Best drum software?

Quote from dhodgson

Former Slate user here that got tired of waiting for SSD5 and ended up switching over to Addictive Drums 2.

... and your verdict?

Quote from Fireloogie

Processed: Slate. KPA plus Slate plus Izotope Neutron/Ozone... While I still like creating my own sounds, I don't really do this for guitars, drums and bass (Trillian) anymore. These sounds are real and mixready for all genres. A huge time safer. Time I use for fiddling with synth plugins now to make shure not to finish another song .

Thank you for this feedback, 'Loogie. Much appreciated man.

Quote from nightlight

Superior Drummer is good, I have the Metal Foundry SDX which is good for metal and I'm really gassing for the prog foundry SDX, which sounds like it would work well with a new project I am in.

Incredibly, I did some recording at Seed back in the '90s, which is where the pack was made, AJ. Small studio in South Melbourne, and one nobody I knew back then had even heard of.

Get some Melbourne tones into ya bro'!

sweetwater has EZD 2 for $150, and it comes with your choice of EZX for free. Additional EZX are $40 right now. Grabbed it with "Metal Machine" and "Metal!" packs. Really liking Metal! right now.

I've messed with SD, and it's good if you want to spend time and get a quality, unique sound. If you want simple and quick, it may be frustrating. It was for me, but it's because I know I didn't put enough time into it.

XLN AD2 I also messed with, and while it seemed good listening to just the drums, I could never make it work in a mix. Again, I'm sure smarter heads would prevail.

Quote from meambobbo

sweetwater has EZD 2 for $150, and it comes with your choice of EZX for free. Additional EZX are $40 right now. Grabbed it with "Metal Machine" and "Metal!" packs. Really liking Metal! right now.

I've messed with SD, and it's good if you want to spend time and get a quality, unique sound. If you want simple and quick, it may be frustrating. It was for me, but it's because I know I didn't put enough time into it.

XLN AD2 I also messed with, and while it seemed good listening to just the drums, I could never make it work in a mix. Again, I'm sure smarter heads would prevail.

Don't buy EZD2! You can get Superior Drummer for 148 euros at their web store! Pretty sure it'll be the same price in USD. And the Metal Foundry is about $75. Much better quality samples than EZD2, which is why I'd opt for it.

The only plus about EZD2 is the midi browser, one reason I'm thinking about getting it. But if you're going to programme your own drums, no need to bother with the programme.

Also, I found out that FXPansion has also got a sale going on. BFD3 for $175. I bought a copy because I was curious, but from what I've heard, it's more system heavy than SD2, but the drums sound more natural, especially the kicks.

For anyone who does not want to always program beats, EZD2 has much more than just a MIDI browser - it can do things like locate the beats in your library that match a kick drum pattern that you play into it, and you can drop a pattern into its song generator, and it will create a drum part for the song structure you select, complete with choices for fills, etc.

Quote from paults

For anyone who does not want to always program beats, EZD2 has much more than just a MIDI browser - it can do things like locate the beats in your library that match a kick drum pattern that you play into it, and you can drop a pattern into its song generator, and it will create a drum part for the song structure you select, complete with choices for fills, etc.

This.
Plus you can alter midi based patterns on the fly, in realtime and a very musical way.
For creation EZD always wins against SD.

I'd say the notion that SD is...well...superior to EZD comes from the time before EZD 2. Then the naming was imho true. You could do everything in SD that you could do in EZD plus a lot more, but it was more complicated. With version 2 Toontrack added many features to EZD which actually made it superior in some fields but also a lttle more complicated. Since then I think the naming is more than just a little misguiding and I'm sure many SD user wait more and more impatiently for some of EZD's features to get implemented into SD.

Quote from mrs-zambesi

I'd say the notion that SD is...well...superior to EZD comes from the time before EZD 2. Then the naming was imho true. You could do everything in SD that you could do in EZD plus a lot more, but it was more complicated. With version 2 Toontrack added many features to EZD which actually made it superior in some fields but also a lttle more complicated. Since then I think the naming is more than just a little misguiding and I'm sure many SD user wait more and more impatiently for some of EZD's features to get implemented into SD.

Still mic bleeding is much more sophisticated in SD.

Yes, I did't mean everything is superior in EZD. It's just that before EZD 2 it was easy . You wanted it all, you got SD, you wanted it easy, you got EZD. Not so clear anymore.

How are the velocity layers in EZD2 compared to SD?

Quote from Michael_dk

How are the velocity layers in EZD2 compared to SD?

Good point. I need to check.
But judging from the size of files you need to drive SD there must be many more layers than in EZD2.

Yeah, IIRC the combination of bit reduction (to 16 from 24) and layer parsing was used. I would guess that the round-robin numbers were reduced too.

I also heard that the reduction in layer numbers barely makes any difference to the listener.

From the Toontrack forum:

Quote

The drums are sampled through all microphones; from the softest hits to the loudest, with several hits.
When all samples are recorded, they are placed in three sample pools; soft, gradient and hard hits.
The engine can both pick samples that "equals" the velocity value sent but also neighboring samples in that pool with the volume lowered/raised to match the output.
This is one of the "tricks" the engine performs for giving you a non-machine gun playback of samples.
EZdrummer EZX:s has fewer samples in the pools than Superior 2 SDX:s, apart from being 16-bit and also fewer instruments included.
Best Regards,
John

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I doubt most people would be able to notice the drop to 16-bit, since the samples are all recorded using really clean gear.

Quote from Ingolf

Plus you can alter midi based patterns on the fly, in realtime and a very musical way.
For creation EZD always wins against SD.

Do you mean the beat pattern section where you can create a beat or drop one to begin matching patterns? I've not tried to alter patterns with EZ2.

I believe ezd is all 44.1kHz whereas SD provides 96 as well as other sample rates

Quote from db9091

Do you mean the beat pattern section where you can create a beat or drop one to begin matching patterns? I've not tried to alter patterns with EZ2.

No, I mean with any existing midi pattern that EZD2 is playing, when you go to the page with the drumset you can change e.g. powerhand from hihat to ride or floor tom, ghost notes business etc.

Quote from paults

For anyone who does not want to always program beats, EZD2 has much more than just a MIDI browser - it can do things like locate the beats in your library that match a kick drum pattern that you play into it, and you can drop a pattern into its song generator, and it will create a drum part for the song structure you select, complete with choices for fills, etc.

Yes, that's what I meant when I said "midi browser", wrong terminology, but I was aware of its capabilities.

I finally managed to download my copy of BFD3. It's interesting, very raw and unprocessed drums unlike Superior. The cymbals, in particular, are much better than the ones in Superior, imo. Tested it out on a track today and liked the results.

The biggest drawback is that it's system hungry, I was able to make it stutter when I was manipulating the project. Superior Drummer has none of those issues.

Thinking about layering them both together and seeing if I can get better drum sounds :woot:

Quote from nightlight

The biggest drawback is that it's system hungry, I was able to make it stutter when I was manipulating the project

I get this too when the kit is showing (the graphic representation of all the hits).

The earlier versions of Bfd were already demanding with the system. I like their sound, though. But Superior always had something, even the older version, that I missed in Bfd, some "Wow, Man" feeling.

Quote from CJGOMEZ

The earlier versions of Bfd were already demanding with the system. I like their sound, though. But Superior always had something, even the older version, that I missed in Bfd, some "Wow, Man" feeling.

I'd say it's the processing baked into the samples that makes Superior so easy to work with. Even without applying effects, there's always something going on, this is most noticeable with the kicks.

It's also amazing how many producer presets you can get for Superior, really classic drum sounds from people like Andy Sneap and Ulrich Wild.

BFD3 sounds raw, so I'm not sure what I can get out of it. Of course, I haven't really fooled around with its processing options so keeping my fingers crossed. I like the groove editor too, a good way to build up a series of grooves that fit into your style of music.