Vintage Rhythm Section: Kontakt Instrument for Retro Rhythm Sections

Big Fish Audio says the instruments were sampled from a large collection of vintage gear, some in mint condition and some showing decades of wear. Wherever possible, the developer used the same types of amps and microphones associated with the 1960s and 1970s.

The result is intentionally rough around the edges. Drum kits were custom-built to fit the genre and era they represent, so the number of toms and cymbals varies from kit to kit.

The instrument has two interfaces. A 12-channel drum mixer offers a Reverb Select menu for convolution impulse responses, and channel strips with Treble, Bass, Reverb Amount, Pan and Solo/Mute controls. A master channel adds tape saturation and compression to the whole kit.

The main interface handles keyboards, basses and guitars. Its controls include tape saturation, treble, bass, a distortion switch and amount, tape-style delay with selectable types, a Leslie-style rotator, reverb with selectable convolution reverbs, and a mod-wah switch that assigns your controller's mod wheel to a wah-wah effect.

Many basses and guitars include key-switched long and short articulations, which are shown as red keys at the far left of the Kontakt keyboard.