dfh Superior is a software-based acoustic drum module that runs in DAW platforms as a VST instrument or a ReWire client on Mac OS X and Windows 2000/XP computers. dfh comes with three plug-ins called Drummer, Percussionist and Cocktail and over 85,000 samples stored on one DVD-ROM and four, double-sided DVD-ROMs. The reason for the over 35GB of data is the elaborate detail ToonTrack has taken with sampling each drum, cymbal, and percussion instrument to achieve the most realistic and human sounding drum performances possible with MIDI programming.

Each of the drums and cymbals of the five drum kits included are sampled in multiple velocity layers--sometimes as many as fifteen soft hits, fifteen gradient hits and fifteen hard hits. Because drummers use both hands when playing snare and toms, this process is repeated for both left and right hands and also left/right feet on some bass drums. Since all the drum kits and percussion were sampled (recorded) using real kits with actual drummers and conventional multi-miked studio recording techniques, you also get access and complete control over the attendant "bleed" or sound leakage of one drum's sound into another drum's microphone.

Management and editing of all these samples is made possible with the Sampler GUI which lets you: construct any kit from libraries of kicks (6), snares (17), cymbals (60), hats (8) and much more; choose the "tool" with which a drummer hits drums (stick, rods, brushes, felt bass drum beater etc); map out all samples to MIDI and control velocity ranges for full dynamics to none; allow mixing and selection of bleed of every drum into every other drum; tune any drum and corresponding bleed; and control the amount of room ambience on any of the drum kits' parts--i.e. you can have ambience only on the snare hits.

Once you've created your dream kit, program your beats just like any MIDI sequencer (we used Nuendo) except you'll have more choices with regard to realistic drum playing--left and right hand hits, full velocity, randomize hits (or not), then use Bounce To Disk to render all drums and leakage to separate audio tracks.

We found the drum sounds the best of any of the current, new drum modules and the additional percussion (tambourines, shakers, cowbells) excellent! For much more check www.toontrack.com. dfh Superior sells for $299 from EastWest at www.soundsonline.com/