Soniccouture releases Tonal Drums
by The Press Desk   15th November 2024

Sounds spectacular, but no crossgrade for Sun Drummers / Moon Kitters?

You can certainly contact SC to see if you can get a discount as an existing customer. But keep in mind, this is already a discounted introductory price.

It's a great sounding drum VI, certainly on par with any SD3 expansions. And unlike SD3, tuning a drum actually switches to samples of the drum recorded at that tuning.

This walkthrough video might help determine if the sound suits one's taste. I think all of the options are certainly well thought out.



I have found even the idea of tuning the kick to a song’s key tedious, but now it is easy. Go on then, load up different instances of the kit and give No Limit by 2 Unlimited a go on the bass drum. No one is judging.

ime, -nothing- is ever an "instabuy"...

except this.

just checked out the walk-through and find this to be the brilliant execution of a very well thought out state-of-the-art drum engine. pretty much all i could have asked for has been addressed. (for perspective, i work almost exclusively on preproduction demos for "emerging artists" who never have budget for full on sessions. i hate programming drums but end up doing it so often peeps think i'm good at it. did i say i hate it?)

just tried to d/l the use guide but got a 404 error, dropping a few comments/wishes here.

0. UX/UI. love this. extremely functional = highly productive.
- never had any use for the bloat of pretty pixels, useless midi patterns, etc. and never been a fan of Kontakt either but can live with Player for this.

1. is it possible to automate switching beaters for a kit piece?
- something real drummers do ime and no plugin does afaik. the programming work around is to clutter up kits and midi tracks with multiple kit pieces.

2. extending the # of addressable kit pieces, specifically cymbals. a bit limited atm but really only in that dept.
- apologies in advance for a feature request before this even gets out of the gate, but could imagine enhancing the current user interface (which i think is genius) with mixer channel "folders" which could flyout to expose more cymbals, perhaps layered kiks, snares, even collapse the toms with parameter focus tied to channel selection. ya, i know... but just saying.

3. additional kit pieces, i.e. future optional add ons for snares, kiks, cymbals, etc. to extend the tonal palette

4. additional kits (in the future)? the current approach of high quality kits makes so much more sense to me than yet another Ringo/Bonham/Peart/whatever clone.

and i was thinking there was very little in plugin land to look forward to.

me > https://www.soniccouture.com/en/prod...6-tonal-drums/

This is a terrific concept for a drum VI, keen to investigate further

I own about 20 SC products, including 3 of their other drums (Electro Acoustic, Sun Drums , Konkrete) not this Tonal one, yet.

I got the SC ad letter or two this week regarding the Tonal Drums, the link icluded to the demo didn’t work and I have not had time to get acquitance of the product, yet.

But I’m afraid this one has the same ”pet peeve” than 90 % of the launched drum plugins by different developers, and the SC other drums has.

Namely: the lack of the included grooves/fills.

The drum sounds and all the other feature may be great. But one is missing and with that all.

And what’s worst, many drum apps don’t support GM.

I don’t want to spend hours and hours by programming sequencer or using other tools such a euclidean beats.

What I wish the developers to do, is to include a good library of MIDI files, grooves and fills in different genres and time signatures.

(I know in beforehand, that many of you blame me to be negative, but I think that a person who invest that much in developers stuff, has the right to express his/her opinions/preferencies - I may purchase the Tonal Drums because its new feature, it would be about 20th of my drum plugins. But it could be better, I believe.)

I'm the opposite and typically avoid any included MIDI/groove stuff like the plague. I want to come up with my own.

I think the inclusion of drum grooves with a drum plugin is a reasonable request. A lot of other drum plugins do. Why not?

I do not find your comment negative, but I think SC’s efforts should go towards getting their products to sound good + offering sensible MIDI mapping.

Programming drum MIDI sort of became obsolete for me after discovering EZDrummer. It is good for fast idea development, thanks to its library of MIDI packs, and I also find EZDrummer useful for editing.

There is a menu for mappings, EZDrummer, and many more… so you can just use the beats/grooves of your preferred library

Hi Harry,
we're looking into developing a groove library in the future.
Meantime, Tonal Drums does have mapping presets so you can easily switch it to GM, or Toontrack, or Abbey Road mapping and use your existing grooves.

James

Hey,
Thanks for the great feedback. It makes me excited that you're excited.

User Guide link is fixed. ( it was double checked, but hey)

1. Automating (during a sequence) any of those front panel drum parameters is a no go, I'm afraid, because you are purging / loading sample sets when you flip the tuning or stick switches. It's quick, but there's a small delay.
2. Additional pieces / new pieces etc. It would be possible to add soem rides, but in truth, this library has maxed out Kontakt. It isn't really possible to get any more sample zones into it.
So, if Tonal 1 is a success, my plan is to go to different studios with different drum kits, and explore the different tones and spaces of each new place.

James

Hi Durk,
We do offer very sensible MIDI mapping in both Sun Drums and Tonal Drums.

James

Hey James, thanks for confirming the mapping in Tonal Drums.

Remapping is not an option for Moonkits due to the way it is built (and something about articulations), except through Kontakt scripting for e-drums. Given your recent clever design and the different possible options in Tonal Drums, here is hoping SC might adapt Moonkits in a similar framework with sensible MIDI mapping in the future.

Yes, I'm planning Moonkits 2 for next year.

Got an email advertising a Black Friday Sale that mentions only the new Tonal Drums. When I click the link, 129 is crossed but it’s just replaced with the same price:129. Is that intentional?

Probably yes. It's brand new so...

But my oh my, prices have gone up since I last looked at SC.

Which is understandable, nothing except plugins is getting cheaper these days. But I can't afford them anymore.

Ah, sorry, yes, that's mistake. Bulk price upload caused that.

it's 179, on intro offer at 120.

James

Any response on this one?

Hi Alex,
We aren't doing a crossgrade for this, no. We tried to put a healthy intro discount on it, and to be candid, the library was very expensive to produce (a lot of studio time in a resdential pro studio) and we really can’t sell it for less than this, as we need to recoup!

Hope that makes sense.

cheers,
James

I own several other Soniccouture libraries, so I'm probably going to jump on this. I'm always concerned about overlap and option paralysis having too many drums in my arsenal. I'm always hoping the next one will satisfy for quite a while. Just wanted to add to the conversation: even though there are no MIDI sequences there are 4 excellent MIDI sequencers including a very cool euclidean sequencer. Sequences can be saved and the MIDI dragged into a DAW. I do wish Kontakt would allow live routing of MIDI out, but apparently it does not. (I'm wrong about this. It does - see below) And while you cannot swap out samples with MIDI because of the load time, you can animate just about all the other parameters including turning sequencer lanes on and off.
As far as the MIDI mapping... I can't recommend this free plugin enough: NoteMapper by CodeFN42 - easy to find with a search. I use this with all my drum libraries - particularly Soniccouture's - as it lets me save custom note assignments but - even better - it's lets me assign extra keys to samples as well as combining instruments at lower and random velocities or events. It performs all sorts of magic and I love to have 4 adjacent keys all assigned to snare for easy rolls as well as having a tiny bit of clap or some other instrument thrown in with one of those snares randomly to add diversity. Cheers!

Hi,

Kontakt will send MIDI out, in all plug-in formats except AU ( I believe). I have often used Euclid this way, driving other plug-in instruments.
You have to make sure to select 'send MIDI to outside world' in kontakt prefs.

James

Well that's great to know and great to be wrong about. Now that the GUI in Kontakt is scalable, I can actually read the prefs!
EDIT: just learned from Soniccouture support - whereas you will get MIDI note output from the sequencers, it is not consistent with what is represented and not designed for real time output from Kontakt. Using the MIDI drag and drop export works and is the way to go.

Honestly such a huge gem in this VI is that option to bring up the lighter hits and limit the midi, so many VIs sound bad bc ppl slam them and trigger the loudest midi notes and so many drums sound so nice with lighter hits lol
I know this is probably an option in a few other places or even your DAWs midi transform functions and whatnot but still lovely to see, great stuff!

I really like "Sun Drums." Is "Tonal Drums" of the same quality?
Which music genre do you think "Tonal Drums" is best suited for?

Hi,
it’s designed for all genres, because you can customise the kit so much.
if you need low and dead, it can do it, if you want high and ringy, it can do that too.
This recent SOS review says the same thing: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews...re-tonal-drums