Hammers

EVERY TOOLBOX NEEDS A HAMMER

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.

MAKE AN IMPACT

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.

THE ARCHITECT’S BRUTALIST DREAMS

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.

DEVILISH DETAILS

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.

CHARLIE CLOUSER

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.

BEHIND THE SAMPLES

For a deeper look into the making of Hammers, sit back and watch the documentary film Behind The Samples.