We're showered in drums from MHC Synthesizers and Effects with the release of MHC Acoustic Kits and the announcement that it will join MHC Ambient Kits in a fully-fledged drum bundle that handles your directly miked drums as well as the full room. Overall, it's a startling six soundpacks with full access to thousands of sounds, 2,048 presets and hundreds of kits. A search application only sweetens the deal, much like Splenda sweetens my morning coffee.

Seriously, that search application is sweet, making seeking and replacing samples a breeze. Each drum kit contains 12 pads, and when you click on the centrally located button, the search application is activated, and you're free to customize the kits that MHC has so lovingly chosen. You can also use the search application as a standalone device.

A company with the word Synthesizers in their name should undoubtedly lend a powerful synth section to its products, and MHC delivers here. The synth functions are tailored for drums, and they include resonant filters, traditional filter and amp envelopes, a pitch LFO and a myriad of other effects. Integrated effects allow you to add slow resonators, sub oscillators and other goodies that'll take your drums further.

These plugins are also velocity sensitive, and velocity can be assigned to either volume or filter cutoff. To reduce the dynamics of the drums without getting compressors involved, you can take velocity out of the equation -- also useful if you yearn for the drum sound of a robotic gorilla who hits everything as hard as he can every time.

Finally, some special to-do should be paid to the analog filter that works with both Acoustic Kits and Ambient Kits. It's a resonant fourth order lowpass filter with a smooth sound.