CC06 BY SUB51
36 Years on and still in the groove!
Introduction…
Way back in 1982 when most serious electronic musical instruments still cost an arm, leg and very possibly a kidney too!, Roland began to produce gear that was more affordable to the masses.
The TR606 drum machine and TB303 Bassline were a duo not really intended for the dance music scene of the day,but were in many respects aimed more at the home based songwriter or pub/club performer.
Thankfully the early 80’s were a particularly musically experimental time, and the ‘middle of the road’ tag initially attributed to the duo was soon torn off and thrown into the gutter and some electronic music history was made.
the TB303 went on to become the undisputed crown king of acid house, and the TR606 was a firm favourite for would be electro musicians who could not at the time quite stretch to the TR808, and I was certanly one of those.
Enter CC06…
Follwoing on from the release of SUB51’s Satur809 (their TR808 & TR909 dual library), they have now revisited and re-released CC06 their TR606 library and have now bestowed a number of improvements upon it.
Specs…
The library which requires the full version of Kontakt will occupy a mere 362mb of disk space in total, and the high quality samples are unusually in .AIF format in the supplied Kontakt folder.
Also included as a bonus are both Apple loops and REX files for use outside of Kontakt within your DAW or other program if you wish to do so.
Naturally there is a folder of Komplete Kontrol/Kontakt NKSN snapshots to give us access to the mapped parameters within Komplete Kontrol, which is of course what qualifies the library for inclusion in a KK-Access review.
The included presets are as follows:
CC06 Clean,
CC06 Medium Crush
CC06 Heavy Crush
CC06 Drum Hits
CC06 20 Loops (Clean
CC06 20 Loops Medium Crush
CC06 20 Loops Heavy Crush
Installation…
Installation is generally straightforward, however there is a little tweaking for us Komplete Kontrol users in order to enjoy fully seamless future use. This is nothing to do with SUB51 and more to do with the quirks of using snapshots within KK.
You can certainly simply plonk the whole Kontakt folder including snapshots into your user content folder and rescan, job done and the presets will show up under Kontakt on the user side.
The downside to this however, is that you will have taken up some precious storage space in your user content folder which often resides on your OS drive, and also Komplete Kontrol will have scanned in both NKI and NKSN files resulting in duplicate presets, only the NKSN contain the accessible mapping we want, so I found that spending an additional 15 minutes to resave the snapshots negated both of the above issues.
Rather than clog up the review with a mini ‘how to’ tutorial here, I will instead crack on and add my methodology at the footer of the review.
CC06 Parameter Mapping…
As mentioned the library will only appear on the user side of your Komplete Kontrol browser, under Native Instruments/Kontakt. The parameters have been assigned as follows:
Page 1 – Compressor & Limiter
Knob 1 – Threshold
Knob 2 – Ratio
Knob 3 – Attack
Knob 4 – Release
Knob 5 – Output
Knob 6- Limiter/Gain
Knob 7 – Release
Knob 8 – Output
Page Two – Reverb
Knob 1 – Pre Delay
Knob 2 – Size
Knob 3 – Colour
Knob 4 – Damping
Knob 5 – Stereo
Knob 6 – Dry
Knob 7 – Wet
Knob 8 – Unallocated
Page3 – Delay
Knob 1 – Time
Knob 2 – Damping
Knob 3 – Pan
Knob 4 – Feedback
Knob 5 – Dry
Knob 6 – Wet
Knob 7 to 8 – Unallocated
Page 4 – Phaser
Knob 1 – Depth
Knob 2 – – Speed
Knob 3 – Phase
Knob 4 – Feedback
Knob 5 – Dry
Knob 6 – Wet
Knob 7 to 8 – Unallocated
Page 5 – Lo-fi
Knob 1 – Lo-Fi Bits
Knob 2 – Sample Rate
Knob 3 – Noise
Knob 4 – Colour
Knob 5 – Output
Knobs 6 to 8 – Unallocated
Page 6 – Note Tune
Knob 1 – Bass Drum
Knob 2 – Closed Hat
Knob 3 – Snare Drum
Knob 4 – Open Hat
Knob 5 – Floor Tom
Knob 6 – Low Tom
Knob 7 – Cymbal
Knob 8 – High Tom
Page 7 – Note Level
Knob 1 – Bass Drum
Knob 2 – Closed Hat
Knob 3 – Snare Drum
Knob 4 – Open Hat
Knob 5 – Floor Tom
Knob 6 – Low Tom
Knob 7 – Cymbal
Knob 8 – High Tom
Page 8 – Note Pan
Knob 1 – Bass Drum
Knob 2 – Closed Hat
Knob 3 – Snare Drum
Knob 4 – Open Hat
Knob 5 – Floor Tom
Knob 6 – Low Tom
Knob 7 – Cymbal
Knob 8 – High Tom
The only variations upon the above parameter mappings are in the loop presets, which being pre-baked do not have individual drum tuning, volume or panning assignements.
It is Worthy of note that SUB51 have on this occasion used tempo synced samples which makes them imminently more usable, I rather enjoyed knocking the tempo up to 180 for a spot of drum & bass frivolity, but they are equally as creatively useful if dialled down to 90bpm for a more moody ambient vibe, of course halving a tempo will also work alongside a tempo double it’s own value, so why not experiment and combine the two!.
CC06 In Action…
As per SUB51’s previous library it’s evident that time and care has been taken in the recording process, the direct from machine samples are meticulously clean and if you are not a fan of clean, then there are equally great crushed versions in both the preset kits and loop patches, hence the library title ‘CC’ meaning ‘crushed circuit’.
I said in my previous review that it would have been ‘the icing on the cake’ to have individual drum volume and panning parameter assignments, and SUB51 have happily risen to the challenge and admirably provided both!
For me adding those two additional pages have not only added icing to the cake, but thrown a shiny red cherry on top for good measure too, as the variety of personalised kits you can create and build using the available elements of compression, limiting, reverb, delay, bit crushing, phasing, tuning volume and panning is quite stunning for what on the surface appears to be a simplistic retro drum library.
Despite their vintage these retro style of sounds continue to appear in plenty of current music tracks across a myriad of genres, and also in other commercial sample libraries and expansions, so if used creatively there is still plenty of life to be squeezed out of them.
Conclusion…
In all the reviews I’ve written so far, I have sometimes come across libraries costing many times more than the price of CC06 which have less options in terms of creative parameter mapping.
You may well already have drum kits in your library collection that sound like CC06, however we are all well aware of the shortfall in NKS mapping in products such as Battery. For the sake of the price of a coffee and cake for you and a friend, be selfish, let them get the next round, and treat yourself to this little gem of a bargain!
CC06 is available for purchase as a download from the SUB51 website at a cost of £9.00 UK
Links:
Sub 51 Website:
http://www.sub51.co.uk/products
(c) Chris Ankin 2018
October 9th
CC06 Method for resaving snapshots…
Place the Kontakt folder on your desired samples drive, then place the CC06 snapshots into your user content folder, and perform a rescan in Komplete Kontrol standalone.
The presets will now appear on the user side of your browser under Kontakt, the presets are easy to locate all being prefixed with CC06. Now if you load a preset you will almost certainly obtain a ‘samples missing’ dialog because the NKSN file has been divorced from it’s original sample folder location and no longer knows where to find them.
So using the availble auto hotkey Kontakt script (from Access for Music) on Windows, or the Keyboard Maestro equivelent on Mac, browse to the location of your samples folder and hit enter to load the preset.
The preset should now have loaded, however to avoid doing this each time, again use the relevant platform scripts to resave the current preset ideally with the same name, on Windows you will need to switch to Steve Spamer’s Komplete Kontrol AHK script for this part.
You will need to repeat this procedure for each of the 7 supplied preset snapshots. Almost done, you can now go to your user content folder and remove the snapshots folder supplied by SUB51 (otherwise you would again end up with duplicates), perform a rescan once more in standalone, however this time you should now see only one set of CC06 presets, these being the ones you have just resaved which will have been saved into a Kontakt folder within user content.
Now future subsequent loading of presets should avoid both the ‘samples missing’ dialog and load as true NKSN presets with all Komplete Kontrol mapping, believe me it’s worth the effort and sounds a lot more trouble than it actually is.
Disclaimer
The author accepts no responsibility for subsequent purchase decisions made as a result of reading this article,or Any inaccuracies found within this review. All opinions or product functions stated are based soly on information perceived as a blind user whilst using the product in combination with information gathered from official factual sources on the web or product manual.
About the Author
Chris Ankin has worked previously as a freelance review contributor with articles published in Sound On Sound, Home & Studio Recording and ST Format Magazines.
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