Air Music Boom Plug-in NKS Mini Review…
Amongst the latest NKS pack releases from Jason at Freelance Soundlabs was Air Music’s Boom drum machine plug-in.
I picked this up yesterday from Plug-in Boutique where it is currently selling for £17.95, and when paired with the Freelance Soundlabs NKS pack costing $8.99 Australian Dollars, makes a great value addition to your box of beats for around £23.00 UK.
Not disimilar in functionality to Air Music’s Strike plug-in, Boom offers 10 predominently analog sounding kits based around Rolands classic 808, 909 CR78 and several other machines.
the kits range from pure machine specific to hybrid variants, and are set-up on your keyboard in two ways.
On a lower octave you have individual drums mapped, mostly using something akin to the GM midi standard, allowing you to create and record your own rhythms into your DAW of choice.
On an upper octave are a collection of pre-programmed patterns based around a variety of genres electro, dub, club, drum & bass, ambient etc.
There are around 135 presets each having it’s own kit, and pattern with 12 pattern variants. These patterns are tempo synced to your DAW by default, however there are NKS parameter controls to lower or increase the speed whilst maintaining a tempo lock.
On the subject of NKS mapping, there are 11 pages per preset, the first page hosting main volume, dynamics, swing, speed and triplets. Subsequent pages have per drum controls for level, pan, tuning, decay, mute and solo.
There are no reverb or E.Q parameters, however the kits are fairly dry so both reverb and E.Q can be added in another KK slot. Boom I think does benefit from a little E.Q. to add some brighness, but it’s not a deal breaker.
Overall, it’s great to welcome Boom to our existing collection of Air Music software, and certainly for Komplete Kontrol newcomers it’s a low cost option to build on your collection of NKS products, the ability to tune all of the individual drum sounds mean you can get quite creative, so the provided kits and presets can cross genres and work at a variety of tempos without sounding out of place.
Links
Plug-in Boutique Air Music Boom Product Page
https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/7-Drum-Machine/3889-Boom
Freelance Soundlabs Air Music Boom NKS Pack
https://freelancesoundlabs.com/index.php/downloads/komplete-kontrol-vst-packs/item/262-air-music-boom-nks-library-for-komplete-kontrol-maschine
(c) Chris Ankin
KK-Access.com
January 21, 2019
KK-ACCESS 