VQ Drums: Vintage 1964 Ludwig Kit Kontakt Instrument by Wavesfactory

The kit was recorded with eight microphones: kick, snare, one for each tom, hi-hat, a stereo pair of overheads and a stereo pair of room mics. Each channel in the mixer offers pan, volume, mute and solo, and an output selector for routing into your DAW.

A bleed control adjusts how much of the other drums reaches each microphone, which lets you balance the close mics against the overheads and room. Load and purge switches are provided for each articulation.

On the main page you can choose between two snares, two kick beaters and two ride cymbals, so you can shape the kit's attack and tone before mixing.

The samples are normalized to 0 dB, so a velocity ramp produces 128 volume steps. Six velocity layers and six true round-robin repetitions are included for each articulation, which is meant to avoid the machine-gun effect in repeated hits.

The settings page includes a dynamic range control for the gap between the loudest and quietest hits, a velocity curve for how the library responds to incoming MIDI, a remapping section with MIDI learn, and per-articulation attack and decay envelopes.

VQ Drums suits producers who want a recorded acoustic kit inside Kontakt rather than a programmed drum sound. Because each articulation is mapped to a MIDI key and velocity-sensitive, it can be played from a keyboard or e-drum kit. The sample library is large at 2.89 GB, so it is most practical on a system with enough storage for the full library.