IK Multimedia has introduced Modo Drum, their first physical modeling drum virtual instrument.
Modo Drum features a combination of modal synthesis and advanced sampling, giving you what IK calls “the most deeply customizable virtual drum kits ever.” You can edit the type of drum kit, the size of each drum, the tension of the drum head, the type of stick, the room sound and more.
Features:
- Drum modeling engine
- Physical modeling drum synthesis
- Real-time control & amazing realism
- Loads faster and takes up less hard drive space
- Cutting-edge cymbal sample engine
- Unique drum element controls
- Adjust both diameter and height of every drum
- Change shell profile on the fly
- Tune control to fit perfectly in the mix
- Damp control to sculpt the feel of a groove
- Unique snare/kick controls
- Change snare size and tension
- Change kick beater type
- Change kick technique (heel up / heel down)
- Control sympathetic snare and tom resonance
- Unique drum player technique controls
- Selectable hitting position
- Swap stick and head types
- Infinite velocity layers for more human feel
- Infinite round-robins for unmatched realism
- Professional-sounding drum tracks
- 10 fully customizable drum kits
- 1400+ MIDI patterns
- 8 unique convolution-based room reverbs
- Suite of 19 studio processors and effects
- Advanced drum software application
- Resizable GUI for perfect workflow on any display
- Smart Filters to find the right groove for your tracks
- Drag and drop grooves into your DAW for easy workflow
- Full mixer with effects derived from T-RackS & AmpliTube
Pricing and Availability
Modo Drum is available with an intro price of US $299 (normally $399).
It seems the more features they build in to make it sound like real drums, the more you can hear it’s NOT a real drummer.
I enjoyed working with Image-Line’s Drumxxx which is a model thing and mostly makes cool artificial kinds of tones.
The feature set is cool. Nice to see things like kick batter options, heel up (BtB) vs heel down, ability to tension drums and snare wires, etc. Also good to see the full velocity response applied to more realistic sounding drums.
Those drum-kit GUIs are nice for some people, but for some reason I find them off-putting. Probably because of the gawd-awful drum set apps on iOS. I’d prefer the option to hide that and just see controls– or some hybrid display.
I’ve had some disappointing experiences with IK products, and find their in-product marketing to be heavy handed. But this does seem like a timely and useful product– especially if it let’s you build drums that are far out of spec for unusual tones.
299$ WOW WOW WOW. I remember the time as imageline has released drumax, it was pay what you want!
Drumaxx is very cool, and powerful, but doesn’t seem to be going for hyper-realistic. Instead it seems to go for tweakability, and even allowing for very unusual, yet musical, sounds. Very expressive and pretty fun sounds. I think the name your price was probably a thing where it was past its peak and they were just selling it for what they could get. I wonder how that went for them. It’s a great bargain, I think.
For Modo, 300 beans doesn’t seem that unreasonable. Considering that you can create a huge variety of sounds and tweak them to high heaven and perhaps not have a many GB library to go with it- seems cool.
If I did more drum production and hadn’t already bought enough drum libraries, and didn’t have a negative reaction to IK generaly, I’d strongly consider it.
Just watched this demo again. Actually, with the degree of deep editing this is promising, I can see why they are hyping it. Letting choose details like head types, stick tips, damping, etc. etc., that’s pretty geeky.
Though the song in the demo track shows a particular kind of “over-produced” driven-rock needledrop, it is not hard for me to imagine that you could make a more wonky drum sound– and possibly some more extreme tones.
“How’s the new album coming?”
“Sucks, we can never get the drummer to show up”
“You should try this software drum machine and editor! You can do EXACTLY what you want without dealing with the drummer”
“Cool”
3 years later
“Hey, how’d that album turn out?”
“Don’t know yet! Still working on stick and beater combinations and how well they work with different head tensions on each of the 30,000 toms we’ve got set up”
I only listened to this video while working and thought it was a for a virtual guitar to go along with the MODO bass… 🙂