digital black Raven dRT

I have been drumming for around 15 years, and recording music for about 5. Raven dRT is used with Cubase SX, on a PC running Windows XP with an Athlon 3GHz and 1024MB.

I downloaded from www.digital-black.net Installation was easy, with no complicated copy protection to worry about. The Raven dRT interface is pretty straight forward, and is logically designed, if not the prettiest I have ever used. There are many sliders, but you soon realize that quite a few don?t actually need adjusting most of the time. I managed to dial in the settings very quickly to replace a snare drum track. It took a little longer on the kick though ? because the front head had no hole, the mic was placed in front, outside the kick drum, and picked up a lot of bleed from the rest of the kit - so I needed to use the filter in dRT to dial this out. Once I got the hang of this, the triggering was excellent though. The included PDF manual is short, but has a very readable style, with a good explanation of how to use the software.

There aren?t many sounds included (hence the 7 rating), but they are of excellent quality (I would have given a 9 or 10 rating if there had only been more). You can easily get multi-samples from elsewhere though ? if you don?t already have a large collection. There are plenty of sample CDs full of WAV files that you can use with Raven dRT ? Pro Samples Volume 43 ? ?Real Drum Kits? for example - only #30 from Time and Space UK. Because Raven dRT uses WAV files, then you can load up whatever sounds suit you.

This was definitely worth the money. CPU usage is quite low. I will now use Raven dRT for my entire drum replacing needs, it has all the features I need, and seems to work just as well as Drumagog ? which is a lot more expensive. I can highly recommend this software, Raven dRT works really well...