The Sound Board

MAD RocknFunk is out: two entirely new kits (the White and the Blue), plus an update of the existing Red one.

Having done a few demos for these drums, permit me to say — 100% honestly and sincerely — that the two new ones are really something special. Verrrry good. The old Red was already a very attractive and powerful virtual kit, but the Blue and, my favourite, the White go further still with regards to detail, dynamics, dimensionality of sound, and overall believability.

At the time I made those demos, the Kontakt patches for the Blue and the White were still very much in beta-shape — which meant quite a bit of unfinished business to circumnavigate — and I haven't purchased the finished version yet, so at the moment I can't tell if all those little beta problems have been successfully ironed out, but I assume they are.

Quite pleased myself with the demos I did for the Blue and the White, but 90% of the credit goes to Handheld, for creating such inspiring, detailed and strong-sounding drums in the first place.

WHITE demo
BLUE demo

Product page: http://www.handheldsound.com/instruments/mad/#*
Soundcloud page: https://soundcloud.com/handheldsound

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Fantastic demos, Piet!

Drums sound good. Crafted well for an albeit somewhat limited drum sound palette. The mixer does some good things with bleed (& overheads), see walkthru video at about 13 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqKoYF8gizk

Lots of flexibility in articulations. Overall well thought out and most importantly, well carried out. Seemingly clean programming. It should be a contender in an already crowded field.

I'll have to seriously consider purchasing. Love the drum set recorded on a soundstage. It could end up replacing both the CineSamples soundstage kit and the Spitfire HZ2 for that kind of sound. Probably the crew here will go for the dry White Kit.

Savvy pricing, too.

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I bought the original MAD kit a while back but got almost no use out of it because of it's limitations. No Mapping options, including GM, makes it difficult to play on an E kit, and the patterns (which only work on their kits because of the special mapping) cannot be used with other drums or other drum patterns with these kits. Pretty big limitations. A key mapping selection (like on NI studio drummer) would solve many of these issues, but has not materialized.

After writing back and forth to HH they assured me that when the update came, it would solve my issues with MAD, so I put it on a shelf and waited. Now it's finally out and they want more money to upgrade so I can use the kit I bought last year. How about just sending me the updated single kit first? Then perhaps I'll upgrade to a larger version. But i feel advertising the newer interface on their website then sending me the older version (and now charging me for the update) is a bit of a bait and switch. Although I can understand the need for an upgrade price with the extra kits, I wish they would have been clearer about what I was getting.

Thanks Piet. So that's what you meant earlier...! Great demos. White sounds particularly good.
I read in my email that this library completely replaces the previous one - do you happen to know if it is backwards compatible - i.e. if I have projects that use the old Red (and I do), and I upgrade, will the old projects run / sound the same?

Paul, loading both the original and the updated Red, side by side, in a single Kontakt instance, recording some playing and then switching between both kits, they sound indistinguishable to me. (They also require the exact same amount of memory.) So I think it's safe to say: complete backwards compatibility. But if you like absolute 100% assurance, I can send Eitan a mail and ask him.

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Piet, thanks so much for that - no, that's good enough for me and clarifies that - I'll be upgrading soon for sure.
Maybe there are no differences re the Red then even in programming features (couldn't find this info on the site) i.e. maybe the upgrade is essentially the addition of the White and Blue kits.

I really love the sound and control of these (although never totally liked the crashes on the Red, and the snare pitch is quite high/ringy/funky and not always suitable). But looking forward the Blue and White. The kick on the White sounds lovely.

Perhaps the mapping is indeed an issue, but it doesn't affect me as, although I have a Roland TD-11 kit, I never managed to get any e-kit-triggered midi drums to work for me because of latency.

Thanks again,
Paul