Swing More Percussion

Big Band Drum Kit here we come. Some things in music I like to believe I sort of understand, but Jazzy and Swinging type drumming doesn't fall under that category. However I've been seeking out videos of the great drummers and studying them a bit on Youtube along with using some midis and whacking on my keyboard keys as research into sound and style.

The virtuosity of some of these drummers is amazing and I get that truly great drummers of this style can do all kinds of funky things with their drum kits that can't be completely emulated in a VST. However the Big Band Drum Kit seems to capture the sound and style fairly well. Note that it uses Sticks as the Brush Kit is in the original Swing! library. The sound is very close to what I'm hearing on the videos and what I heard when I compared it to Native Instruments Vintage Drummer which I believe has drum kits from roughly the same era and also has jazz and swing presets. When placed in a well programmed midi it sounds quite realistic however if you don't do some volume variation and overuse the cymbals you might start noticing that it sounds a bit artificial.

The variety of sound is helped by a goodly number of round robins as most of the pieces of the kit have 5 to 9 round robins for each type of hit. However the velocity curve and the variety are harmed by having only 6 velocity layers for most of the drums. It is a bit of an odd trade off in that most drums tend to have 16 velocity layers and maybe 3 to 5 round robins. The NI kits mentioned earlier tend to have 12 to 20 velocity layers and usually 3 though up to 6 round robins. They also have more articulations and about 8 times the samples of this Big Band Kit. As I suspect I will say several times in this review, remember you write blogs backwards, this is a solid instrument with a good sound that fits in well with the other instruments in the package, but it isn't to the level of the high end solo drums.

That said these drums seem to have more of a live feel than the in studio sound of many other drums and that does fit in well with the whole collection which seems to strive to have the feel of a live big band. When mixed in with the bass and the horns and the rest, it certainly sounds like a solid drummer is doing his thing. Well as long as you put a little effort into the tracks.

One of the cool things about the kit is the bottom two playable keys, the mod wheel controlled Snare Rolls that let you work your way up and down through the six velocity layers in real time. They might have been a bit louder across the board, but are quite fun to play with.

As with the rest of the library the Drums have three mic positions which blend well. They are Direct, Ambient and Wide. As mentioned there are generally 6 velocity layers and 5 to 9 round robins. The raw numbers are 3,332 Samples and 0.83 gigs. That's probably pushing toward 2 gigs uncompressed.

The keys aren't exactly in GM order so here is a list of what keys make what noise...

F0:   Snare Roll Long Close - Modwheel
F#0: Snare Roll Long Open - Modwheel
G0:   Snare Roll Mid
G#0: Snare Roll Short
A0:   Fingersnap
A#0: Drum Sticks
B0:   Kick Open
C1:   Kick Damp
C#1: Rim Click
D1:   Snare Middle Open
D#1: Snare Rimshot 2
E1:    Snare Rimshot 1
F1:    Floor Tom 2
F#1:  High Hat Closed Side
G1:   Floor Tom 1
G#1: High Hat Pedal Closed
A1:   Tom 1
A#1: High Hat Open Side
B1:   Floor Tom 1 Rimshot
C2:   Tom 1 Rimshot
C#2:  Crash 2 Let Ring Sind
D2:   Snare Rimshot 2 FF Click
D#2: Ride 1 Let Ring
E2:   China Sustain
F2:    Ride 1 Bell
F#2:  Crash 2 Short Damp
G2:    China Short Damp
G#2:  Crash 1 Short Damp
A2:    Crash 1 Let Ring
A#2:  High Hat Pedal Half Open
B2:    High Hat Pedal Open

There are also Crazy Endings and Grooves. I've never really gotten into the whole making music by dragging premade loops around thing. However if you are going to do something like that it makes the most sense for drums. Many folks I suspect use some form of premade drum track like a repeating midi pattern or such and don't play in every drumbeat themselves or, heaven for fend, enter every single drum stroke by hand into their midi. At any rate you might find some use here especially as the groove usually occupy the lower part of the keyboard and the breaks the top even though it doesn't list breaks. The breaks might sound pretty good in a production as long as you can keep them from being jarring as they are a real drummer breaking the monotony of the computerized drum beat. The Ends are just two ending breaks and / or final hits.


The Vibraphone is quite nice. Both the Sustain and Staccato articulations have 6 velocity layers. The sustains have 2 round robins while the staccatos have 6. With 4,392 samples using 1.35 gigs compressed this is a surprisingly heavily sampled Vibraphone. There are up and down runs and tremolo repeated notes. There are two mic positions, Close and Room. Other than the close being louder I can't tell that much difference. The staccatos sound a bit dull to me but you can brighten them up a bit with the sparkle Knob. The sustains have a nice bright tone but can be difficult to access, more on that below.

The irritating thing for me as that the sustains require a foot pedal to activate. The default is the staccato and there is no way get sustains without pressing down on the pesky pedal or is there...
Well an advantage to being a little dev along with being an alleged reviewer is I can roll patches and share them with you. Here is my little work around which enables Sustains by pushing the modwheel to the top. Up is sustain and down is staccato. The modwheel still also controls the filter, but there isn't anything I can do about that. Drop the patch in your percussion folder and it should work. The easiest way to open your percussion folder is to right click on the Vibraphone.nki instead of double clicking to open it and choose 'Open containing folder'.

Vibraphone Modwheel Sustain Patch

If you turn up the Motor knob when using sustain you will get a funky wah effect on the low notes especially. If you crank up Reverb and Sparkle you get a sort of other worldly crystalline effect especially on the higher notes. If you crank up Motor, Reverb and Sparkle you get the effect of a goldfish driving a motor boat.


I have a friend who loves Bongos and he would definitely enjoy the Bongo and Conga patch. To help you avoid embarrassing mistakes in live concert, the Congas are on the bottom of the keyboard and the Bongos are on the top. It is pretty easy to get a good sounding rhythm going once you play around a bit with the multitudinous variety of available hit types. Do you call them hits?

There are all kinds of fun hits, soft, hard, quick, multi and even rolls. The Congas have high and low hits for open, damped, palm, flam and tip. The Bongos high and low for stick, regular, damped, flam and mallet along with a fun stick bounce. If you know what all that means please let us know in the comment section. Except for the rolls, the bongos and congas have 4 to 6 velocity layers and 4 round robins.


Moving on, I suspect if you are a lover of percussion, the Small Percussion Kit might excite you, but I have trouble getting too pumped up about Chimes, Maracas, Cabasas, Agogos and Plastic & Wooden Shakers. They are certainly nice to have, but I doubt anyway bought Swing More! just to get their hands on a Plastic Shaker. At any rate there are fast and slow shakes and rolls depending on the instrument. The chimes have longer sweeps up all the chimes or the tinkling of individual chimes.

These have the usual three mic positions. The velocity layers and round robins are all over the place from non-existent for the chimes to 6 velocity layers and 3 round robins for the Agogos. The Cabasas are really odd in that the first RR has 5 velocity layers, the second has 4 and the third has 3.

The bulk of the small percussion is in the bottom blue area with the chimes in the middle and the individual chimes on the top. There is a glitch on D#1 where the second round robin of the Maracas Medium doesn't sound so it only plays every other time you call for it.

So in summery.
A solid Drum Kit without enough velocity layers to be a true solo kit.
Crazy Endings and Grooves which might work for something but likely not.
A surprisingly well sampled Vibraphone with Sustains that might make their way into your regular palette.
Bongos and Congos that would have Ricky Ricardo smiling.
A Small Percussion Kit that is well a small percussion kit.

For a full summery of the whole package go back to the top. Presuming of course I actually wrote the first blog post.