I’ve owned Native Instruments’ Battery for a few years now and hadn’t done much with it until recently. Partially because it was bundled with NI Komplete and I wasn’t really sure how it worked. But also due to the preconception I had that it was mainly for electronic/dance music and wouldn’t suit what I was trying to do. Then I stumbled onto this course on Lynda.com: Learning Battery 4 and it made perfect sense to me. I began to think about how I could use it on my songs.

It’s a fantastic plug-in that allows you create custom kits either using your own samples or from a large built-in library of instruments. It also has extensive editing, routing and processing options.

I ended up using Battery on a couple of the tracks for the Equinox Album – “Dew Drop” and “Frost”. One thing I loved doing was taking Drum MIDI files from Superior Drummer and pumping them into one of the kit presets in Battery like “Telefon Tel Aviv Kit”. This gave a humanistic style of playing to a drum machine sounding kit. Really great!