BlackToms 2.0: Epic Tom Library for Kontakt

The toms were recorded in a dry studio environment. Each sound is captured with two mic positions. The close position uses two Sennheiser 421 microphones in stereo, and the far position uses two spaced AKG 414 microphones placed at the back of the room.

The mixer lets you control the two positions separately. Each channel has a load/purge switch, pan, volume, mute and solo, and a stereo width control that runs from full stereo to mono. An output selector routes the channels to your DAW for mixing.

Six round robin repetitions help avoid the machine-gun effect when a tom is played repeatedly.

An effect script lets you place any effect in any of the eight slots available for each channel. The options include a high-quality EQ, several compressor types, chorus, flanger and phaser modulation, distortion, saturation and tape emulation, algorithmic and convolution reverb with more than 40 custom impulse responses, and amp simulators.

The settings page is split into four sections: round robin, dynamic range, velocity curve and envelope. The round robin count can be reduced to lower RAM usage, with unused repetitions purged from memory.

An extra parameter adds a sub-octave layer. Wavesfactory says this makes the lower toms sound more like taikos and gives the overall sound more body.

BlackToms 2.0 suits producers looking for large, cinematic tom hits in Kontakt, including trailer, film and epic-style productions. Its interface is designed to be simple to use, and the library is 1.58 GB in size with 1,729 samples.

The full version of Kontakt 5.7.3 or above is required. The library does not run in full inside the free Kontakt Player, where it works only in demo mode.