CAKEWALK SESSION DRUMMER 2

Running only in Cakewalk Sonar, Session Drummer 2 loads drum programs, each of which consists of ten drum sounds, eight MIDI patterns, and an associated mix. So, calling up a particular program automatically selects appropriate grooves. All drum sounds are acoustic, and offer several styles, such as 6/8 Shuffle, Drum ’n’ Bass, Hard Rock, Marley Reggae, Police Rock, Rock, Swing Jazz, and Train Brushes.

The eight patterns are there as inspiration — you can use them as-is, or make your own and treat SD2 as a tone module. Since you have a “universe” of only eight grooves per program, it’s not a big deal to click on them to hear what each one does (there are straight-ahead beats as well as fills) before you string them together into parts. You can also right-click on any of the pattern slots, and load MIDI patterns from other drum programs, or for that matter, other MIDI files. However, you can’t audition them without loading them into a slot. Craig Anderton

DIGIDESIGN STRIKE

Designed exclusively for Pro Tools, Strike calls its basic drum parts Styles, hinting at why it’s one of my favorite virtual drummers for those of us with a “keyboardist’s brain” — a Style is much more than a drum pattern. It’s a set of related patterns, playable from Strike’s virtual keyboard (see screenshot on page 55). The base set of 61 Styles favors acoustic sounds and rock, pop, urban, and funk Styles.

Initially, the quantity of Styles may seem skimpy, especially to anyone who’s built up an audio and MIDI loop library. Qualitywise, Strike achieves the same variety, but in a different way: It goes light on “things that live in a directory” but lets you change up each of those things internally — subtly, drastically, or anywhere in between — using the virtual keyboard and an OMG amount of realtime controls. More on these when we get to steps 2 and 3. Stephen Fortner

FXPANSION BFD2

BFD2’s Grooves page is where you start hunting for patterns. From here, you can load and edit BFD2’s drum patterns, and even record your own from scratch. BFD2’s browser is slightly “hidden” — first, you have to double-click on one of the keys along the virtual keyboard (see screenshot on page 58), or choose Load Groove from the Load menu. Once you do, you can then audition single patterns, or palettes, which are collections of similar patterns that you can use to build a song structure. Patterns are generically labeled with the groove name followed by a number. Descriptive names such as “intro” or “chorus 1/2-time” would be more helpful, but it’s easy enough to sort through a palette to find the building blocks for a drum track. John Krogh

Here’s Steinberg Groove Agent with its edit section revealed, where
you can mix sounds, insert snapshots into memory, and access the
setup page. The big slider on top selects musical genres; the one
just below it varies how busily the drummer plays.

Digidesign Strike ’s virtual keyboard plays aptly-named verse, chorus,
intro, outro, and fill patterns relevant to any Style you select from the
browser on the left. The amount of realtime, automatable control over
the virtual drummer’s behavior is pretty mind-blowing.

SPECTRASONICS STYLUS RMX

Stylus RMX has a basic browser structure, where you choose a directory containing a Library, then drill down that into Suites, which are collections of related loops called Elements. There are no tags or search options, although once you find what you like, you can assemble a list of favorites. When you click on an Element, you hear it immediately, and it loads instantly into the eight-track mixer that holds an equal number of loops. So on one hand, there’s a definite element of trial-and-error, but on the other hand, that’s often led to happy accidents where I found some groove that turned out just right for the song. Craig Anderton

STEINBERG GROOVE AGENT 3

Groove Agent 3’s interface is really fun, and favors songwriters. Rather than searching for grooves and loops, you use a slider to select a musical genre (see above left), then find a style in that genre using a drop-down menu. Groove Agent then loads suitable grooves and loops, and what’s cool about these is that they’re fluid: You can vary the complexity with a slider, add fills manually or automatically, allow random fills, add accents, and so on. Think of it this way: You’re working with a drummer who listens when you say “I want it simpler for the verse, more complex for the chorus, and a big fill going into the solo.” You won’t find attribute tags, favorites lists, or other ways to locate grooves: All the groovitude is built into the “under-thehood” algorithms that vary the selected patterns. The same basic process applies to the Percussion Agent and Special Agent modules, which use digital audio loops instead of the more usual process of triggering drum hits with MIDI. GA3 has two modes, Classic (which uses the Groove Agent only), and Dual (which allows loading two of the three Agents simultaneously). There are some interface differences between the two modes, but being able to play different grooves from different “Agents” against each other is cool. Craig Anderton

SUBMERSIBLE MUSIC DRUMCORE 2.5

DrumCore is unique in this roundup because it’s not a plug-in — it’s a standalone program that lets you ReWire audio into your main recording software (see screenshot on page 56). DrumCore’s loop librarian is a single-window affair that can help you find the drum groove you need quickly, whether by name or by auditioning. Since DrumCore’s add-on DrummerPacks are recorded by celebrity drummers, one way of filtering the data is by the drummer’s name — very cool if you’re hip to the work of a particular musician. You can also search by style, and if you’ve got several DrummerPacks installed, you’ll have a very useful range of styles from which to choose.The individual grooves within each style or DrummerPack are evocatively named, but if you want to be sure you’ll find (for example) all the 12/8 shuffles, then just click on the “More” button and select what you’re looking for in the drop-down menus that appear on the right side of the screen; everything in the browser that doesn’t match your criteria will be italicized and grayed-out, making it easy to spot your quarry using the menus. By entering your own descriptions into the database, you can get more specific still. Once you’ve selected a groove, the “Results” window displays icons that represent the groove variations, in audio and MIDI format. The variations are labeled according to their suitability for verses, choruses, breakdowns, and fills, so it’s easy to flesh out a song’s structure. Just click on an icon to hear the groove, and dial in the tempo with the BPM slider; red tempos are considered out of range while the black tempos are optimized for the particular groove. I think most of the grooves sound excellent even when pushed into the red zone a bit. Ernie Rideout

Submersible Music DrumCore’s organization tree goes from
famous drummer (top left) to styles that cat recorded (top right) to
song section parts within that style (bottom). Draggable icons are
square for main section audio files, diamond-shaped for audio files
meant as fills, and circular for MIDI files you could export and edit
note-by-note.

TOONTRACK EZ DRUMMER

Building a drum track is simple: Browse through the included MIDI patterns, dragging and dropping ones you like from EZD’s browser into your host sequencer as you go. Patterns are organized by feel (e.g., shuffle, straight, 4/4 with 6/8 feel, etc.) and further categorized by style such as Funk/Rock, Ballad, Jazz/Fusion, and so on. In each category you’ll find a healthy number of singlebar “grooves,” each of which is played with a variety of hi-hat and ride cymbal variations. These are a boon for creating drum parts that build and support each section of a song in a natural way. [For late-breaking news on Toontrack’s flagship Superior Drummer 2.0 and the associated EZ Player Pro MIDI file player, see page 64. —Ed.] John Krogh

XLN AUDIO ADDICTIVE DRUMS

Addictive Drums (AD) includes a good selection of meticulously multisampled drums and a hefty library of beats in the form of MIDI clips. You can audition beats in the AD browser (either at the beat’s suggested tempo, which is displayed, or at host tempo) by clicking the large play button in AD’s Beats window. Here, beats are grouped intelligently in bundles and songs, and you can filter the display to material in a given category, such as Hard Rock or Blues. You can also decide whether the display shows “main” beats, fills, or both.

The beats are labeled “Straight” or “Swing” (meaning swing sixteenths), and some beats in 3/4 and 6/8 time are included. Closely related variations are easy to find — for instance, under the Swing Beat 002 category in the browser you’ll find 19 beats with descriptions like “16th HH Closed (Clean),” “16th Ride (w Ghostnotes),” and “8th HH Open (Clean).” The Song groups (25 of them in all) typically include four beats, labeled “Bridge,” “Chorus,” “Middle8,” and “Verse” — in other words, bonehead-clear suggestions for what parts of a song you should use them in. The Fill categories are grouped with separate lists for one-beat, two-beat, three-beat, and four-beat fills. Jim Aikin

CAKEWALK SESSION DRUMMER 2

You can use SD2’s transport buttons — play, stop, return to the beginning, and repeat — to play drum parts into your song. Although clicking on pattern names in the GUI will play them, this is solely for auditioning.

You can also drag-and-drop the patterns that load with the program into a MIDI track. As these are MIDI “groove clips,” you can roll them out for as many repetitions as you like. Drag-and-drop works in the other direction, too: You can drag a MIDI file from the desktop, a Sonar track, or any other source into a slot in SD2. This replaces whatever pattern was previously in the slot, and the only thing to watch out for is that if the old pattern had, say, eight bars, and the new one has four and is set to repeat, you’ll hear four bars of drums followed by four bars of leftover silence from the old pattern. To avoid this, right-click on the pattern button and choose “unload” to clear the old pattern.

You can trigger the drum program’s eight patterns from a MIDI keyboard, play individual hits from a keyboard or other MIDI controller while recording, or play drums over a loop that’s repeating. Craig Anderton

DIGIDESIGN STRIKE

The hub of Strike’s user interface is an onscreen keyboard, which you can play from a connected MIDI keyboard. The keyboard stays visible no matter which of Strike’s window pages you’re on, and has a selector for two modes: in Kit mode, the keys play single drum hits; in Style mode, they play patterns. You know those buttons on arranger keyboards that tell the rhythm section to play main sections, fills, intros, and endings? Strike thinks kind of like that, only a few notches more sophisticated.

Once you’ve loaded a Style or Setting from the browser, different octaves of white keys are organized to play patterns for verses, bridges, or choruses. Depending on the octave, black keys trigger one of three things: intros that lead into a white-key pattern, fills, or outros that stop all playback once they’re done. You can even decide whether a fill plays the instant you press a key, waits for the next measure, or sounds only as long as you hold the key. Keeping with the “keyboardist’s brain” theme, the best way to record a drum part for a full song is to play it in: Do a couple of rehearsal runs to get your pattern transitions and fill triggering tight, then hit Pro Tools’ record button and do a take. You get the best of both worlds: some of the “live factor” of finger-drumming, but with Strike’s expertly-played patterns grooving like a real drummer. Stephen Fortner

CAKEWALK SESSION DRUMMER 2

Altering the feel, swing, and other elements of a rhythm part is done in the Sonar MIDI track driving SD2 — there are no such controls in SD2 itself. Typically, the workflow would go as follows: First, choose your patterns. Second, string them together into a MIDI track by triggering them from a keyboard. From there, treat SD2 as a tone module as you refine the track using Sonar’s sophisticated MIDI editing.

Note that SD2’s grooves were played by a human drummer, so there are slight timing and dynamic differences that can really help a part “breathe.” If you want it tighter, of course, you can quantize notes in Sonar. Craig Anderton

 

Because Cakewalk Session Drummer 2 is skinnable, the drum pictures have been user-modified to show the MIDI note numbers that play them from a keyboard or pad controller. You select rhythm patters with the buttons labeled A–H at the top.

DIGIDESIGN STRIKE

Strike’s Main page is divided into Style, Kit, and Mix areas, each giving you broad-brushed control of Strike’s sound. There are also full control pages with the same names, and these let you go a lot deeper. Almost every variable of how real drummers play 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 sample-switching that I’ve ever heard. No less than three knobs affect time issues: 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 Timing locks up or turns loose individual downbeats: for example, you could make beats 2 and 4 skin-tight while leaving more funky slop in the rest of the pattern.

The centerpieces, though, are the Intensity and Complexity sliders. When real drums are hit harder, they don’t just get louder, but their harmonics change, and Intensity nails this. Complexity is the slider you wish you could implant in your real drummer’s forehead, offering continuous control over how sparse or busy any given pattern in the Style sounds. It’s not switching patterns — it’s doing realtime groove surgery on the same one. Stephen Fortner

FXPANSION BFD2

Though you can directly edit patterns in a grid window with familiar pencil and eraser tools, the most fluid and non-destructive ways to vary a pattern are found just below this grid. They’re called Groove FX, and include knobs for swing quantize, “humanizing” for both timing and velocity, and a Simplify knob that reduces the pattern’s overall business.

With BFD2, Strike, Groove Agent 3, or any virtual drummer in which realtime knobs change how the groove is played, it’s best to do all the pattern-arranging from step 2 first, commiting it to a MIDI or instrument track in your host. Then, you can experiment with knob tweaks and record them as automation. If things go wrong, you can clear out the automation and start again, leaving your song structure intact. John Krogh

SPECTRASONICS STYLUS RMX

Stylus RMX has synth-like options (filters and such) so you can manipulate many of a groove’s sonic characteristics, and use the MIDI learn function for hands-on control of this stuff. That’s just the start, as Stylus RMX is flexible to a degree that’s hard to believe until you actually use it. The “Chaos Generator” alters timing, pattern, pitch, dynamics, and other elements. Exactly what gets altered, you ask? Pretty much whatever you want, from an individual time-slice (e.g., just the second beat), to combinations of slices of your choosing, to the entire loop. You can flag any set of slices you’ve chosen as an Edit Group, so you can do things like change the dynamics of a hi-hat part on, say, everything except hits that fall right on the downbeats. The only thing missing is an “official” swing function. Craig Anderton

STEINBERG GROOVE AGENT 3

Groove Agent is another plug-in that takes the approach of creating variations on an existing groove, rather than selecting a different groove. It does this with the Complexity slider, and other continuously variable controls, including Snare/Sidestick, Accent, Fill, 1/2 Tempo Feel, Random, Auto Fill, Random Fill, Shuffle, and Humanize. Craig Anderton

SUBMERSIBLE MUSIC DRUMCORE 2.5

DrumCore offers grooves at different levels of complexity that are easy to audition just by clicking on a different pattern icon. Its most unique feature is the “Gabrielize” button (so named because of a feature request by Peter Gabriel), which slices up and re-assembles the current audio or MIDI loop, in a fashion that’s random, but always hip and seldom unmusical — just click the button until you hear a variation you like. But there’s no way to tweak the feel, for example, if you should just want to adjust the swing. Instead, you’d simply find a different groove. If you create a MIDI drum track made up of Drum- Core patterns, you can use your DAW’s MIDI editing and groove and quantize functions to change it up.

Varying the sound of the kit is easy, as the Kit Editor lets you swap in an entirely different kit, mix and match samples from different kits, and import your own samples. Ernie Rideout

TOONTRACK EZ DRUMMER

Like in DrumCore, EZD takes the approach of letting you select different grooves, rather than giving you realtime controls for the same groove. Since the grooves get progressively busier as you go down the list, it’s easy to go for, say, a few more ghost notes or snare flourishes in your second chorus than in your first. A velocity knob lets you make EZD’s “playing” of the selected groove softer or more aggressive. Velocity info gets saved with a groove when you drag it into your host, so you can create a part that “plays harder” as your song unfolds. It’s a nice way to add dynamics without having to edit velocities note-bynote. There’s also a “Humanize” button that turns on EZD’s round-robin feature, so each time a drum or cymbal is hit, a different sample of the same drum/cymbal will play. The result is a more live-sounding performance. John Krogh

The kit panel (top) and mixer (bottom) in XLN Audio Addictive
Drums. To load a different drum into a kit, click its L button. Load and
save entire kits using the menu in the upper left corner. The fader,
solo, and mute buttons beside the individual drums control both the
direct channel and the overhead and room channels for each drum.

XLN AUDIO ADDICTIVE DRUMS

AD also takes the “just pick a different groove” approach, foregoing macro controls such as a “complexity” slider. If you want to edit a groove, you’d do this in your host sequencer, making use of whatever quantizing, swing, and groove template features it offers. Likewise, all of your added single hits, ghost notes, and so on are separate notes in the MIDI track itself. Sidestick and rimshot samples are assigned to separate MIDI keys, but (as in a real studio) they’ll be routed through the same mixer channel as the other snare sounds. Ditto for the cymbal bell and edge hits and hand mutes — all are routed through the same channel. Still, the fact that you get separate hand mutes for the various cymbals is an unexpected luxury, especially at AD’s price. Jim Aikin

CAKEWALK SESSION DRUMMER 2

SD2’s internal mixer is straightforward: Each drum sound has its own Volume, Width, Pan, and Tune controls. You can record moves for all of these as automation. Clearly, SD2 is designed to be more of a straight tone generator. Any sonic processing you do afterwards happens in Sonar.

Whether the drum sounds all dump into a mixed stereo out, or become assignable to eight outputs, depends on whether you select “First Synth Audio Output” or “All Synth Audio Outputs: Stereo” (respectively) when you first insert SD2 in a Sonar project. If you select the latter, individual stereo output tracks will be created automatically. Craig Anderton

DIGIDESIGN STRIKE

There’s a lot going on in Strike’s Mix page. 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 even facilitate surround mixing, as you can bus these to the Pro Tools outputs that feed your rear speakers. Since you can assign any instrument or mic pair (output faders for overheads, room mics, and even bleed from the drummer’s “vocal” mic are on hand) to any of eight outputs, it’s no problem to put your go-to 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 itself has a mixer! Every drum and mic channel has its own pair of insert effects plus a three-band 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 effects. Stephen Fortner

FXPANSION BFD2

BFD2 can export your drum track as either a MIDI file or a rendered audio file. For the ultimate in mixdown control once you get into your host, BFD2 can even render multitrack audio files. I feel BFD2’s audio quality, built-in effects, and mixing capabilities overshadow the more fiddly pattern-editing aspects of the program. The level of detail is stunning, with up to 96 velocity-switched layers on some instruments. For each drum, there are a number of microphone perspectives, allowing you to mix and process the kits with remarkable control. BFD2’s internal mixer offers four inserts and four sends per channel, with the ability to set the sends pre or post fader. You can also create subgroups and aux channels. BFD2’s effects range from utilitarian (EQ and compression) to more interesting choices (distortion, ring mod, filter mod, delay, bit crusher, and more), and they aren’t tackedon afterthoughts — they’re on par with some of the best third-party plug-ins available. It all amounts to a staggering degree of sonic control that’s unparalleled among software drummers. John Krogh

SPECTRASONICS STYLUS RMX

Each groove gets its own channel, and each of those channels has controls for level, pan, and four aux sends, as well as mute/solo buttons and an selector to decide which of the eight outputs the groove goes to. The aux buses feed a fine selection of “rackmount” effects: distortion, delay, reverb, EQ, modulation, and the like. You can also put these effects on Stylus’ master output. Remember those Edit Groups we talked about at step 2? You can assign specifc insert effects to specific Edit Groups — as many inserts as you have Edit Groups, in fact! So not only can you use Edit Groups with the Chaos Generator to mess with timing, you could do something like add a reverb splash on just the downbeats. Bottom line: Stylus RMX has enough MIDI control, effects, and aux buses to be a complete “rhythm workstation” in itself, presenting the final results as a stereo track — although of course, you can also use the individual outputs if you want to apply your favorite plug-ins in your DAW’s mixer. Craig Anderton

STEINBERG GROOVE AGENT 3

All three “Agent” modules let you send a channel to up to 12 outputs (you select how many you want), each of which has compression, 9-band graphic EQ, and a master volume control. Each of Groove Agent’s eight drum channels offers Velocity (response), Tune, Decay, Ambience amount, and Volume — curiously, there’s no pan control. Percussion Agent does have a pan control, along with Shuffle, Tune, Ambience, and Volume. Special Agent includes only the option to send the dry and ambience signals to different outs. However, it also includes Pre-Delay, and like the others, a Master ambience control. This isn’t just throwing on some reverb; it mixes in different amounts of room and overhead mics. Other than the overall amount, though, you don’t have precise control over these. Craig Anderton

 

Spectrasonics Stylus RMX offers exceptional synthesis options as well as mixing, looping, effects, a kit mode, and much more. The buttons numbered 1–8 select which of eight groove channels the controls are currently working on, and each of these has its own play button.

Toontrack EZ Drummer operates as a plug-in, but not standalone. Samples are loaded into RAM, not streamed from hard disk, so it can take more than a few seconds to swap out sounds or load a new kit. The payoff is that EZD doesn’t hiccup during playback the way some disk-streaming sample players can.

SUBMERSIBLE MUSIC DRUMCORE 2.5

DrumCore’s mixing is simple, and whether you get a stereo mix or individual drums on separate mono or stereo tracks via ReWire depends on how you set up your DAW tracks. Within DrumCore itself, you can adjust pitch and panning of individual drums, but other than that, mixing and sonic processing has to happen in your host. Ernie Rideout

TOONTRACK EZ DRUMMER

EZD’s built-in mixer lets you dial in the amount of direct sound you want of each drum, along with microphone bleed and room tone, so it’s possible to create a mix that’s very dry, soaking wet with ambience, or somewhere in between. Some EZX sound expansion packs provide an additional compressed room mic sound that you can blend in. There are no built-in effects; however, you can run EZD in multichannel mode with eight stereo outputs, so you can apply plug-ins to individual drums or mic groups in your DAW’s mixer. John Krogh

XLN AUDIO ADDICTIVE DRUMS

AD’s mixer is always visible no matter which interface page is up (Kit, Edit, Beats, or FX). You can tune and pan each instrument, add an amplitude envelope and EQ, and adjust the mix of direct, overhead, and room mics. As in a real studio, the cymbals are recorded only in the overhead and room mics. Bus sends with compression, distortion, saturation, and EQ are provided, along with two separate reverbs (with hall, plate, room, and ambience algorithms). For more sonic control and third-party effects, you can route any drum channel to a separate channel in your DAW’s mixer. In Steinberg Cubase 4, my usual host program, this required just two mouseclicks: First, I activated the output in the VST Instruments rack, then I clicked the Out button in the corresponding channel of AD’s mixer. Instruments that are normally close-miked are sent to mono channels, while the master, overheads, and room are stereo. Jim Aikin

CAKEWALK SESSION DRUMMER 2

www.cakewalk.com $229, $369, or $619 (as part of Sonar Home Studio XL, Sonar 7 Studio, or Sonar 7 Producer)

SD2 isn’t meant as an ultimate drum set, but as a useful sound module and inspiration generator that adds value to Sonar. Much of the time, Sonar users won’t need to reach for anything more complex. Though SD2 comes only with Sonar, you can run it in other Windows VST hosts.

DIGIDESIGN STRIKE

www.digidesign.com $299

Strike is the most keyboardist-friendly virtual drummer in terms of how it “thinks.” Also, the sheer variety of realtime controls over the virtual drummer’s behavior, not to mention how organic these controls sound, boggles the mind. Remember — if you want Strike, you need Pro Tools.

FXPANSION BFD2

www.fxpansion.com $399 Upgrade from BFD1: $199

Calling BFD2 a great virtual drummer is like calling a Maybach a “nice comfy sedan.” The sounds are exhaustively sampled and detailed, and the internal mixer could put some DAWs to shame. Its workstyle is on the techy side, but for ultimate control over your drum parts, it’s top of the heap.

SPECTRASONICS STYLUS RMX

www.spectraonics.net $299 base $399 with all SAGE expansion packs

Stylus RMX is one of those rare programs that doesn’t just live up to its hype, but exceeds it. It’s impossible to describe everything this puppy can do in anything shorter than a book. Though it’s got a hip-hop and remix-oriented rep, SAGE expanders and Kit mode take it to other realms.

STEINBERG GROOVE AGENT 3

www.steinberg.net $299.99

GA3 can be a tone module, an “intelligent” drummer that adds fills and changes based on your specs, or a generator of MIDI drum parts you can later modify. As such, it comes closest to being a “robot drummer” where you tell it what to play, and it comes up with a satisfying drum part. Actually, it’s three robots (Groove, Percussion, and Special Agents). Dual mode can combine any two of these.

SUMBERSIBLE MUSIC DRUMCORE 2.5

www.drumcore.com $199 Deluxe version with all celebrity drummer packs, $646

If you work by assembling loops, DrumCore is like the ultimate rhythm database, letting you hunt through, narrow down, and audition tons of audio and MIDI files with remarkable speed. It’s a standalone app with two ways to get music into your DAW: dragand- drop and ReWire. The celebrity Drummer- Packs offer some of the most musically diverse content in the business.need Pro Tools.

TOONTRACK EZ DRUMMER

www.toontrack.com $179 See next page for our first look at Superior Drummer 2 and EZ Player Pro.

EZ Drummer combines a wealth of patterns and feels with a great- sounding set of drums, wrapped in a deceptively simple interface. If you want to craft entire drum kits yourself, it’s a bit limited. If you don’t, but just want to write songs, it’s the perfect partner — quick, uncluttered, and, well . . . easy.

XLN AUDIO ADDICTIVE DRUMS

www.xlnaudio.com www.bigfishaudio.com $249.95

If you don’t have a drum booth but need to sound like a real drummer, Addictive Drums will fool most of the people, most of the time. Mixing options aim at realism, but distortion and compression can produce some rude electronic sounds too. Classic styles like country and Motown aren’t well-represented in the factory patterns, but for hard rock and funk, Addictive Drums is hard to beat. (No pun intended.)

Refer to individual product websites for detailed tech specs and computer system requirements.

FIRST LOOK: Toontrack Superior 2.0 and EZ Player Pro

  

Just as we went to press, Toontrack Superior Drummer 2.0 ($349, top) showed up on our doorstep. Unlike EZ Drummer, Superior doesn’t have any pattern-based features. It’s strictly a high caliber sound module and mixing engine. However, in the same box, you do get a program that lets you arrange and play grooves: EZ Player Pro (bottom; also available separately for $49).

EZPP works as a standalone drum performance sequencer, or as a MIDI “drum engine” running inside your main DAW. Hundreds of MIDI files are included for complete drum kit tracks as well as for individual kit pieces, such as hi-hat and ride cymbal patterns. One of several unique features is that individual instrument patterns can be extracted from a MIDI drum track, allowing you to isolate each element in the drum kit. There are some clever playback features, too, such as the ability to loop different lengths from each pattern (e.g., two beats from a hi-hat pattern and a full bar of kickplus- snare). This lets you shape new performances from existing MIDI drum tracks in a way that’s faster and more intuitive than working in a traditional sequencer.