Overview - Toontrack EZdrummer 3įollowing on from the company’s venerable EZdrummer 2 product, Toontrack’s third instalment of the line hopes to build upon the two things that existing users will recognise: ease of use with great sounds. Clearly, we are now in place where rather than being a poor relation to a real recording, frequently, the drum virtual instrument could be considered a sonic benchmark by which the former is compared. Rounding off the ‘real’ experience, engineers can often route out individual channels to the DAW to employ their own drum mixing workflow. The acoustic environments in which they are placed can come from the place in which they were recorded (with many studios having developers as prolific clients), as can the signal paths through which they are recorded. The drums themselves often come in every size, material and period imaginable, with choices regularly offered in families of sub-products. Better still, players themselves can play into the VI using an e-kit thanks to fewer concerns about the amount of grunt the studio’s system can provide. Not only can parts be manually programmed by pad or mouse, but also they can be driven from vast libraries of MIDI covering a multitude of genres. Going back to the holy trinity of getting a good drum sound (playing, drums, and room), the modern VI has got it covered. Owing to these factors, it could be said that developers of drum virtual instruments had to wait a while for computer hardware’s ability to catch up to fully exploit the power of these incredible drum production powerhouses. Added to that, of all instruments, drums really do hate the latency introduced by slower processors. The main one was inevitably host computer resources, owing to the huge amount of RAM required to hold all of that meticulously sampled realism. Of these earlier instruments, it could be said that there were still limitations in their use. By having a choice of drums, as well as virtual acoustics and signal paths to play with, engineers and programmers instantly had the final piece of the puzzle when armed with the right playing or programming. That was a real or MIDI-driven performance triggering a whole smorgasbord of sampled studio favourites, as well as a smattering of exotic tubs made out of materials like carbon fibre or plexiglass. When drum virtual instruments (VIs) started appearing around the mid-2000s, engineers found themselves with a new tool that promised everything that real recordings sometimes lacked. In any scenario, most would agree that all real recordings need at least musicality (not necessarily technicality) from the player, and drums that are well maintained and tuned (not necessarily expensive ones). That’s not to say that many working engineers without these elements didn’t get great sounds with at least some of these in place, but more that without all of them, the sound’s potential was inherently restricted. The second option was to not have the best drum sound possible. With these elements in place, it was hard to get wrong. The first option was to record a great player on a well-tuned kit with decent cymbals, and add or record with a great sounding ambience. Not so long ago, engineers wanting the best drum sound possible were presented with a binary choice. The third incarnation of Toontrack’s EZdrummer promises to bring even more to its well-loved combo of ease and sounds, but what do these bring to your production? Three Experts give their verdict… In The Beginning…
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