Put down that gun, Toontrack!

[James Steele]

Ugh... so the window is going to close forever after 12/31 to upgrade my Superior Drummer 2 to Superior Drummer 3. I'd stalled till the end of the year just hoping Toontrack would have a sale. They didn't blink. Looks like I will. I sort of resent the expiration of that deal? Won't MOTU still offer you some sort of discount upgraded from older versions like 8 or 9?

[Michael Canavan]

Ugh... so the window is going to close forever after 12/31 to upgrade my Superior Drummer 2 to Superior Drummer 3. I'd stalled till the end of the year just hoping Toontrack would have a sale. They didn't blink. Looks like I will. I sort of resent the expiration of that deal? Won't MOTU still offer you some sort of discount upgraded from older versions like 8 or 9?

MOTU are among the best this way, it's the same price from ANY version of Digital Performer, unless they change it this time. Check it out next time they release an upgrade.

Oh and agreed, I don't like windows on upgrades, or upgrades that are more than 60% of the cost of the program new, especially if said company is always having 50% off sales, looking at you FXPansion!

[Tonio]

I'm in the same boat. Not sure I'll cave

I've been looking @ Realidrums for a quicker AI assisted quick mockup. Tweeking SD isn't always productive in a creative moment.

[mhschmieder]

Since it's a drum package, the aforementioned comparison to fxpansion policies is quite pertinent as it probably informs whatever competitive pressure is in play -- that is, very little.

For instance, I'd like to sell my entire BFD collection for peanuts (administrative costs and no else), now that I have switched to Toontrack, to free up disc space (better than deleting outright), but they charge $50 per product for license transfer, which is more than some of them cost new and more than most of them during Black Friday sales and other events.

Toontrack is in Sweden, and fxpansion is in Britain, so I don't know if both are bound at this point by European rules regarding fair practices on upgrades as well as license transfers and the like.

Fortunately, I haven't had to deal with this dilemma yet regarding Superior, as I did the S3 upgrade as soon as it came out due to it finally catching up to BFD's feature set with the new release (as well as sampling depth reaching near-parity). But I can see it being painful for a late adopter who might also have preferred to wait for the next rev.

[FMiguelez]

James, if you get SD3, you will be SO HAPPy with it! It's orders of magnitude better than SD2 in terms of sound and workflow.

You will be happy to have spent your hard-earned money so wisely.
You won't regret it (don't let Doris influence you. She'd be still using a drum machine if it were up to her)

[mhschmieder]

My tossing aside several thousand dollars worth of BFD purchases is testimony to how good SD3 is.

That, and spending a few hundred hours editing and re-tracking everything I had done with BFD3 to use SD3 instead.

[HCMarkus]

You guys are making me Jones for SD3.

But then I think about what great results I am getting with BFD3 and my wallet goes back in my pocket.

[mhschmieder]

Haha, I thought they were great results too, until I switched. BFD3 sounded like great recordings of drums; SD3 sounds like actual drums.

I liken it to the revelation of switching from Soniccouture Hammersmith to Vienna Instruments Synchron Steinway D this past weekend. The latter feels like I'm at the actual piano; it's that three dimensional and real.

The lucky thing is that the stock kits in SD3 are quite good, so you wouldn't necessarily need to add expansion libraries right away, and possibly not at all if you are in very specific genres and they're covered well by the main kits.

I use the main kits a bit, and am not sure if they include the ones from SD2 (which I surprisingly use from time to time, heavily edited), but otherwise mostly use Roots, Music City USA, and a bit of Vintage, plus Progressive Foundry.

I haven't made much use yet of the others, as they tend to be a bit more modern metal oriented and my current projects are more vintage sound based.

[Tonio]

aahhh man, you guys are killing me LOL

[monkey man]

... and Slate is $79 to upgrade, and that includes updated versions of all expansion libraries.

It's situations like these that make me glad I went with SSD.

[Babz]

In facing down the same gunman. Too many competing expenses lately, plus precious little disk space resources, may exile me to permanent SD2 Island.

In other news, NI is offering the complete suite of Abbey Road drums (Vintage, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, Modern) for $199 smackers. I already have it all as part of Ultimate, so does me no good, but thought I’d put it out there since these are some of my favorite drums ever! They seem to deliver faster easier better out of the box. They just work for me will very little fuss.

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/p ... ollection/

[mikehalloran]

Babz and His Monkeyness beat me to the punch. I have all three and find I use SD3 more than Komplete or Slate (didn’t turn down the $79 upgrade to SSD5 but haven’t checked it out yet).

[mhschmieder]

I turned down the SSD5 upgrade but won't go into details as I don't like bursting other people's bubbles. I was super-low on disc space at the time, so it was that more than the $79.

The Abbey Road Drums are great for finding which decade works best for a song's drums, and then I take that as a hint when searching for the best setup in SD3. The older vintage kits were eye-opening for me, as I didn't previously know that the bass drum had started out huge like an orchestral drum, then went small for be-bop, then big again for metal.

I don't like Kontakt for final drum rendering and production though as it is too hard to deal with all the articulations and mappings in a way that is highly visible, and also due to poor mic mixing granularity. But there are some well-recorded kits there.

[Babz]

There is also RealiDrums on sale for $99. Never tried the product myself, but seems a promising bang for buck and easy UI. Anyone tried this one?

https://realitone.com/products/realidrums

[James Steele]

Dammit! I paid up. $209 on credit card. Ouch. I kind of resent the time limit, Toontrack. On January 1, because it's discontinued, my past purchase counts for nothing and I'd be a new purchaser? I'm not happy.