This week Meena Shamaly had an in-depth look at 8Dio‘s latest percussion library “ZEUS” – a seriously comprehensive drum kit library (38,000 samples) for Kontakt 4.2 and higher which uses “Flow Note” technology. From the 8Dio website:
ZEUS is the first library to utilize our new flow-note technology. One of the challenges with normal drum sampling is that elements like hats and cymbals artificially stack upon each other. In reality a cymbal doesn’t stack. It partially mutes when its hit again, while also carrying some sound from the previous hit. We call this concept Flow Note.
But most importantly ZEUS just works. It sounds completely real out of the box and doesn’t take a drum scientist or rocket engineer to operate. The flow-note technology makes everything connect. The mixer allows you to dial in your desired sound in seconds.
ZEUS is all about hyper-realistic sound – playability and ease of use.
Here is the track Meena wrote to showcase ZEUS (played towards the end of the youtube video):
So put on the coffee and settle in for the review. Meena goes through the interface, sound, playability and more in this 44 min review:
8Dio Zeus
INSTALLATION – 100%
PATCHES – 100%
INTERFACE – 100%
SOUND – 100%
VALUE – 75%
95%
95/100
While it may be considered too expensive for a single drumkit library, the control and flexibility on the front end, along with the stellar 8Dio sound and pushing sampling boundaries with flow-note scripting, make Zeus a powerful tool and may justify the cost.