If you have ever tried to create a realistic cymbal rolls using samples, you would know it’s not an easy task. Thanks to Loops de la Crème, a small library developer from Austria, and who have immediately become one of my favourite developers, creating natural sounding cymbal swells in your mock-ups is no longer so tricky. Let Julien Tauban from Loops de la Crème present Cymbal Rolls:

Features Overview

• 10 hand-picked premium cymbals
• 278 samples (WAV, 24bit, 48kHz)
• Up to 34 dynamic layers for maximum realism
• 10 single cymbal roll instruments
• 1 dynamic set with all cymbals
• 12 sound design instruments (Kontakt multis)
• 20 Impulse Responses (reverb)
• License agreement + user manual included
• Total size uncompressed: 1,57 GB
• Full version of Native Instruments Kontakt required
• Price: €42

Installation

After purchasing Cymbal Rolls, you will receive email with download links for 3 different files: the library in ZIP file form, the User guide, and the licence agreement. Altogether it’s about a 1GB download. All you need to do is unzip the library, and copy it to your destination folder.

Interface

The interface is very simple with a basic UI, but that’s all you need. Cymbal Rolls does just one thing, and does it very well. Basically, the modulation wheel is enough to perform cymbal swells, but Loops de la Crème gives you additional controls for altering attack and release, reducing stereo width, filtering unwanted frequencies with highpass and lowpass filters, or picking one of 20 Reverb Impulse responses.

Patches

There are 10 different cymbals recorded at 4TUNE Studios, sampled with up to 34 velocity layers. Creating rolls is easy and intuitive, just press and hold down a key (C3 to C5), or multiple keys at the time for huge sound, and change the intensity of the roll with the modulation wheel.

The primary function of the Cymbal Rolls library is to produce natural sounding cymbal swells, but that’s not the only option. In addition to rolls and swells, there is one instrument patch with all the cymbals, comprising sampled hits, crashes, splashes, and chokes. Even more, 12 multi instruments were created with different combinations of cymbals and UI parameters (see the Interface section above) to produce interesting sounds and sound effects – some you probably would not expect from cymbals! The developers do encourage you experiment and create your own multis from all they’ve provided you with.

Conclusion

What I like about Cymbal Rolls is that it’s a small library a single goal in mind – and one that is done very well. No longer is it hard to create realistic cymbal rolls and swells. All the instruments are mapped to the same key range, and controlling swells with the modulation wheel produces natural results. If realistic cymbal rolls in your compositions are of the utmost importance, Cymbal Rolls, was made for you.