Native Instruments Battery 4

Battery 4 is Native Instruments' dedicated drum sampler — a grid-based instrument built around loading, layering, and processing your own samples with the kind of per-hit routing flexibility that general-purpose samplers don't offer.

The interface is a matrix of up to 128 cells arranged across 8 rows and 16 columns. Each cell holds a drum sound — anything from a single sample to up to 128 layers stacked or spread across velocity ranges. Per-cell processing includes an AHDSR envelope, filter, and compressor, plus access to the full effects chain: SOLID EQ, SOLID BUS COMP, TRANSIENT MASTER, tape saturation, LoFi, delay, and reverb. Effects are reorderable via drag-and-drop, and up to 8 modulation paths can be routed per cell for dynamic response to velocity, MIDI CC, or internal envelopes.

Routing is where Battery earns its place in professional sessions. Each cell can go to the master channel, one of four FX buses, or a Direct Out — a dedicated audio output channel in the DAW, giving you full independent processing per drum sound in your mixer. The bus system supports sidechain routing between cells and buses, so kick-driven compression on a bus is set up in seconds. This multi-output workflow is how most producers use Battery: drums spread across individual mixer channels, each treated separately at the mix stage.

Voice groups handle real-world drum behaviour — open and closed hi-hats cut each other, cymbal chokes work as expected, voice limits prevent unwanted polyphony. The Time Machine Pro algorithm handles time-stretching for tempo-synced samples. Battery imports WAV, AIFF, REX, SF2, ACID, Apple Loops, and several legacy sampler formats.

The factory library ships with over 143 kits covering electronic, hip-hop, and acoustic styles. The tag-based browser supports full-text and genre search with search history. Battery has no internal step sequencer — patterns are programmed in the host DAW or via a pad controller, which keeps it focused purely on sound: one instrument that does one thing at a depth most drum tools don't reach.

Who Is This For?

Producers who need granular control over drum sounds in the DAW — particularly for multi-output mixing, deep velocity layering, and per-hit effects processing. Battery 4 is also included in Komplete 15 Standard and above, making it effectively free for anyone already in the NI ecosystem.