Real to Reel: Real World Drums – Sounds and Presets
Plus preset rhythms for your RD-78 and scraping the barrel with Kontakt!
3,6 / 5,0 | 
From the hallowed rooms at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio complex comes Real to Reel, Toontrack’s latest SDX expansion for Superior Drummer.
Sounds and Presets
Real To Reel SDX for Toontrack Superior Drummer
Toontrack has, over the years, rightly established itself as the developer of one of the best drum plugins on the market today. They don’t update it every five minutes, and their release of content for it is slow yet steady. And we now have a new library to consider.
Following on, deliberately or not, with the Peter Gabriel theme from one of their most recent collections, the rather brilliant Hitmaker, we now have Real to Reel. Recorded by Kevin Killen, this pack features eight kits captured in three different rooms at Gabriel’s iconic Real World Studio in Box, Wiltshire.
Real to Reel’s credentials are both illustrious in regard to the environment they were recorded and the person responsible for those recordings. Killen is a multi-Grammy award-winning producer and engineer whose resume is quite like any others.
He has recorded with U2, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Elvis Costello, Tori Amos, David Bowie and many more. There are few people, if any, better qualified to record drum samples at Real World. And of course, that studio has been the creative hub for countless legendary and groundbreaking recordings.
Real to Reel comes with everything you’d expect from an SDX pack. As well as the eight kits, there are numerous additional extras to swap in and out of your chosen kit to make it distinctly personal to you. Everything was recorded to analogue tape with multiple mic placements, and selected kits have ambience and surround mic placements.
As always, there is an extensive library of tailored MIDI grooves within Real to Reel that you can mix and match to get instant gratification, but if you’re an e-Drummer, the extensive e-Drum kit mappings will have you playing these kits as if you were in that hallowed space.
There are numerous presets to get you going, but Superior Drummer’s… well, superior interface will have you mixing and matching and creating your very own kit configurations with ease. Real to Reel is priced at €179/£157/$175 and adds yet another stunning drum collection to what is, in my humble opinion, the best drum plugin available today.
Berlin Brass Additional Instruments by Orchestral Tools
Don’t be put off by the slightly unwieldy title of this library from industry-standard orchestral sample library developers, Orchestral Tools. Whilst it states that the instruments are “additional”, you don’t require any of their previous libraries to tack this on to.
BBAI, as I shall call it from here on in, contains four brass instruments not included with the main Berlin Brass package. These include the Piccolo Trumpet, Bass Trumpet, Euphonium and Contrabass Trombone. Presumable these were left out from the main package because they are less frequently used.
That said, if composing for and playing a complete orchestra is your thing, this library will give you instruments that will broaden your capabilities. Sampled in the same location and with the same level of details as the rest of their Berlin Orchestra libraries, these instruments are by no means inferior.
Each instrument is available to buy separately, but if bought that way, it would cost you €280. At full price, this package will cost you €199, but Orchestral Tools is making this available for a limited introductory price of just €139, until September 10th, 2025. That’s a saving of €141 over the combined individual prices!
Everything is sampled at 24/48 and will occupy around 30GB of drive space if you choose the SINE Player version, 40GB if you use the Kontakt version.
Berlin Brass Additional Instruments is available for both Orchestral Tools SINE Player as well as Kontakt for €139, a 30% intro discount until September 10th, 2025, although OT states that the SINE version is the most up-to-date version. SINE Player is free of charge.
Erosia for Kontakt by Native Instruments
Another Kontakt library this week in the form of Erosia. Targeted at those who work in cinematic sound design, Erosia hones in on the scraped, bowed, grinding and friction-style sounds. This library is all about abrasion and stress!
Using natural sounds of tension as a starting point, such as hinges under strain, ice cracking across metal sheets or bows drawn over things such as glass, Erosia then processes these sounds using synthesis processing such as complex modulation and resonance.
Created for NI by Jeremiah Savage (quite an appropriate name!), who also created the Kinetic Metal and Kinetic Toys libraries for them, there is a deep sense of texture, stress and tension in these sounds. Four layers of sound can be manipulated and then processed through a wealth of FX.
Erosia reminds me of some of the recent libraries and instruments from the likes of Arturia and UVI, but you may well find that it complements those, rather than replicates them. It is definitely a useful sonic tool with a unique sound. Erosia is available direct from Native Instruments for £129.
CR-78 Preset Pack for Behringer RD-78 by The Digital Lifestyle
Here’s a little treat for all you Behringer RD-78 owners from Ian Dixon who runs a YouTube Channel and page under the moniker of The Digital Lifestyle. It is fair to say that when the RD-78 was released, we found ourselves rediscovering all the songs the Roland CR-78 had been used on.
And whilst Behringer attempted to recreate a bunch of these within its own presets, they were a bit hit and miss. So Ian has taken it upon himself to recreate 10 classic rhythm tracks originally played on the CR-78 and stuff them into a little package for pocket money!
The obvious candidates are there, such as “In the Air Tonight”, Fade to Gray” and “Underpass”, but there are lesser-known patterns such as Kate Bush’s “Delirious” And Roxy Music’s “Same Old Scene”. If recreating these songs is your thing, this could be the best pocket change you’ve ever spent!
You can grab this pack of preset rhythms straight from Ian’s website for a paltry £4!
Seasons of Earth – European Winter by Boom Library
Finally, this week, we have another library from Boom and another library squarely aimed at soundtrack or Foley producers in the form of European Winter, part of their Seasons of Earth series. If you want the sounds of snow, ice, winter and all manner of snow-dwelling creatures, this is for you.
The sounds of winter on the European continent have been meticulously captured in painstaking detail, harnessing the sound of snow falling on multiple surfaces, ice lakes creaking and half-frozen waterfalls trickling down the sides of mountains.
Winter wildlife has been recorded too, covering things from howling wolves to the unmistakable calls of corvids like the raven. Combined with your compositions and the wintry imagery, they will conjure up the real essence of a frozen winter.
The library is presented in both stereo and 3D surround, perfect for Atmos and binaural productions. Up to 366 files, taking up to 110.5GB of space, everything is presented in high-resolution WAV format, with every file containing extensive UCS-compatible metadata for easily locating the sounds you want.
Seasons of Earth – European Winter adds a specific geographic location to these sounds and is currently on offer at €95.20 (down from €119.00) for the stereo version and €263.20 (down from €329.00) for the 3D Surround version.
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