packed with percussion sounds from all over the world. Apart from standard sounds like bongos, congas, shakers and other useful stuff, we will try to expand the sonic palette with ethnically sorted sounds like Indian, African, Caribbean, Latin American drum & percussion sounds, short ethnic chants, tabla one-shot samples and so forth.

Main focus:  Inspirational, interesting ethnic flavours

Delivered from:  External sample developers (Zero-G)

e.g.  Afrolatin Slam OEM

Beats Working In Cuba OEM

6.) Sound FX kits

A nice gimmick would be a collection of sound FX sounds and "environment" sounds - but only if they make sense in a groove building context! They should be useful for a variety of styles, they must be really short and have a fast attack ("drum characteristics")!

A few kits that feature a nice mixture of some nice sounds should be enough in this area.

Examples:

Door slams (check Michael Jackson's "Thriller"!..)

Clicks & clongs

Multimedia / Web development sounds

Industrial sounds

Main focus:  Additional value & gimmick

Delivered from:  External sample developers (Zero-G)

e.g.  Cuckooland series

Fields of Motion, Malice In Wonderland

(all of them are also included in OEM library "Altered States")

iFX series

7.) GM drum standard compatible kits

Here, the most important point is to have a few usable kits (samples are taken from other Battery 2.0 kits) that strictly follow the GM drum standard regarding their key mapping - see the list below for further information. That will allow for workflows that some users will appreciate, e.g. instantly playing MIDI files with high-quality drum sounds or triggering samples with external hardware wired via MIDI (Akai MPC, Roland JV-1010, Roland V-Drum electronic drum kits etc.) - without doing more than two mouse clicks.

So-called "bread & butter" sounds of high quality will best do the trick here.

Main focus:  Compatibility with GM standard

Delivered from:  Other Battery kits

GM Drum & Percussion Sounds

This chart shows what drum sounds are assigned to each MIDI note for a GM module.

MIDI Drum Sound MIDI Drum Sound
Note # Note #
Acoustic Bass Drum 59 Ride Cymbal 2
36 Bass Drum 1 60 Hi Bongo
37 Side Stick 61 Low Bongo
38 Acoustic Snare 62 Mute Hi Conga
39 Hand Clap 63 Open Hi Conga
40 Electric Snare 64 Low Conga
41 Low Floor Tom 65 High Timbale
42 Closed Hi-Hat 66 Low Timbale
43 High Floor Tom 67 High Agogo
44 Pedal Hi-Hat 68 Low Agogo
45 Low Tom 69 Cabasa
46 Open Hi-Hat 70 Maracas
47 Low-Mid Tom 71 Short Whistle
48 Hi-Mid Tom 72 Long Whistle
49 Crash Cymbal 1 73 Short Guiro
50 High Tom 74 Long Guiro
Ride Cymbal 1 75 Claves
Chinese Cymbal 76 Hi Wood Block
53 Ride Bell 77 Low Wood Block
54 Tambourine 78 Mute Cuica
55 Splash Cymbal 79 Open Cuica
56 Cowbell 80 Mute Triangle
57 Crash Cymbal 2 81 Open Triangle
58 Vibraslap

Copy protection?

The question will be whether the library should be encrypted using one or multiple monolithic files (like all of the Kompakt / Intakt OEM products are) or not. Many users will highly appreciate if Native would decide not to use this rather unflexible sound file handling - and so will the international audio press.

It just makes a quick file exchange of sounds and kits so difficult in a production context - apart from other issues such as cross-compatibility problems with freshly installed content that cannot be loaded into Kontakt, only after online registration for both products is done.

On the other hand, there's the copy protection factor. This one is going to be difficult to decide.. but it seems that monolithic encrypted files will arise difficulties that do not seem to fit very well with the straightforward and very user-friendly concept of Battery itself.

Stylistic variety - to be continued:

● Big Beat

● Clicks & Cuts

● Dance

● Drum'n'Bass

● Dub

● Electro

● Experimental

● Funk

Garage

● Hip Hop

● Jazz

● Reaktor (Clicks & Cuts, Experimental)

● Reggae

● Rock

● Soul

● Vinyl

The competitors - to be continued:

BFD Acoustic Drum Module FXpansion

https://www.fxpansion.com/product-bfd-main.php

This RAM- and CPU-hungry beast offers high quality acoustic drums (only a few kits, but 8 GB sample data!), embedded in a graphical interface with some neat features like controllable room ambience and distance parameters - an emulation of a "live" drum recording situation. Very useful is the included collection of well-programmed MIDI-based grooves and fills - although they are stylistically as limiting as the samples themselves are - only acoustic (rock, pop, funk, jazz).

DFH Superior Toontrack Music

https://www.toontrack.com/superior.shtml

This product is something like a ridiculously expanded acoustic drum sampling CD and pretty much competes with Fxpansion'S BFD because of its acoustic focus. DFH Superior offers brushes, drumsticks, rods or felt mallets on the sample content side, as well as felt, plastic or wood bass drum beaters. Included are more than 60 (!) cymbals, 5 drumkits, 8 hihats and 17 snares to choose from - and some samples are taken from signature instruments or prototypes not available on the market.

The user also has access to a small cocktail kit from Yamaha and to a massive percussion kit from Meinl percussion with different bongos, congas, tambourines, cowbells, triangles,.. played by a world class percussionist.

DR-008 FXpansion

https://www.fxpansion.com/product-dr008-main.php

Conceptionally, you cannot get any closer to Battery than this little drum sampler. It's like an replica of Battery and pretty much offers the same straight-forward "let's have drum programming easy" approach. There's not too much to say about this - other than the GUI is quite ugly.

Stylus & (soon to come) Stylus RMX Spectrasonics

https://www.spectrasonics.net/instruments/stylus.html

Stylus is an extremely valuable drum sound ROM player embedded in a simple, but really effective interface. It ships with a 3 GB encrypted "core" library that leaves many competitors in the dust. The sounds are outstandingly "phat", and although the main focus are loops (together with MIDI templates for increased flexibility - similar to Propellerhead's popular Recycle concept and their REX format), many additional instrument banks with snares, kicks, etc. are included.

But its sequel "Stylus RMX" goes miles further and apart from a massive library, it offers musical features that users have never seen before, like exchanging single sounds WITHIN a loop (!) or the "Chaos Designer" which randomises rhythmic figures for a more human "live" feel and fills & loops - all ON THE FLY. To keep the main groove, the elements on the downbeat and backbeat can be left unaffected by these variations, it's the user's choice!

It is hard to explain, but everybody who saw presentations of it so far was simply amazed. This product competes with Intakt and Battery at the same time.