Magic Hi-Hats by Loops dela Creme

[Markus K]

This looks interesting. HiHats can be hard to get right.

https://www.loopsdelacreme.com/magic-hi-hats

MAGIC HI-HATS
Highly realistic, versatile, fun to play, and pure magic!
2761 samples (mono and stereo WAV, 24bit, 48kHz)
22 Kontakt presets
4 main hi-hat instruments with 4/4 and 6/8 rhythm metrics.
built-in tempo-synced grooves with a lively and realistic feel
Groove variations and fills with mod wheel control
Intuitive GUI with a four-band EQ, filters, saturation, limiter, soft attack, and reverb
18 custom Impulse Responses
Up to 42 velocity layers
Left and right-hand sampling for many articulations
‘Magic keys’ with up to 200 round-robin samples per key for maximum realism and automatic subtle variations
full Kontakt 5.8+ required!!!
total size uncompressed: 1.04 GB

list price: €64,- (+VAT for EU customers)

32,- Euro- 50% INTRO OFFER!!! (ends December 20th)

[Piet De Ridder]

Thanks, Markus! I wasn't aware that this had been released. And it's 200% my kind of sample library.

You can always count on Loops de la Crème to deliver brilliant and extremely useful material like this. Only €32 today and only €64 next month, but in reality at least worth 10 times that, because a little Kontakt-library like this has the power to transform any virtual drumkit from a "mmm, ok, I suppose" to a "Wow! Yeah!!". (Good hi-hats are key to the believability of a sampled kit.)

Currently I'm using the BFD3 Bosphorus hat or the Mixosaurus hi-hats to 'upgrade' drumkits that have hi-hats I don't like — which includes most Toontrack kits — but I'm sure these Loops de la Crème hats will do the job just as well, especially since they have that crisp, well-defined sound that I like so much in h-hats.

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[mr anxiety]

I wonder if these can be re-mapped to drop into a Toontrack kit? That would be helpful

[Piet De Ridder]

You can’t remap from the GUI, but the patches are fully editable, so in Kontakt’s Editor you can remap things any way you like. As soon as you do though, the patterns no longer function. (The sequencer still does.)

These hats do use the widely adopted standard of F#1 (closed), G#1 (pedal) and A#1 (open), so those three notes in a Toontrack pattern wil translate instantly. Problem with Toontrack hi-hat parts is that TT kits have a whole set of hi-hat articulations in the bottom octave and in that range, the Loops de la Crème patches have nothing mapped. You could duplicate groups and map them to where the TT hats are mappped, I suppose.
Also one of the charms of these Loop de la Crème hats is that an octave above you’ve got another set of three articulations (essential for the complete Loops de la Crème hi-hat experience) and at the other end, an octave below, you’ve got those ‘Magic’ keys, which trigger random samples from a pool of, apparently, around 200 samples. (Two of those keys are excellent choices for ghost notes, the third one occasionally brings up a open sample at times when you might not want an open sample.)

All that being said, the Loops de la Crème hats are at their best, I find, if you get a feel for how to play them and discover how they respond, rather then feed them midi-data that was recorded on and for other hats. They react differently to any other sampled hi-hats I’m familiar with.
So I would never drag the data from a Toontrack midi-groove (or from any other developer, for that matter) onto the Loops de la Crème hi-hat track. Much more fun and much better results if you play those hats yourself.

Here is a quickly made example with a Toontrack kit assembled from the SD3 core library. The first eight bars are entirely SD3 and after that, those 8 bars are repeated four more times, each with a different Loops de la Crème hat.

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[Guy Rowland]

Here is a quickly made example with a Toontrack kit assembled from the SD3 core library. The first eight bars are entirely SD3 and after that, those 8 bars are repeated four more times, each with a different Loops de la Crème hat.

Very impressive. I thought of you instantly the moment I saw this thread - "Piet is gonna make these sing". And you do!

For someone happily 100% in the Toontrack ecosystem, I'd be the one looking at the 120 different miltimiced-with-bleed hi-hats I have within SD rather than using an outside tool. However good that tool is, it is a somewhat cumbersome workflow to be using two products not one. Some of the TT kits have over a dozen variations at different velocities and - crucially for me - have midi played by real drummers that use them. I doubt the results will be better than what I've just heard, but I think they would likely get closer to it in a faster way.

[Piet De Ridder]

True, Guy.

What I said about playing the LdlC hats directly, so as to be able to get the best out of them — which you’ll never get if you just drag a midi-file from somewhere else onto their track —, applies to the Toontrack hats as well of course. Or to most any midi-driven instrument, I would think. (It certainly applies to virtual pianos too.)

I totally understand you’re completely happy with TT’s hats. I don’t like them, but that’s just me; I suffer from a weird disorder that makes me almost pathologically obsessed with hi-hats (and bassdrums and snares and toms and cymbals …) and not until these things sound absolutely right to me — for the track at hand — will I feel comfortable enough to continue with what I’m working on. There’s almost no margin for “almost but not quite”. For example, I don’t like the drum sound in the above example at all. Would never use that in a track of mine. Not only does it sound unconvincing (as a drums simulation) to me — 2 seconds in and you already now you’re listening to fake drums —, but its sonic character (that ‘toontrackness’ I’ve talked about before) is also something I simply don't like. But again, that’s just me. De gustibus et coloribus … you know.

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[mr anxiety]

I missed the window to hear Piet's hihat example.

[Piet De Ridder]

Had I read this a few minutes later than I did, I would have to apologize for deleting the file, cause I'm the middle of autumn cleaning my audio HD.
But I didn't, so I haven't. The link is re-enabled.

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[mr anxiety]

Thx Piet. Will check it out shortly.