Sonic Specialists Urban Electro drum kit review

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Yall know me, I love drums. I’m super critical when it comes to drum samples and I never feel like you can have enough.

When it comes to commercial, radio ready, pristine sounding drums…only a couple names constantly come up.

Sonic Specialists is one such name. I first heard about them a few years back, from one of my engineer friends that visited gearslutz.com

All he said was “man, this dude sirrocco got the illest drums man, go over to the forum and download his free joints!”

Well I did, and they were dope. Then about a year later they had opened up Sonic Specialists.

Fast forward to now…their Urban Fire has become one of the best and most widely respected sample drum kits around, and it’s on it’s 5th volume (I’ll try to get a review of that one for ya too)

But now they are moving into a crossover kit, merging electro and urban together. They just dropped this Urban Electro kit, and sent it over for review….let’s see whasup.

What is Urban Electro and what’s so special about Sonic Specialists?

urban electroAccording to them it’s the first professional library made for Urban AND Electro producers.  This is a mixture of hard hitting urban sounds as well as traditional (and not so traditional) electro type sounds.

It fits in with the current trend of electro influenced urban music, as well as urban hip hop or rap influenced electro dance tunes. It’s universal.

The thing that makes them so special is that they are engineers, urban music engineers, so they know the frequencies, eq, and all the settings for the outboard gear needed to make the drums POP

Quick Specs:

  • Contents: over 300 single shot drum samples
  • Format: 16 and 24 bit wave files
  • Price: $74.95

So how does it SOUND? Is there really a difference?

soundThis is where the difference is evident. Most drum packs I come across are good, they have good sounds, but lack punch. If they do have “punch” it’s really nothing more than drums compressed as much as possible or even just normalized, so they are loud, but not punchy.

You can definitely tell the difference in these drums, you can tell these dudes are engineers, they know how the frequencies and all the dynamic work together to make a drum PUNCH without mashing it up to 0db and normalizing the crap out of it.

The engineering on these are pretty amazing, I really didn’t think it would make that much of a difference but it does.  They bang, but they don’t force themselves to take over your whole track like many other urban drum kits that claim to have “punch”. There’s a “space” around them that I really can’t explain.

It’s like they lay into your tracks with their own protective “bang bubble” that clears the way for them to sit in the mix.  I am a drum fiend, I have tons and tons of drums, and many that claim to give you that commercial sound… next to these drums, you can tell the processing was nothing more than “get the drums as hot as possible so they bang” without really understanding the dynamics, eq, and how they would fit in a mix.

You immediately know that these cats KNOW how to use the processors and effects, eqs, all that good stuff that they have…they aren’t blindly turning knobs just to make the samples “louder”.

What’s the final verdict, is it really that important to use these drums?

Look, I can’t tell you what’s important for you, but I will say this, these drums to have a different quality than many I’ve come across.  If you’re looking for that dirty, vinyl sound, or them dirty gutter drums, then I can show you quite a few of those.

But for that new, clean, punchy, radio ready drum samples…I just don’t see many options around.  Some have the “sound” as in they style, but they lack the dynamics and punch.

4andhalfsubsI give this collection a 4.5 out of 5 subs.  You may be wondering why not a full 5…because I want more variety.

I understand they had to put many “general” sounds in there, and even though they are processed pristinely, I still have tons of “dance claps and kicks”. In order to be a standard for many users, they had to do this, so it can find it’s way into many producers toolkit as a default drum library.

What I would like to see is them push the envelope more into their own unique sounds. They had some stuff they created that was just down right new and inspiring, and that’s the stuff that really blew me away.

I wanted to leave some space for them to challenge themselves and spark a new standard.  There’s no doubt they’ve raised the bar, and this is a dope kit that can be used over and over, both the traditional dance/urban sounds as well as the new are here…. I just wish there were less “traditional” and more of the “what they heck did they do?”

all in all, it’s a dope kit, worth having, and will make it hard to look anywhere else for pristine and clean sounding drums.

They have a demo, so you can download some for yourself here: Urban Electro Drum Samples

lemme know what ya think, leave me a comment below!

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35 Comments

  1. Kruz · Edit

    Good sounding stuff, bound to stretch a beatsmith into some new stuff. Carries a hefty price, how many gigs included for that much? or are we talking MEGABYTES? later man, thnx for the review. Ima go check their website in a few for other stuff.

    Reply
    • saintjoe · Edit

      It’s just drums, over 300 drum sounds, but definitely not gigabytes lol.

      I’m not so big on the quantitity or size of files, I want to know what the quality is like.

      You can get 10gb of drums on ebay for 2 bucks lol… or you can get a few mb of high quality drums that’s you’ll actually use 🙂

      I’m a drum fanatic, I’m always looking for the best ones lol.

      Reply
  3. m. reiner · Edit

    My bread and butter is electronic and it seems as of late alot of hip hop artists and songs I hear on the radio are are very electronic influenced..so it’s good to see someone is fast on the ball to release hip hop and electro drums in 1 package…kudos and these do sound great..wouldn’t have to worry about tweaking the sound or volume when i bring them into ultrabeat

    Reply
  4. effone · Edit

    sup dude i like em u right About the risky sounds but over all i liked them an boy do i need alot more punch with weight not just sound but over all they are what iam lookin for in sounds iam a check the download thanks sir

    Reply
    • saintjoe · Edit

      Yeah it’s def a solid kit and will be a staple for many producers. It’s usable out the box, enough variety to please pretty much everyone, and the sound is right.

      I wish they’d push the envelope a lil more, but that may not be smart business lol.

      What they did in this kit is smart business, high quality, usable sounds, with some new extra goodies thrown in next to the legendary staple sounds.

      I was very impressed with the quality, you really don’t know till u try em lol…then compare them to the other stuff you got.

      It’s really weird.

      Reply
  5. Great Scott · Edit

    The drums sound pretty good man I might check out the demo.I have been on that Blazing kits lately and for the price you cant go wrong with them.Thanks for the synths you sent Joe, I have been working with them pretty heavy.Peace!!!

    Reply

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