Rolling Tides Review: Best Liquid DnB at $49?

Rolling Tides delivers some of the most convincing liquid drum and bass source material in Native Instruments' expansion catalogue, but a broken Massive preset section drags what could have been a clean recommendation into something more complicated at $49.

Quick verdict: If your workflow centres on Maschine or Battery, Rolling Tides earns its place. The loops, breaks and drum samples are the real product here, and they're solid. But if you bought this expecting a full synth toolkit with Massive and Monark support, you'll hit a wall fast. Most Massive presets fail to load with a compatibility error. Four Monark presets is not a synth library. Score: 3.5/5. At $49, it's fair value for beat makers and frustrating value for synth heads.

What Rolling Tides Actually Contains

Rolling Tides is Native Instruments' 100th expansion release. That milestone matters because it signals intent: this isn't a throwaway genre pack.

The content breaks down into 288 loops, 312 drum samples, and 180 one-shot samples. On the instrument side, you get 41 Maschine kits and 40 Battery kits. The synth side offers 18 Massive presets and 4 Monark presets, though the Massive number is misleading for reasons we'll get into.

Genre-wise, this sits squarely in melodic drum and bass territory. Flowing breaks, soulful vocal chops, ethereal pad textures and pulsing sub-driven basslines. The expansion was built in collaboration with a list of artists who actually make this music: Ghostek, Makoto, Break, A Sides, Pyxis, and Sofi Mari. That's not window dressing. Those names carry real weight in the liquid DnB scene, and the source material reflects it.

Rolling Tides works across Maschine, Battery, Massive, and Monark. Version 1.0.1 is the current release.

The Good: Where Rolling Tides Earns Its Score

The Loop Library

288 loops is a substantial number. When the genre focus is this specific, breadth matters less than depth, and Rolling Tides goes deep on the liquid DnB aesthetic.

You're getting drum breaks with the kind of swing that separates liquid DnB from anything mechanical. Load one into your session and you'll hear why producers in this space obsess over groove quantisation. These breaks don't sit stiffly on the grid. They breathe. Push a break loop against a straight 4/4 kick pattern and that contrast is the foundation of the genre.

The vocal loops are soulful in a way that's hard to fake. Chops, phrases, textures. If you're building an atmospheric roll-out section and you reach for one of these vocal layers, you'll find something that sits above the mix without demanding too much EQ. Generally, liquid vocal content lives between 2kHz and 6kHz with space underneath. These loops respect that.

Pad loops are similarly considered. Ethereal is the word the developer uses, and it fits. These are not aggressive, harmonically cluttered sounds. They sustain without eating your high-mids. Stack two pad loops and you can fill the stereo field without a separate reverb send, which is useful if you're building a mix that needs air without density.

For anyone producing in this genre who needs to break a creative block, 288 loops at this quality level is a legitimate toolkit.

Drum Kits for Maschine and Battery

41 Maschine kits and 40 Battery kits. That's close to parity between the two platforms, which is thoughtful. Not every expansion bothers.

The 312 drum samples and 180 one-shots sit underneath those kits, ready to be repurposed outside the preset structure. If you want to build your own kits from scratch using this raw material, you can. That flexibility adds real value.

Battery users especially benefit here. Load a kit and you've got a starting point that already has the right genre DNA: snares with controlled decay, hi-hats that roll without smearing, kicks that punch without obliterating your sub-bass region. In a mix where bass and kick are sharing 50Hz to 100Hz, you need samples that were engineered with that relationship in mind. These were.

Maschine users get the added workflow benefit of everything slotting naturally into the pad grid. If you're building a track from within Maschine's internal environment, you can move from break loops to kit sounds to one-shots without leaving the interface. That kind of friction-free workflow is what expansion packs are supposed to deliver, and Rolling Tides does it on the hardware side.

Artist Collaboration

Working with Ghostek, Makoto, Break, A Sides, Pyxis, and Sofi Mari gives this expansion something that most sample packs can't buy. These artists understand the emotional architecture of liquid DnB, the way a track builds tension across four bars before releasing into a vocal hook. That understanding shows in the material.

You won't spend time trying to figure out whether a loop fits the genre. It already does.

The Not-So-Good: The Massive Problem Nobody Should Ignore

Here's where Rolling Tides gets frustrating.

The expansion lists 18 Massive presets. In practice, most of them fail to load at all. Owners report a 'Massive Could Not Be Loaded' error across the majority of presets, with only four loading successfully. Four. Out of eighteen.

That's not a minor bug. That's a content failure. If you're buying Rolling Tides partly for the synth side, you're looking at a broken feature that affects the majority of the advertised Massive content. It's annoying, and it's the kind of thing that shakes trust in the wider package even when the samples are good.

Native Instruments is aware this is version 1.0.1, which implies some patching has occurred. Whether the Massive issues are fully resolved in the current build is something you'll want to verify before purchasing. We can't confirm the current state. What owners reported at launch is documented above, and that launch state matters for trust.

The Monark situation is less broken but still thin. Four presets in total. That's not enough content to call it a meaningful part of the expansion. It's closer to a bonus than a feature.

If you're primarily a synth user who lives in Massive or Monark, Rolling Tides is not built for you. The drum and loop content is strong, but it won't compensate for a synth preset library that largely doesn't work.

For synth-focused expansion packs, check our Hybrid 3 expansion reviews

Working With Rolling Tides: Three Scenarios

Put yourself in a Maschine session at 2am. You need a break that rolls without fighting your lead bass. Rolling Tides break loops are engineered to slot into liquid DnB sessions with minimal adjustment needed, respecting the relationship between bass and kick frequencies in the 50Hz to 100Hz range. That's where this expansion pays off. The loops are arranged to drop straight into that kind of workflow without heavy editing.

Now picture you're layering pads for an atmospheric intro. You want something that breathes beneath a vocal, sits wide enough to feel immersive, but won't cause problems when the full drum and bass drop arrives. Reach for one of the pad loops here and you'll find they've been designed with headroom in mind. They don't compete. They fill.

Now try the Massive presets. You browse the list, click a preset, and most of them return an error. That experience is jarring after the loop library feels so complete. If you're building a track and you hit that wall mid-session, the interruption is real. You'll end up patching the gap with something from your existing plugin chain, which is fine but it's not what $49 should feel like.

Who Should Buy Rolling Tides

• ✅ Buy if you produce liquid drum and bass in Maschine and want genre-authentic kits and loops from artists who make this music professionally
• ✅ Buy if you work primarily in Battery and want 40 ready-made kits with strong one-shot libraries underneath them
• ✅ Buy if you need a deep loop library for melodic DnB with vocals, pads, breaks and basslines in one consistent pack
• ❌ Skip if you were counting on Massive presets: most don't load, and the ones that do may not be enough to justify the purchase alone
• ❌ Skip if you need a full synth preset library: four Monark presets is not a synth toolkit by any measure
• ❌ Skip if you don't own Maschine, Battery, Massive, or Monark: this expansion has no standalone value outside those instruments

Unsure which NI expansion format suits your setup best? See how genre expansions compare across platforms

Specs & Technical Details

Developer	Native Instruments
Price	$49
Plugin Format	Maschine / Battery / Massive / Monark (NI platform expansion)
OS Support	Mac / Windows
Activation	N/A
CPU Usage	N/A
Trial Available	N/A
Version Reviewed	1.0.1

Score Breakdown

Category	Score	Notes
Sound Quality	4.0/5	Loop and drum content is well-crafted and genre-authentic; synth content too broken to score fairly
Value for Money	3.0/5	Strong for Maschine/Battery users; poor value if you needed working Massive presets
Ease of Use	3.5/5	Maschine and Battery integration is smooth; Massive errors create real workflow disruption
Features	3.5/5	Impressive loop and sample counts, but advertised synth content is largely non-functional at launch
CPU Efficiency	N/A	Sample-based expansion; CPU load depends on host instrument
Overall	3.5/5	Solid beat-maker's pack undermined by broken synth preset delivery

The Honest Recommendation

Rolling Tides is a genuinely satisfying loop and drum sample library that happens to have a broken synth preset layer sitting on top of it.

If you're a liquid DnB producer whose main environment is Maschine or Battery, the pack earns $49 on the strength of 288 loops, 81 combined drum kits, and the kind of genre credibility that comes from working with actual artists in the space. The breaks alone are worth having if this is your genre.

But the Massive situation is ugly and we won't soften it. Shipping an expansion where most of the advertised Massive presets fail to load is a quality control failure, full stop. Whether that's patched in the current version is something to check before you commit. If it's fixed, the score climbs. If it isn't, you're paying for content you can't access.

As a drum and loop pack with solid artist credentials, Rolling Tides is a smart buy. As a complete melodic DnB toolkit, it's still unfinished business.