Killer sounds
Lethal’s 1100+ presets are heavily geared toward dance music production (EDM, trance, house and hip-hop, mostly) and largely synth-based, with a smattering of ‘real’ instruments – guitars, brass, flutes, etc – bringing up the rear. Given how dreadful ROM pler emulations of acoustic and electric instruments generally sound, we don’t have any problem with that.
The library is impressively solid and diverse, packed with thoroughly usable basses, leads, pads, strings, keys, vocal noises, FX and much more. Even the drums and percussion (of which there are a whopping 2140) sound fantastic, by and large, although their implementation could be better. They load as ‘sound menus’ rather than drum kits – ie, a series of snares, kicks, hats or whatever, mapped across the keyboard – so you have to build your own kits with multiple instances of Lethal on separate tracks. We’re not at all opposed to that workflow, but the addition of (many!) composite kits to the library, referencing the sounds already in the bank, feels like a no-brainer.
Our only other issue with the library is the generic preset naming – House Lead 1-14, Piano 1-24, etc. Properly titling them all might be a big job, but it does need to be done.
Back on the upside, Lethal Audio are going to be releasing at least one new soundbank for Lethal a month (we’ve had EDM, Hip-Hop and Trance so far), and they’ll all be free until the end of June 2017, which greatly ups the value proposition.