DrumCore 4 Lite

Summary/Short Description: Great sound quality. Generous variety of drum kits, and loops (audio & midi). Clean GUI. Easy navigation.

Starting with the user interface, it is clean, uncluttered, and easy to use. Navigation is simple and straightforward. Drag and drop for audio loops and MIDI clips into your DAW is an absolute breeze.

The 11 kits in DC4 Lite all have great sound, with good variety for a "Lite" version. Also, the sound of each kit piece can be altered in the "Kit" tab, with pitch, gain, and ADSR, per sample. You get 11 sample layers, which can overlap. DC4 even randomizes which sample is played when layers overlap. On top of all of this, you can easily use your own samples. Best of all worlds.

DC4 easily solves a common problem: dynamics can be off when driving one drum VI with another, or importing a MIDI clip. Some snare/tom/kick hits can get way too loud, and soft ones can disappear. This is easy to track down and fix in DC4. Just loop the section, find the offending pad, and adjust the level of whatever sample is off in the sample editor. The layout in DC4 makes this as easy as it gets.

I love the hat opening and closing articulations. You know. That Tsssup...Tsssup...ttt-Tsup sound. Tssup bro! Love it.

14 drummers are included, each with several audio & MIDI clips. * There are more audio clips than MIDI for most drummers, and the audio loops are summed, so you can't adjust individual kit pieces. However, there are still 800 MIDI loops, 500 of which are under the "Song Beats" icon. There are several variations of many loops, which work seamlessly together. There are also drop-down boxes that let you look for different styles, shuffles, time signatures etc. And everything can be time-stretched (audio or midi).

The effects sections are very streamlined, accessible, and simple to use. It's impossible to get lost, and you are very unlikely to have situations where a setting gets accidentally messed up, and you can't figure out what went wrong. Everything is easy to get to and intuitive.

So much to love that's it's hard to keep this short.

* I have never even considered doing a Youtube video. But maybe I'll try to do a demo. I'm very surprised that there's not many out there.