BRUTALIST DRUMS FOR MAXIMUM IMPACT
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Make an impact with an explosive collection of drums and percussion. Created with acclaimed film composer Charlie Clouser (Saw, Resident Evil: Extinction, Nine Inch Nails), Hammers offers over 1,000 cinematic sounds spanning over 50 different drums, including detailed hits, ensembles, performance loops, and genre-bending warps.
Supercharge your compositions with energetic performances recorded in a Brutalist space composed of concrete, glass, and steel—allowing for a uniquely sharp attack and controlled reverb. A must-have for composers and producers of all levels, Hammers will elevate your scores for action, drama, horror, TV procedurals, game music and more.
Hammers Trailer - Charlie Clouser (0:00 / 1:05)
Last Gasp (Hammers Only) - Paul Thomson (0:00 / 1:16)
Unarmed Pursuit (Hammers Only) - Homay Schmitz (0:00 / 2:24)
Unarmed Pursuit - Homay Schmitz (0:00 / 2:24)
Hit The Ground Running (Hammers Only) - Dan Keen (0:00 / 2:07)
Hit The Ground Running - Dan Keen (0:00 / 2:07)
Entrapment (Hammers Only) - Louis Rugg (0:00 / 1:05)
Hammers was developed to quickly give you access to a cutting-edge collection of eclectic drums, percussion, and scrap metals; these sounds are tailored for use in film genres, video games, and trailers. With its ultra-hyped, broadcast-ready sounds, Hammers is immediately playable and instantly satisfying. Recorded, processed, mixed, curated, and produced by composer Charlie Clouser, this library features 100% all-new recordings, specially crafted for this collection.
Hammers features 58 Drums across 8 drum types—Bass Drums, Surdos, Toms, Roto-Toms, Darbukas, Frame Drums, Scrap Metals, and Snares. Captured in an acoustic environment to allow for fast-paced, hard-hitting performances, with a wide range of mic, mix, and warp signals, and a choice of 12 distinctive reverbs, this NKS-compatible library gives you effortless control over extremely powerful drum performances. These are hard, brash sounds with fast attacks and tight, controlled decays allowing for clear and legible patterns when played at speed.
Hits are presented in a format that allows you to easily perform and sculpt your own rhythms, all captured in brilliant detail, with over 130 techniques in total. Hammers features a mix of performance techniques, beater types, including options for drum head tightness. These controls give you unparalleled access to a wide variety of unique tonalities, adding a deeply humanistic feel to your drum and percussion cues. Need to push things harder? Go big with the 2 and 4 players hits, delivering the natural resonance between the drums heard on the performances and instantly create huge sounds without the need for duplicating tracks. The default Ensembles patch gives you quick access to the entire collection of instruments, conveniently spread across the keyboard, perfect for trying out the sounds and for adding flourishes to the performance loops.
Hammers features over 400 performance loops composed and performed by Charlie Clouser himself, with help from first-call percussionists Hal Rosenfeld and Lucas Fehring. Carefully composed in 8 bar loop phrases and delivered to give you the ability to build your own version of patterns by stacking and rearranging via clear keymapping, breaking up loops, and end hits, so you can control and develop the performances to suit your needs.
Rather than record a single collection of loops and stretch them to work at various speeds, Charlie composed each loop to be appropriate for their respective tempos—70, 90 110, 130, and 150 BPMs—with each range offering some shared and different sets of performances to work within that tempo. Slower patterns feature more minimal performances, and faster loops are composed with more energy and movement to propel action. Conveniently, every performance loop automatically syncs to the host tempo. This approach means you can work at a variety of tempo ranges and you’ll be able to find rhythmic continuity across the various loop groups, allowing a musically cohesive result across your compositions.
The Warped Loops capture the heavily processed sounds for which Charlie is known. These performance loops were treated and processed using the same time-consuming and intricate techniques that Charlie developed when working on Nine Inch Nails albums and refined for use in his film scores. Vintage and modern synths, step sequencers, a huge modular system, and 40 years of collecting guitar pedals and high-end rack-mounted processors all contributed to the huge sonic range waiting for you to discover. All of the warps feature 12 signals, each a unique form of warped processing of the same source material, created by Charlie, allowing for a large variety of timbres and tonalities.
Taken as a whole, the versatility and the immense variety of sonics in the Warps is unmatched and will provide endless fuel for modern hybrid compositions, from dark and moody slow-paced moments, through restrained tension, all the way up to frantic, intense action sequences.
Informed by Charlie Clouser’s years of experience producing bands like White Zombie and playing keyboards in Nine Inch Nails, as well as composing music for all nine of the Saw films, Resident Evil: Extinction, Wayward Pines, and others, this library offers music makers a wide selection of widescreen drum sounds to fit any production. Two and a half years in the making, from ideation to execution and completion, with Charlie personally obsessing over every element, from development to recording and processing. Hammers is the ultimate result of a perfect marriage of Charlie’s Brutalist, industrial vision and experience in producing and composing, combined with Spitfire Audio’s comprehensive approach to sampling.
To achieve this vision, all of the performances were captured in Charlie’s own recording space—a Brutalist environment consisting of 23-foot ceilings, concrete, glass, and steel. This is the very space in which Charlie has recorded all of his scores and productions over the last 15 years. In order to obtain performances that have a sharp attack but also detailed low end, this was the environment that was needed. The resulting sounds are informed by industrial and rock production techniques, but all have been recorded, developed, and presented in a cinematic style that is perfectly tailored for all sorts of action, drama, horror, TV procedurals, and game music.
A custom “key brick” layout was developed by Charlie allowing for a wide range of MIDI performance styles, with total consistency across the drum types in Hammers. Laying out each drum across six adjacent keys following the same order (Hit, Ruff, Hit, Flam, Hit, Roll) allows you to play the hits and ornaments in between them for quick improvisation. This then repeats up the keyboard giving you the option to move MIDI performances between drums by simply dragging the MIDI information up or down the keyboard or to other instances of Hammers. Except for a few of the miscellaneous Scrap Metal sounds, this mapping scheme is completely consistent across every drum type, so it’s a matter of seconds to take a finished performance from the Darbukas and hear it playing back perfectly on the Frame Drums, Surdos, Roto-Toms, or any instrument in the library.
Other unique features available in Hammers include Reverse, Normalise, and Retro Pitch mode. The Reverse feature is very useful for modern hybrid composers across sounds in Loops, Warps, and Hits sections, with the ability to play in sync with the host tempo. Normalise appears as a single knob in the FX page, and has the effect of raising the level of the quieter samples until the quietest samples are effectively at the same loudness as the loudest samples. Retro Pitch mode is provided as an alternative to the various time-stretching modes for host sync. With Retro Pitch mode enabled, the samples are not time-stretched to match the playback tempo of your project; instead, they are simply shifted up or down in pitch. While the pitch will be different from the original recording, the transients are immune from any effects of time-stretching and remain crisp and clear. Retro Pitch is a great option to explore for creative sound design and extends the range of possibilities you can discover within Hammers.
Due to the scale of Hammers we recommend watching Christian Henson’s Walkthrough to get the best overview of this drum library. And for a list of patches see the “What’s Included” section found at the bottom of the page.
Before spending nearly a decade as the keyboardist and programmer in Nine Inch Nails and two decades composing violent and intense scores for films like the Saw horror movie franchise, Charlie was originally a drummer. As sampling technology evolved in the early 1990s, Charlie obsessively built elaborate sample collections which led to him being one of the go-to guys in Los Angeles for drum programming, remixes, and mad-scientist loop artistry, working with industrial and metal bands like White Zombie, Prong, Killing Joke, and Ministry, as well as television and film composers. However it was a chance encounter with Trent Reznor that led to being sucked into the swirling vortex of talent in the Nine Inch Nails camp for nearly a decade, where he became the keyboardist in the NIN live band, and extra synth and drum programming, sound design, and remixes for artists ranging from David Bowie to Rammstein.
After leaving Nine Inch Nails in 2001, Charlie returned to the film scoring world, with his first score for Saw, which spawned a global horror movie franchise eighteen years old and nine movies deep. Charlie has also been known for his scores for network television dramas, bringing his unsettling and edgy sound to each production. Always chasing the intense emotions of his early industrial bands, he’s forged a sound in his scores that brings a sense of impending doom and chaotic desperation that supports the action on screen. Charlie’s never-ending search for bigger, heavier, more brutal sounds means that he always records and mixes his own drums for his scores, and now, with Hammers, his personally crafted sounds are finally escaping into the outside world for the first time.
For a deeper look into the making of Hammers, sit back and watch the documentary film Behind The Samples.
Ludwig Bonham 26” kicks, a Cadeson 32”, the Yamaha 36”. The 26” kicks are punchy and solid, The 32” are deep and heavy and the Yamaha 36” drum produces an earth-shaking 808-like pure tone that must be heard to be believed.
A set of four Meinl surdo drums at diameters of 16”, 18”, 20”, and 22” were recorded, their synthetic heads and aluminum shells provide a warm yet punchy sound with a well-defined attack when played with thick, heavy sticks.
The full set of six toms from two unique Ludwig kits were recorded, with all sizes recorded in solo and two-player configurations, and with the four-player ensemble consisting of two 16” and two 18” floor toms. The solo drums were recorded with sticks, wire brushes, and soft 18” paint rollers, which deliver a sound similar to a wool mallet but with a more detailed and pronounced attack. Expertly tuned, with a mixture of Remo Ambassador and Emperor coated heads, they have a solid, massive sound with a long but controlled decay.
Capturing the less common 12”, 14”, 16”, and 18” versions, these offer a nasty, aggressive tone, especially when slack-tuned as Charlie prefers. Surrounded in the bright and dense reverberation of his recording space, these Rototoms produce a violent smack that is a great complement to the longer, warmer sound of the surdos and toms, and bridge the gap to the higher percussion instruments.
Usually intended to be played with hands or fingers, frame drums don’t stand up well to being played aggressively with sticks, mallets, and brushes, with many of the synthetic heads were used did not survive the sessions intact. The sizes used for these recordings were 14” and 16”, played with wire brushes and 18” paint rollers, and recorded in both the center and edge positions. The resulting samples have a very detailed attack and can produce performances with startling realism.
Initially not planned to be recorded, Charlie was taken by the awesome sounds of the vintage Ludwig Supraphonic 6.5” x 14” snare and had to captured them.
Like the frame drums, darbukas are generally played with the fingertips, and while the shells are made from aluminum, the plastic heads are quite thin and Charlie likes them tuned fairly tightly, so two complete four-drum sets were used, along with a bag full of spare plastic heads.
Long a favorite component of Charlie’s percussion grab bag, an entire road-case full of pieces of steel, iron, and brass hardware and scrap metal was auditioned and carefully selected to create four categories of tones; Pipes High, Pipes Low, Iron, and Misc, with that last category consisting of more than twenty of the best from more than a hundred bars, brackets, cans, lids, and other bits of hardware that Charlie has collected over the years for just this purpose. Altogether these recordings provide a wealth of tonalities ranging from tight ticky-tacks, to bell-like tones, to trashy and downright violent smacks and booms. The Loops provided the ideal source for the extensive processing used to create the Warps, and both the Loops and the Warps work especially well when played using the unique Reverse functionality in Hammers.
Carefully composed by Charlie Clouser in 8 bar loop phrases and delivered to give you the ability to build your own version of patterns by stacking and rearranging via clear keymapping, breaking up loops and end hits, so you can control and develop the performances to suit your needs.
A relatively un-processed mix of Close, and Over, but perhaps with a bit of Room, Catwalk and Chimney as well, generally aiming for a less reverberant, closer sound that is fairly civilized and intimate without being completely dry.
A more heavily processed version, with more of the Room mics used to create a denser, more reverberant sound, and for many users, this will be the go-to for a large but not over-the-top sound. For many of the drum types additional specialised processing was used to make this mix bigger than life, including everything from hardware compressors like a UBK-modified Fatso, Distressors, and even a Cwejman EuroRack compressor, to EQ, distortion, and saturation units like Neve and API EQs, SansAmp PSA-21 and RBI processors, SPL Transient Designers, pitch shifters and distortions from the Eventide H-9000, and a few specialised plug-ins… I think you get the point.
The full-fat, no-holds-barred, turbo-charged Signal. This is the biggest of them all. Multiple layers of compression, pitch-shifted signals mixed with un-shifted signals, transients split off and processed separately, layered and stacked and side-chained right up to the threshold of pain, Mix 3 is what you need when you want your drums to be over-the-top.