Zildjian A Family and K Custom Dark hit Alesis
Alesis has quietly finished its Zildjian line-up. A Family and K Custom Dark are live for Strata and BFD at £29 each, seven Artist Vault cymbals apiece.
Back in August we wrote a short piece on the two Zildjian packs Alesis had promised for “late August”, and ended it by saying there was no date, no price, and nothing to do but wait.
Well. They have landed — and true to form, nobody sent a press release.
Zildjian A Family and Zildjian K Custom Dark are both live on the Alesis Strata sound pack store, fully specced, each carrying a launch price of £29 against a £69 list. That is the whole Zildjian line-up Alesis set out to build, finished quietly weeks after the deadline it set itself.
So what is actually in them, and which one belongs on your kit? Let’s find out.
The short version
Two packs, one price, seven cymbals each.
| Zildjian A Family | Zildjian K Custom Dark | |
|---|---|---|
| Launch price | £29 (from £69) | £29 (from £69) |
| Cymbals | 7 | 7 |
| Preset kit | Yes | Yes |
| Character | Bright, cutting, classic | Dark, dry, controlled |
| Runs on | Strata, BFD 3.5, BFD Player | Strata, BFD 3.5, BFD Player |
Every cymbal in both packs was hand-picked from the Zildjian Artist Vault — the stock Zildjian normally only opens up when it is developing signature cymbals for an artist. We covered what the Vault is and why cymbals are so brutally hard to sample in our original piece on the partnership.
Zildjian A Family
This is the bright one. Alesis calls it “the classic Zildjian sound heard on countless recordings and stages around the world”, which is marketing copy but is also just true — the Zildjian A range has been the default cymbal on records for the best part of a century.
Here is what you get:
| Cymbal | What it does |
|---|---|
| 14” New Beat Hi-Hats | Crisp, clean stick definition — the most recorded hi-hats there are |
| 22” Medium Ride | Clear articulation, controlled wash, a defined ping |
| 18” A Thin Crash | Fast and responsive, with a smooth shimmering decay |
| 19” A Thin Crash | Bigger spread and more body, still controlled |
| 20” A Thin Crash | Wide and explosive, long decay — the big accent |
| 18” A China High | Aggressive, high-pitched and trashy |
| 10” A Splash | Bright, quick and sharp |
Three thin crashes in 18”, 19” and 20” is a properly useful spread rather than three versions of the same sound, and the 14” New Beats are the single most obvious reason to buy this pack. If your e-kit’s stock hi-hat has always been the thing that gives the game away, that is the sample to go and hear first.
Zildjian K Custom Dark
And this is the dark one. “Dark, dry, and controlled” is Alesis’s description, and the K Custom Dark line earns it — heavier hammering, a darker and drier finish, and a voice that sits under the music rather than on top of it.
| Cymbal | What it does |
|---|---|
| 14” Hi-Hats | Warm, tight and articulate, with a softer, darker chick |
| 16” Crash | Fast and dark, short decay, opens quickly |
| 17” Crash | Balanced response, smooth and complex, controlled but full |
| 18” Crash | A deeper voice with broader spread, rich but contained |
| 19” Crash | Big dark accents, longer sustain, expressive without harshness |
| 20” Heavy Ride | Defined stick, low controlled wash, a dry ping that sits in a mix |
| 10” Splash | A quick, dry burst of colour |
Look at that crash run: 16”, 17”, 18” and 19”, all from one line. Four consecutive sizes of the same cymbal is something almost nobody owns in real life, because it would cost more than the kit. Sampled, it costs you nothing — and it is the closest an e-kit has come to letting you voice a crash by size the way an acoustic player does.
That, quietly, is the best argument for this pack over the other one.
Hear it before you buy it
Alesis put out a demo reel for the A Family pack rather than a press release:
Worth thirty seconds of your time. Sampled cymbals are one of the few things you genuinely cannot judge from a spec sheet — what matters is how the sample behaves between a light tap and a full crash, and no cymbal list will tell you that.
So which one should you buy?
Buy the one that sounds like the music you play, not the one that sounds most impressive on its own. That was our advice in August and the full spec sheets have not changed it.
Roughly:
- A Family if you play rock, pop, punk or anything where the cymbals need to cut through guitars. It is loud, bright and unapologetic.
- K Custom Dark if you play anything quieter, anything recorded, or anything where a wash of cymbal would swamp the track. Also the pick if you want that four-size crash spread.
- Session Mix Vol 1 — the first pack, still around — if you want cymbals and drums mixed together and ready to play, rather than cymbals alone.
One useful detail: not a single cymbal repeats across the three packs. Session Mix Vol 1 has 17” and 19” A Custom Rezo crashes, 15” A New Beat hi-hats and a 20” K Custom Dark Medium ride, and none of those four turn up in the two new packs. So the line-up is genuinely additive. Buy all three and you have eighteen distinct Vault cymbals, not fourteen and four repeats.
What you need to run them
Nothing here has changed since launch, but it is worth restating because it catches people out.
Your Strata module needs firmware 1.5.0 or higher. Strata Prime can hold packs on its internal storage; Strata Core and Strata Club need external storage — a USB drive or SDHC/SDXC card — with roughly double the pack’s size free while it installs.
The purchase itself goes through your inMusic account, and then you link the module by device code. And the genuinely good bit is still the genuinely good bit: one purchase, three activations. The same £29 unlocks the sounds on your Strata module, in BFD 3.5 and in BFD Player, all under one account. What you play at home is what is waiting in your DAW.
What we still do not know
Four things, and they are the same four we have been asking since August:
- How long £29 lasts. Both pages say “Launch Offer” and neither says until when. Session Mix Vol 1’s launch price was against a £99 list, so the discounts here are real — but a launch offer with no end date is a launch offer that can end on a Tuesday.
- US pricing. The £29 is what the UK store shows. We have not seen the dollar price confirmed on the site itself.
- The exact release date. “Late August” became early September with no announcement in between, so take any future date from Alesis as a direction of travel rather than a promise.
- The Expansion Collection bundle. A Zildjian Expansion Collection Vol. 1 was flagged in August as bundling these two together. We have not seen it priced. At £29 a pack, a bundle would have to work quite hard to beat just buying both.
And the original catch stands: this is Strata and BFD only. If you own a Nitro or a Strike, there is still nothing here for you, and Alesis has not said whether there ever will be.
Final thoughts
The partnership has actually delivered what it said it would, which is more than you can say for a lot of gear announcements. Three packs, no repeats between them, covering bright, dark and mixed, all running from one purchase across module and DAW.
At £29 a pack it is close to an impulse buy, and if you own a Strata and have spent two years quietly wishing the cymbals were better, this is the fix. The four-size K Custom Dark crash run is the thing I would go and hear first.
The rest of us are still stood outside with our noses against the glass. Alesis, if you are reading: the rest of your range would like a word.
In the meantime, our original piece on the partnership explains the Artist Vault and why cymbal sampling is so hard, and if you would rather fix your cymbal sound with actual metal, our guides to electronic splash cymbal pads and china cymbal pads cover expanding an e-kit the physical way.