New York, NY (June 28, 2024)—A relative newcomer to the plug-in market, Nashville-based KIT Plugins has already made a splash with its award-winning Blackbird plug-ins. This week, it released its first instrument plug-in, KIT Drums—Connor Denis. This MIDI drum instrument and sound library was created in collaboration with Denis, the drummer in Beartooth.
KIT Plugins created a MIDI drum plug-in platform for this product and plans to use it for future releases featuring other drummers. KIT Drums—Connor Denis comes with a library that features sampled drums from Denis’ Gretsch USA custom kit, his snare collection and his cymbals. You can choose from two kicks, six snares, three crash cymbals, two rides, hi-hats, a rack tom and two floor toms.
The plug-in features four main sections: The Drum Kit page lets you see the various drums and cymbals, and by right-clicking (or option-clicking) on them, you can change the drum choices individually. Clicking on the Advanced button on the Drum Kit page opens tools for adjusting articulations, pitch, panning level, reverb and ADSR envelopes for the selected drum or cymbal.
The Mixer page features a full mixer with faders for each kit element, panners, solo and mute buttons, polarity flip and even a pad for each channel for triggering sounds. You can also adjust the mic blend for elements like kick and snare that were recorded with multiple mics. In addition to close mics, the Mixer includes separate ambient channels for the overheads, two room mics and a drum reverb. Each of those features mono/stereo panning. The effects section sits above the mixer and includes Saturation, four-band EQ, Compressor and Reverb.
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Between the Drum Kit and Mixer pages, you can create quite a bit of sonic variety. If you’re not into doing your own tweaking, choose from 64 included presets covering styles from metal to funk to punk, rock, pop, reggae and more.
The Groove page features a library of MIDI grooves and a drop zone for loading user MIDI files. The other page is Mapping, where you can assign the kit elements to various common MIDI drum mapping configurations or set up a custom map.
KIT Drums—Connor Denis is currently on sale for an introductory price of $49, down from its list price of $69. Find out more at the KIT Plugins website.
