Overview
The animated drum kit may be the first thing you notice when opening Strike, but the hub of its user interface is . . . a keyboard! Its keys look like drum machine buttons, it stays visible no matter what page you’re on, and works in either Kit mode to play drum hits, or Style mode, which thinks kind of like an arranger keyboard when it comes to how you trigger patterns. Once you’ve loaded a Setting from the browser, white keys play patterns for verses, bridges, or choruses as you ascend the keyboard. Black keys trigger intros that lead into the last white-key pattern chosen once they’re done, fills, and outros that stop all playback once complete. In the configuration panel, you can even decide whether a fill plays as soon as you press a key, waits for the next measure, or sounds only as long as you hold the key.
I’ll cover feature highlights according to which of Strike’s four main pages they’re on.
Main page: Visually, it’s divided into Style, Kit, and Mix sections, each giving you relatively broad-brushed control of Strike’s sound. Relative, that is, to what you can do on the full control pages of the same names. Everything is at your command, from overall dynamic range to how open the open hi-hat is, to “hit variation,” which might be the most subtle, convincing application of round-robin programming I’ve ever heard. This alternates samples of the same drum to avoid machine-like repetition. No less than three knobs affect time: Feel makes the virtual drummer play ahead of, on, or behind the beat in general, Groove moves off-beat notes later to create swing and can import Pro Tools groove templates, and Timing locks up or turns loose individual strong beats independently of the other two: You could make beats 2 and 4 (or 1 and 3 if you’re a WASP) skin tight while leaving the rest of the pattern sloppy and greasy.
The centerpieces, though, are the Intensity and Complexity controls. When real drums are hit harder, they don’t just get louder, but their harmonics change. Intensity captures this with complete realism. Complexity is the slider you wish you could implant in your real drummer’s forehead. It offers effectively continuous control over how sparse or busy any pattern in the Style sounds. No, it’s not switching patterns — it’s varying the same one. See “Style and Complexity” on page 64 for what it’s doing under the hood.
Style page: In a nutshell, anything you can do to the overall playing in the Main page’s Style section, you can change here, only on a per-drum basis: Feel, hit variation, complexity, even what grid value, if any, each instrument quantizes to whenever it is hit.
Kit page: Volume and tuning of each individual drum and cymbal lives here, as do Timbre Shift knobs that work like Intensity, only without affecting volume. While a lot of plug-ins can load a “lite” version of all their samples to go easier on your computer, Strike lets you choose from three sample sizes for each instrument in a Kit: You could opt for “XXL” cymbals but set a seldom-played floor tom to “economy,” for example. Strike defaults to “mid,” and when I kicked everything up to XXL, Kits took appreciably longer to load, and Pro Tools LE 7’s disk and CPU meters increased by about 20% on my test machine, a dual 2GHz Mac G5.
Mix page: The faders for each drum’s volume are the same as on the Kit and Style pages, but here, you can blend a minimum of three virtual mic positions per instrument — a close mic, stereo overheads, and a more distant pair of room mics — which can provide extra ambience, or facilitate surround mixing, as you can bus these to the Pro Tools outputs for your rear channels. The snare adds top and bottom close mics, and the kick has three separate close mics. Since you can assign any instrument or mic pair — output faders for overheads, room mics, and even bleed from the drummer’s talkback mic are on hand — to any of eight outputs, it’s no problem to put a third-party compressor, EQ, or other plug-in on just one drum in Pro Tools.
Strike has so many built-in effects, though, that you could almost forget PT has a mixer. Every drum and mic channel has its own pair of insert effects plus a 3-band parametric EQ. There’s the usual salad bar of effect types, but the compressors and mic models really shine, and a synth-style resonant filter is great for clubby affectations.
SOUNDS AND STYLES
Moving on from the tweaky stuff, how does it sound? The samples themselves are stellar, and my ears say the “economy” level’s main compromise is amount of hit variations, not recording quality, as even the cymbal tails, which are a notorious Achilles’ heel of “lite” samples, sound completely natural.
Strike’s 61 preset Styles favor rock and pop music that uses acoustic drum sounds. Six have “funk” in the title, and have every right to. Hip-hop styles are in the pocket and favor heavy, minimalist grooves, as they should. Electronic styles are a great starting place for making dance music, but anyone trying to sound cutting-edge will want to tweak them in the Style editor. Obviously meant for jazz, “JazzBossa” and “JazzSamba” are the closest thing to Latin styles available, and there’s not even one kit devoted to Latin percussion like congas and timbales. I asked Digidesign about this and they agreed that there’s room for expansion in a future version.
The initial style offerings may seem pretty basic, especially to anyone who’s put in some time building an audio loop and MIDI file library. But the main reason some other drum plug-ins have so many grooves with associated file names to click on is to create variety. Strike achieves this variety differently, i.e. with its tons of realtime controls. Ultimately, I found this approach musically superior, not to mention more fun and inspiring to use.
IN USE
I hooked up a Novation ReMote SL MIDI keyboard (reviewed Sept. ’06) and immediately mapped a fistful of Main page controls to its knobs, thanks to Digi implementing “MIDI learn” the way everyone should: Control-click (Mac) or right-click (PC) on anything onscreen, move a physical knob or slider, and it’s assigned. All Strike’s styles are recorded in 4/4 time, but I wanted to do a rhythm bed for a song in 5/4. Of course, there’d be no problem just recording my own style from the keyboard into Strike’s instrument track in Pro Tools, as Strike receives note-ons for Kit mode on MIDI channel 2, and even preserves hit variation if you want it. But to see what would ensue, I set my PT session to 5/4 meter and fired up some styles.
What happened surprised me. Strike recalculated how to play, on the spot, with alarming tenacity. It’s not perfect, and a bit like having a drummer who’s not used to odd time signatures, but knows enough theory to pull it off. I spent a lot of time in the Style Editor to get just the right “Take Five” groove going with the Bebop style, and because the edit window still expects 4/4 patterns, I had to pay careful attention to where the strong beats really were. By contrast, the “Hard Funk” grooves and fills were ill straight out of the gate. That Strike can do this at all, without the need to load a style recorded in 5/4, is remarkable.
My main gripe is that Strike needs a more at-a-glance way to show what Style and pattern is active. A status strip below the onscreen keyboard only shows the Style name and pattern (or single instrument hit) when you point the mouse right at a key. The strip goes blank if you mouse elsewhere, and when I triggered patterns from the ReMote SL, the corresponding onscreen keys lit up, but no info showed up in the strip. Digidesign says a permanent style/pattern display will be part of version 1.0.1. I did find one bug: Occasionally, and seemingly at random, pop-up help banners (which you can turn off in the configuration pane behind the browser) would display the wrong information, and I had to remove and re-insert Strike in its PT instrument track to put this right.
CONCLUSIONS
I’m quite stricken by Strike. If you’re looking for an “ultimate drum module” to record rhythm tracks from scratch or build custom drum kits, Toontrack DFH Superior still has the edge for sheer amount and variety of instruments. We’ve yet to review Steinberg Groove Agent 3, but we do know it includes more preset styles, and can implement different complexity levels per instrument within them. At present, Strike jumps to the head of the pack for editing and humanizing preset grooves in sophisticated ways, and it’s all wrapped up in a user interface that’s fun to learn and that constantly tempts you to experiment.
Spectrasonics Stylus RMX invites comparison, not just because it can seamlessly mix and match grooves, but because its “chaos designer” serves up generous realtime variations on what notes are played and how they’re processed. Largely, these are ways that a DJ or electronic artist might change things up, and Stylus leans in this direction even with rock or funk-oriented expansion packs. Working with Strike has more of a record-producer vibe, as if you’re saying, “Great take, but gimme 20 percent less John Bonham and 30 percent more Steve Gadd.” And the software obliges. . . .
Speaking of chaos, here’s a thought: Whether it’s timing, velocity, where the stick hits the drum, or any other variable inherent in real drumming, the buzzword for getting human feel from drum machines or software has always been “randomize.” The thing is, however complex or unpredictable a world-class drummer’s playing might seem to the listener, it’s not random. It’s not chaotic. It’s intentional, only with the brain working much faster than words can explain what’s going on. Whatever is going on in Strike’s brain, it captures this intentional quality like nothing we’ve ever heard. It sounds so human it’s almost scary.
Let’s not ignore the obvious: If you want Strike, you gotta have Pro Tools. But if quickly crafting uncannily realistic rhythm tracks is important to you, Strike alone is enough reason to consider PT as one of your platforms. If you already use Pro Tools, it’s a complete no-brainer.