Using Battery

[Bitfiend]

I was recently told ii should be using Battery for my kick drum parts. So can i get some feed back on ease of use, how to use, etc... before I go buy it.
Anyone aware of a demo version? i haven't been able to locate one.
thanks in advance

[James Stichbury]

There is a demo version on their website. Here is the link:
http://www.native-instruments.com/index.php?id=battery. It doesn't have the whole sound library, but enough to get the idea.

[Bitfiend]

thanks James, musta overlooked that.....

[sven hauck]

Once you get the hang of it, probably the best VSTi for drums, in my opinion. Jesse used to hate it but is now a convert.

[Bitfiend]

Yeah he is the one who told me to try it.........haha.

[sven hauck]

Well truth be told, he didn't hate it, I just like to give him a hard time about it since now he uses it a lot.

To be fair, I haven't seen anyone get such realistic sounding grooves out of a VSTi drum machine like Jesse.

[admin]

Battery is a great piece for the studio, you really can't go wrong with it for efficiency.

That being said the new version 3 takes some steps back so I use 2 instead.

What's nice about Battery is that you can basically 'preload' samples into a cell you've got playing via some midi in your sequencer. So as you browse through your library the sample you've got selected will temporarily load into the cell so you can hear it in context. Credit to this function actually goes to fxpansion's dr-008 which had it first, NI then borrowed the idea.

So in pracitice what you do is say program your kick to note C1. Assign that to Battery and open it up. You'll see the cell assigned to C1 flashing/playing. Then you select load sample and go through your one shots. As you select them you will hear them play as if they had been fully loaded. It just makes it very easy to go through samples and more importantly hear them in the song without having to go back and forth between loading and unloading.

There might be some other samplers that do this now but other than this Battery does have some nice features for editing the envelopes of the samples amongst other things.

They key is that it's all clear and simple to use, which helps when you're trying to be creative.

The problem with 3 is it makes this process a pain as you first have to load a sample into the cell (2 lets you start with a blank one). Beyond that I always end up canceling my selection or making layers with 3, could not get my head around it even with a few looks in the manual.

Too bad as 3 does include some cool ways to manipulate samples.

But for bread and butter drum kits 2 is the way to go, I'd stick with that for now and it would be cheap as well.

I would like to make a distinction though that battery is not a drum machine per se'. It's a drum sample player, there is no sequencer on it like fxpansions' Guru.

[sven hauck]

Distinction noted. Good call.

[sven hauck]

About loading samples, as a workaround, I start off by loading an entire kit off a sample cd, then use some of the stock samples and load some of my own. CPU overhead is pretty minimal so you can load an entire kit, no problem. Then you just use the cells that you want.

It's an annoying bug though.

[admin]

I actually don't think its even a bug, they just changed the way this was handled which makes it even more annoying .