Glorious 8-bit sound of the Cheetah SpecDrum for Kontakt
Rhythmic Robot’s has released SpecDrum 2000, a 24-bit sampled Kontakt instrument of the Cheetah SpecDrumand its three add-on sound packs.
The SpecDrum was Cheetah’s first foray into drum machines, pre-dating its popular MD8 and MD16 hardware units, and took the form of a hardware expansion to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer. Once the SpecDrum expander had been plugged into the Spectrum’s expansion port, the user could load up dedicated drum pattern editing software that played the eight onboard samples of the SpecDrum. These were 8-bit samples of real instruments. The add-on sound packs came on cassette, and could load in three further drum kits: Afro, Latin and Electro.
SpecDrum 2000 samples all four kits at 24-bit quality and spreads them across four octaves for instant access. The UI allows access to level, pan and tuning controls for the kit pieces, plus a group of Effects which operate across the whole kit. These comprise Tube saturation, Drive distortion, Bit-reduction (to take those 8 bits down even further) and buss compression. Subtle velocity control of kit piece volume is built in for “humanising” if needed.
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