Many drumlines perform with a front ensemble which includes a drum kit, so it’s not a “wrong” combination. They can be used in combination with your favorite acoustic drum kit library if you do want to use some conventional kicks etc. The pieces don’t quite sound like their drum kit equivalents, being generally quite tightly tuned. Having four round robins with one clearly louder or quieter than the others is extremely annoying, but there’s no danger of that here. The samples are very consistent, especially the dynamics between the different round robins. Everything has four round robins, and the number of velocity layers varies from one to three. There are also flams, rolls, various cymbal techniques (including tempo-synced chokes) and many of the drums are recorded with various types of sticks. This library has the greatest variety of rim clicks and cross sticks that I’ve ever run across, and there are even some shell clicks. That’s the nature of marching percussion – because most of the drums have one person to play them, there are many more articulations for each type of drum than you’d have in a typical drum kit where you have one person for many kit pieces. If there’s one thing these samples are about, it’s variety of techniques. There are over 1,500 WAV files of various drum hits here. However, DrumLine is not all about sounding epic – it’s very suitable for pop, hip-hop and EDM, and there’s no huge baked-in reverb or distant mic perspectives. So, this is an ensemble drum library, something you usually see in taikos and other epic and cinematic drum libraries. The basses, snares, tenors and cymbals are each recorded as a group, with many parts played by multiple people in unison, though the bass drums are also sampled individually. Only the drumline (the marching part) is sampled, the front ensemble (non-marching percussion, such as xylophones) is not. The sampled drums here include five bass drums of various sizes, four snares, two sets of tenor drums (sort of like toms), and two cymbals. The specific drumline recorded here is from the Music City Mystique ensemble from Nashville, Tennessee, which is not associated with any school or university and which has won seven world championships in this sort of thing (yes, there are world championships in this sort of thing). Even though marching drums are found in military and other marching bands all over the world, this type of drumline is something our American readers will be more familiar with from high school and university sports events. So, what’s a drumline, anyway? Not all producers are familiar with drumlines, but it’s basically marching percussion.
![the drumline free the drumline free](https://us.123rf.com/450wm/vladvm/vladvm1611/vladvm161101076/69634331-drum-icon-design-music-and-toy-drum-symbol-web-graphic-ai-app-logo-object-flat-image-sign-eps-art-pi.jpg)
It contains multi-samples and loops of a drumline.
The drumline free plus#
That Sound’s new DrumLine library ($35 for samples or loops, $45 for both, deluxe edition including both plus sampler mappings is $55 with a $45 intro price) is one of the more unusual drum libraries.