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dewdman42 wrote:Thanks a lot. I will check that out. I ended up buying Steven Slate Platinum on his birthday, so I will also be dissecting it a little closer under the microscope to see if I can emulate the sound direction in SD. Or maybe I'll just layer these two drums together and get what I need.

BTW - You can turn down the overhead and ambient mics in SSD too.

When I turn down the Room mix in SSD and just listen to the Direct mic I still here some qualities that resemble a room mic. Something akin to the Mono mics that are available in Superior Drummer 2.

SD2 Metal Foundry really sounds like what you get when you mic a kit and throw up all the channels in a control room to me. SSD sounds more processed but I like the attitude of the Slate Kits and I often use the samples and layer the kit with SD2 as you are thinking about doing.

KEVORKIAN wrote:

dewdman42 wrote:Thanks a lot. I will check that out. I ended up buying Steven Slate Platinum on his birthday, so I will also be dissecting it a little closer under the microscope to see if I can emulate the sound direction in SD. Or maybe I'll just layer these two drums together and get what I need.

BTW - You can turn down the overhead and ambient mics in SSD too.

When I turn down the Room mix in SSD and just listen to the Direct mic I still here some qualities that resemble a room mic. Something akin to the Mono mics that are available in Superior Drummer 2.

SD2 Metal Foundry really sounds like what you get when you close mic a kit and throw up all the channels in a control room to me. SSD sounds more processed but I like the attitude of the Slate Kits and I often use the samples and layer the kit with SD2 as you are thinking about doing.

I believe his direct sound is not "ambient" per say but its definitely not unprocessed. That is the whole point of getting SSD. each hit is goign through some secret combination of EQ, compression, probably gating and I have a feeling a gated verb is in there too..but not sure. It doesn't sound ambient per say...but it sounds like it would sound in the studio if you took took the direct mic and engineer it the way he does. LOL.

Anyway, I'm with you totally on the advantages of SD2 in terms of flexibility, and sheer realism. It sounds more like what I would expect to hear if a drummer was sitting next to me playing. SSD is more about getting that elusive engineered rock drum sound....and I can't wait to use it.

dewdman42 wrote:I believe his direct sound is not "ambient" per say but its definitely not unprocessed. That is the whole point of getting SSD. each hit is goign through some secret combination of EQ, compression, probably gating and I have a feeling a gated verb is in there too..but not sure. It doesn't sound ambient per say...but it sounds like it would sound in the studio if you took took the direct mic and engineer it the way he does. LOL.

Anyway, I'm with you totally on the advantages of SD2 in terms of flexibility, and sheer realism. It sounds more like what I would expect to hear if a drummer was sitting next to me playing. SSD is more about getting that elusive engineered rock drum sound....and I can't wait to use it.

Totally... Just so you know, I'm not saying you should use SD2 over SSD in any way. It's all about what gets you that sound on a given day. I love the Slate drums too. I was writing to an Addictive Drums loop earlier today

I'm a crackwhore for Drum Instruments, basically.

I was just checking out the different paks. They seem to be mostly different EQs of the same kits. For example, the Pantera kit in EX Expansion Metal and More seemed to be the same kit as in the Dreamday kit in Essential Rock Pop Volume 2-- different balance and EQ.

Maybe Pantera and Dreamday have more in common than I thought they did, but something's not turning the corner for me here......

Please, please-- convince me otherwise. I'm wide open.

There is no question that the 40 different kits reuse a lot of the same kit pieces. I'm not sure right now how many actual underlying kits there are. The magic of SSD is the way he's processed them. You're paying for the engineering.

Frodo wrote:I was just checking out the different paks. They seem to be mostly different EQs of the same kits. For example, the Pantera kit in EX Expansion Metal and More seemed to be the same kit as in the Dreamday kit in Essential Rock Pop Volume 2-- different balance and EQ.

Maybe Pantera and Dreamday have more in common than I thought they did, but something's not turning the corner for me here......

Please, please-- convince me otherwise. I'm wide open.

There are a bunch of reused instruments. They didn't bring in 40 separate kits. The "kits" in SSD are essentially productions targeted towards different styles.

Thought I'd dig up this thread because Toontrack is now offering Steven Slate mixer presets in SD 2.0 for download. Thought that was a cool development, I haven't checked them out yet though.

http://www.toontrack.com/products.asp?item=66

Just went to DL the presets and turns out that the presets are only available at the NAMM show right now (???) Kind of strange but I'd imagine they'll be available soon...

Believe it or not, I get much the same sound from the DFH expansion in EZ Drummer. In fact, despite owning the default EZ Drummer Pop kit, the Vintage Rock Brushes & Sticks, Latino Percussion (which I snagged mostly for the extra drum stuff like tambourines that you don't get with the other kits) and DFH, I usually load up the DFH set for everything. It's the only kits with china crashes and a full complement of cymbals, and the snare is just amazing. At full velocity, it sounds like it's going through a serious compressor. In fact, I usually have to dial down the velocity to around 100 just to make it sound "normal", but that's awesome, because you can drag up certain snare hits to sound like you're whacking the hell out of the snare. The Pop and Vintage Rock kits have their place, but again, DFH seems to work on everything. For the price and the hard drive real estate, you can't beat the sound. My only caveat with EZ Drummer is that, when I bought it, I assumed you could trigger its MIDI pattern player via DP, like a real drum machine, instead of the "dragging the pattern to a MIDI track and looping it" method, which is essentially what you could do with Model 12 and a handful of MIDI drum loops, minus the built in pattern player. Still, the looping method's not terrible (better than my old method of using an external hardware drum machine to keep time!) and EZ Drummer serves its main purpose for me: awesome drum kits.

Armageddon wrote:Believe it or not, I get much the same sound from the DFH expansion in EZ Drummer. In fact, despite owning the default EZ Drummer Pop kit, the Vintage Rock Brushes & Sticks, Latino Percussion (which I snagged mostly for the extra drum stuff like tambourines that you don't get with the other kits) and DFH, I usually load up the DFH set for everything. It's the only kits with china crashes and a full complement of cymbals, and the snare is just amazing. At full velocity, it sounds like it's going through a serious compressor. In fact, I usually have to dial down the velocity to around 100 just to make it sound "normal", but that's awesome, because you can drag up certain snare hits to sound like you're whacking the hell out of the snare. The Pop and Vintage Rock kits have their place, but again, DFH seems to work on everything. For the price and the hard drive real estate, you can't beat the sound. My only caveat with EZ Drummer is that, when I bought it, I assumed you could trigger its MIDI pattern player via DP, like a real drum machine, instead of the "dragging the pattern to a MIDI track and looping it" method, which is essentially what you could do with Model 12 and a handful of MIDI drum loops, minus the built in pattern player. Still, the looping method's not terrible (better than my old method of using an external hardware drum machine to keep time!) and EZ Drummer serves its main purpose for me: awesome drum kits.

I believe it. DFH EZX is still one of my favorite packs especially when the snare is blended with one from the Nashville EZX. However, Metal Foundry is now my go to set. Have you checked out EZPlayer? That would give you a pattern player.

Armageddon wrote:Believe it or not, I get much the same sound from the DFH expansion in EZ Drummer. In fact, despite owning the default EZ Drummer Pop kit, the Vintage Rock Brushes & Sticks, Latino Percussion (which I snagged mostly for the extra drum stuff like tambourines that you don't get with the other kits) and DFH, I usually load up the DFH set for everything. It's the only kits with china crashes and a full complement of cymbals, and the snare is just amazing. At full velocity, it sounds like it's going through a serious compressor. In fact, I usually have to dial down the velocity to around 100 just to make it sound "normal", but that's awesome, because you can drag up certain snare hits to sound like you're whacking the hell out of the snare. The Pop and Vintage Rock kits have their place, but again, DFH seems to work on everything. For the price and the hard drive real estate, you can't beat the sound. My only caveat with EZ Drummer is that, when I bought it, I assumed you could trigger its MIDI pattern player via DP, like a real drum machine, instead of the "dragging the pattern to a MIDI track and looping it" method, which is essentially what you could do with Model 12 and a handful of MIDI drum loops, minus the built in pattern player. Still, the looping method's not terrible (better than my old method of using an external hardware drum machine to keep time!) and EZ Drummer serves its main purpose for me: awesome drum kits.

Ya'll have any snare fav's from that kit you'd like to share?

KEVORKIAN wrote:I believe it. DFH EZX is still one of my favorite packs especially when the snare is blended with one from the Nashville EZX. However, Metal Foundry is now my go to set. Have you checked out EZPlayer? That would give you a pattern player.

Well, the full-on EZ Drummer has a pattern player, plus a humanization control (which may or may not also work for any MIDI piped into it; I usually turn it off when using it as a sound module), it's just that you can't load a MIDI pattern into the player and have it triggered by MIDI beat clocks like a drum machine. In order to have EZ Drummer play the pattern inside of DP on sequence start and stop, you have to either drag the loop from the player or from the pattern browser into a DP MIDI track and loop it. Seems a little counter-intuitive, when you should just be able to trigger the player via sequence Start and Stop, but just using the patterns as loops inside of DP does actually work better than triggering my hardware drum machine (which, as I've detailed in other forum posts, somehow can't keep the beat straight inside DP unless I'm starting on Measure 1), so it's a bit of a trade-off.

cbergm7210 wrote:Ya'll have any snare fav's from that kit you'd like to share?

I usually either go with the Default Kit, which has the best-sounding kit overall, or "Metal 1", which has a bit more ambience and sounds a bit more scooped out. The trick with any EZ Drummer snare, as I've discovered, is to only use between 1-105 on velocity. For some reason, the snare isn't set up like a typical drum module snare; it actually changes characteristics the harder you hit it, rather than just simply velocity. From 105-127 you actually get three different snare sounds, and depending on what kind of sound you're looking for, you can actually set your total snare velocity to, say, 110 and get a consistently harder and more compressed hit. At 127, the hit is completely compressed and chops through the mix like a Coheed & Cambria or a death metal snare hit. I wasn't aware of this fact until I started examining the MIDI loops and noticed that the "regular" snares were hitting at around 100 on the velocity range. I loaded up a song that I'd done the drums using the "Black Kit" in MOR, put the drum track through EZ Drummer and got alarmed when it sounded like the snares were completely overdone, no matter which EZ drum kit I loaded, until I pulled down the velocity to around 105 and everything sounded "normal". Like I said, it's actually a nice feature, because you can either choose to sound "normal", and just bring up the velocity a bit on your fills to make the snare sound more vicious, or you can keep the average velocity higher and have a snare that consistently cuts through a mix without compression. From 1-105, the snare sounds natural and you can use it on anything.

Armageddon wrote: In order to have EZ Drummer play the pattern inside of DP on sequence start and stop, you have to either drag the loop from the player or from the pattern browser into a DP MIDI track and loop it. Seems a little counter-intuitive, when you should just be able to trigger the player via sequence Start and Stop

Right, check out EZPlayer pro:

http://www.toontrack.com/products.asp?item=27

The multi track Arranger would allow you to set up patterns to start/stop without dragging them into DP if you so choose.

Armageddon wrote: I usually either go with the Default Kit, which has the best-sounding kit overall, or "Metal 1", which has a bit more ambience and sounds a bit more scooped out. The trick with any EZ Drummer snare, as I've discovered, is to only use between 1-105 on velocity. For some reason, the snare isn't set up like a typical drum module snare; it actually changes characteristics the harder you hit it, rather than just simply velocity. From 105-127 you actually get three different snare sounds, and depending on what kind of sound you're looking for, you can actually set your total snare velocity to, say, 110 and get a consistently harder and more compressed hit. At 127, the hit is completely compressed and chops through the mix like a Coheed & Cambria or a death metal snare hit. I wasn't aware of this fact until I started examining the MIDI loops and noticed that the "regular" snares were hitting at around 100 on the velocity range. I loaded up a song that I'd done the drums using the "Black Kit" in MOR, put the drum track through EZ Drummer and got alarmed when it sounded like the snares were completely overdone, no matter which EZ drum kit I loaded, until I pulled down the velocity to around 105 and everything sounded "normal". Like I said, it's actually a nice feature, because you can either choose to sound "normal", and just bring up the velocity a bit on your fills to make the snare sound more vicious, or you can keep the average velocity higher and have a snare that consistently cuts through a mix without compression. From 1-105, the snare sounds natural and you can use it on anything.

+1 on all of this. I also like the default snare sound in the DFH EZX and I also adjust the velocity so that the majority of the hits are not at the top of the range because of the compression.

I also found that I like to load the DFH EZX into Superior Drummer 2 as there is a difference in sound that I have A/B'd and prefer. Metal Foundry is my new preference though as I like the realism with which it handles double kicks.

KEVORKIAN wrote:Right, check out EZPlayer pro:

http://www.toontrack.com/products.asp?item=27

The multi track Arranger would allow you to set up patterns to start/stop without dragging them into DP if you so choose.

I did not know that. Odd that they wouldn't just include this feature in EZ Drummer.

KEVORKIAN wrote:+1 on all of this. I also like the default snare sound in the DFH EZX and I also adjust the velocity so that the majority of the hits are not at the top of the range because of the compression.

I also found that I like to load the DFH EZX into Superior Drummer 2 as there is a difference in sound that I have A/B'd and prefer. Metal Foundry is my new preference though as I like the realism with which it handles double kicks.

Superior Drummer has more advanced controls and internal processing (and, possibly, a more-advanced sound engine), I think? I wind up recording all the drum parts separately in EZ Drummer, unless I'm scoring and wind up dumping my drum kits down to two tracks and mixing them with the internal mixer, so I end up Q'ing and processing the snare hits, kicks, hats, toms and overheads via DP, not through EZ Drummer. Still, hearing the kit in the context of the "live" mix helps make your instrument decisions easier.

The odd velocity business extends to the other kits, as well, except, that at least with EZ Drummer's default kits and Vintage Rock Brushes & Sticks, having the velocity up all the way doesn't necessarily make it sound more compressed, just a bit sharper and heavier. In fact, they kind of sound ugly to me unless I pull the average velocity down to the 105 region, where they sound "normal" and sit in the mix properly.