When you hear the name Toontrack you might think of a low-budget, possibly pornographic Walt Disney rip-off animation company.  But they are in fact a bunch of Scandinavian wunderkinds who produce massive VST virtual drum kits.  They might also do porn on the side, but I think that’s pretty standard for Scandinavians (they love their scat vids!).

The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad found out about Toontrack years ago, during the mixing of Die Humpin!  We were pretty committed to using the built-in sounds from our Roland TD-6v drum module, which at the time (when properly tweaked) sounded better than almost anything else out there.  But then Toontrack came out with EZDrummer, and totally blew away the drum sample community (yes, there actually are people who obsess over drum samples).  So we quickly bought EZDrummer and remixed many of the songs on Die Humpin! with their sample sets, with varying results.

Essentially Toontrack had done something revolutionary with EZDrummer by creating an ultra-realistic VST sample set with a minimal RAM footprint and an interface that was simple and easy to use.  Plus, at the time it seemed cheap: around $150 for the basic EZDrummer program, which included their Rock kit, and then another $100 for each additional expansion kit, which now includes Nashville, Vintage, Electronic, and a host of others that can match just about any style you’re up for.

However, a few years later Toontrack one-upped themselves with a more advanced version of EZDrummer: Superior Drummer.  The interface is a lot more complicated, but with that comes much greater control over the processing of each piece of the drum kit, as well as the ability to mix and match individual pieces from the various EZDrummer expansion kits.  So, say for example you love the kick in the Vintage kit but the snare isn’t punchy enough.  With EZDrummer you’d have to load up in an additional instance of another expansion pack just for the snare (i.e., another VSTi on a different track, with the snare midi split out and sent to the new track).  But with Superior Drummer you can just load up a snare from the Nashville pack as an X-drum, and then load in a handclap from the Electronic pack, a single dry tom from the Twisted Kit, etc, all within the same VSTi.

Furthermore, you can now blend multiple kit pieces, so if you like the attack from a Drumkit From Hell metal kick, you can layer that over the warm low-end of a kick from the Funk pack.  Another critical addition is the inclusion of built-in effects such as compression and EQ, so you’re no longer stuck with the pre-processed sounds of EZDrummer, but can shape the sounds to fit your song, all within the confines of the Superior Drummer interface.

Unfortunately, Superior Drummer isn’t as cheap as EZDrummer, so it’s going to cut some of you home studio folks out of the equation.  We’re looking at $250 for the main program (although there are sales that pop up occasionally) and another $200 for each of the Superior-specific expansion packs.  My advice is to skip EZDrummer altogether, spend the extra cash for Superior Drummer (which gets you two pretty great and versatile kits) and then wait for sales on the EZDrummer expansion packs, which can then be loaded into Superior Drummer for a wide range of sounds.

So, how does it sound, you ask?  Well, it sounds great, but compared to Steven Slate Drums EX, you definitely need to put more effort into getting the kits to fit into a cluttered mix.  EZDrummer is already pre-processed with compression and EQ like SSD, but for whatever reason the samples don’t have the punch of SSD.  As a result, you need to add a lot more additional effects to the instruments to get them to work with your mix, which means you need to split out each channel to individual tracks in your multitrack program and use the included or 3^rd party plugins to sculpt your sounds.

And what you’re getting with Superior Drummer are unprocessed drum sounds, just like you’d have if you recorded a real drum kit.  It’s up to you to flex your mixing skills by using compression and EQ (which are included in the program), and to blend in the overheads and room mics to the appropriate levels.  They do offer presets for various styles, but not many (although preset packs are apparently in the works, with the Allen Morgan presets being the first release).

That said, these kits fit places that the Steven Slate kits would stand out, such as in acoustic-based music, jazz, hip-hop, or basically any other style of music that doesn’t involve a lot of distorted guitars.  For example, here are two clips from songs off our new album Boneslinky where the SSD kits just sounded completely out of place.

First is a clip from a new song from Boneslinky! called “You’re Special“.

We’re using a brush kit here, something not available with SSD, and one of Toontrack’s strong points.  Obviously a regular rock or pop kit would simply not work with this song, but the Toontrack kit fits in just fine.

Notice we’re only using the overhead, kick, and room mics here, just like you might when mixing a real kit for this sort of song. Also notice that no internal processing is available on a per-channel basis in EZDrummer.Next up is another clip from Boneslinky! from the song “Country Robots”.

Notice that the snare is just barely able to punch through this section of the mix, even with EQ and compression.  But the rest of the song is much more low-key and a punchier SSD-style snare would be inappropriate.  So, the tambourine helps to reinforce the snare during this section of the song, which is an old Motown trick.  The kick and toms, however, sound amazing throughout, and the hi-hat is very realistic.

The interface for Superior Drummer is much more complicated, and each channel allows for a multitude of built-in effects.Summary: Toontrack’s VSTi drums offer a few things not available with other sample packs.  First, you can get as complicated or simple as you want by using either Superior Drummer or EZDrummer.  Secondly, they have expansion packs dedicated to specific genres of music, so if you’re just into jazz you don’t have to blow a lot of cash on other kits that you’ll never use.  And finally, they offer some of the most natural and responsive samples out there.  The only downsides are that for heavier rock mixes you’re going to have to do a lot of work to get the sounds to punch through the mix (just like you would if mixing a real drum kit), and if you want to own the whole collection you’re going to have to shell out quite a bit of cash.

***

Electronic Drums in the Studio is written by Ryan Graham, producer for The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad. If you like this post check out:

ELECTRONIC DRUMS IN THE STUDIO: Good Enough For Phil Collins, So Suck Our Su-Su-Sudio!: A quick discussion on why we avoid the (figurative and literal) headache of messing with live drums in the studio.

Steven Slate is supposedly an actual guy who produces, mixes, and masters music for big label rock bands.  According to his website, his nickname is “Bang”, although I think that’s one of those nicknames that a person gives to themselves and then really hopes other people will start using.

The legend is that Steven Slate spent hours upon days upon weeks upon years meticulously crafting incredible drum samples with magical powers that would make any song a hit.  He put these samples on a CD and copies of that CD got passed around from top mixer to top mixer, each promising never to tell how their otherwise shitty songs got massive radio airplay.  But then some pimply-faced kid in Cleveland realized that the snare sound on the new Tool album was exactly the same as the snare on the new Linkin Park album, got pissed because he fucking hated Linkin Park, and blew the whistle before the Mixing Mafia could have him knocked off.

Defeated and almost at rock bottom, Steven Slate then had a brilliant idea: he decided to sell his sample CD so that everyone could use the infamous “snare 12a” and sound like Linkin Park and Tool!  “Why the fuck have I been giving these away for free?!” he yelled at the sky, “Stupid, stupid, stupid!!!”  And thus was born Steven Slate Drums!

For the first few releases, Steven Slate Drums cost a shit-ton of money. So The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad didn’t give them a second thought because we’re generally pretty cash-poor (but talent-rich!).  Recently SSD released the EX series, which basically broke up the Platinum series into smaller chunks so that you could buy just the kits and samples you really wanted and thus pay a lot less.  And even more recently there were a flurry of deals where you could pick up the whole shebang for about $150, and that’s where The Flute Squad met Steven Slate Drums 3.5, taking advantage of a hot deal like a frat boy does to a drunk chick at last call.

I’d been using Toontrack’s Superior Drummer exclusively for our drum tracks on Boneslinky! I was having trouble getting the drums in the hard rock songs to sit in the mix properly.  They sounded a bit thin for that style of music and the bass drums especially didn’t have a lot of low-end punch.  While Toontrack offers plenty of ways to tweak the samples with EQ and compression, SSD promised that I wouldn’t have to mess with all of that crap.  According to them, I’d just drop their preconfigured kits (many of which are supposed to sound like famous bands’ drums) into the mix, and all of the sudden our songs would sound awesome.  To be honest, this isn’t too far from the truth!

First things first: installation and activation.  They shipped me a few CDs and a keycode.  You really have to follow the directions on the installation carefully, since it’s not quite as automated as most software installations.  SSD 3.5 runs through Kontakt, which apparently a lot of people don’t like, although I’m not sure why.  Regardless, you have to install Kontakt separately from the samples, and you absolutely have to install everything into the proper directories, or else Kontakt won’t find the samples or kit presets.  So not the easiest installation, but in the end everything was fine.

To get it working, you drop the Kontakt VST into an audio track in your host software (we use Sonar 8.5), then you point your MIDI drum track to that audio track. I find it easiest to load up a preset kit from within Kontakt, and then start replacing the samples.  I tend to like the Modern Zep kit, for example, so I’ll load that up and then layer in another snare, or swap out the kick for another kick, add more room to the hi-hat, etc, as needed for the mix.

I don’t particularly like any of the preset kits that they’ve provided, but I do love the individual instruments that make up the kits and actually agree with the marketing hype that you really don’t have to do much tweaking to get them to sound good in a hard rock mix.  I’ve only been doing a few dBs of boost at around 65Hz on the kick to bring out the thump, reducing 200Hz on the entire kit to get rid of some mud, adding a few dBs of shelf at 10k to add some sparkle, and then putting on a little compression to glue it all together.  Granted, it takes me a while to put together a kit for each song, but so far I’ve always found at least one sample for each instrument that works in the mix with minimal EQ or compression.

That said, I absolutely do not like these samples for anything other than hard rock, metal, or pop.  The sounds are very pre-processed and have a hi-fi sound to them that doesn’t work at all in a jazz, folk, or acoustic rock song.  Basically they work great for any kind of song where the drums are fighting for space in the mix, but in a more open, bare song, they stand out like a sore thumb.  In those situations I’m still using Toontrack’s kits.

Here are some sound samples, both within a mix and of the drums by themselves:

Steven Slate Drums EX 3.5 is a great sounding drum VST and is perfect for anyone who doesn’t want to spend a ton of time futzing with drum sounds on hard rock, metal, or pop mixes.  You just drop the kits in and they pretty much mix themselves with full, punchy results.  But if you need samples for more low-key types of music, your best bet is to look elsewhere.

***

Electronic Drums in the Studio is written by Ryan Graham, producer for The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad. If you like this post check out:

Electronic Drums in the Studio: Good Enough For Phil Collins, So Suck Our Su-Su-Sudio!: A quick discussion on why we avoid the (figurative and literal) headache of messing with live drums in the studio.

For Die Humpin!, Super Galactic Space Banana, and Boneslinky! (coming soon) the Flute Squad exclusively used samples for every drum track. I know it’s hard to believe, but when we first started out we too were young, dumb, and actually owned a regular ole drum kit. We managed to get some decent recorded sounds out of it, but when we switched to an electronic drum kit for our live shows (to reduce stage volume and setup time), Captain Mediocrity famously used a flaming chainsaw to cut the acoustic drum kit in half during our set on Showtime at the Apollo (we were never asked back.)

The post-real-drums-era was born and now we only record the MIDI data for our drums tracks. A Roland TD-6v kit is used, and we lay down basic live tracks with drums, guitar, bass, and scratch vocals to create an energetic foundation for the song. The MIDI data from the drums can then be assigned to any sample set available; it could even be used to play a piano!

The advantages to recording with an electronic kit are two-fold:

1. Each part of the kit (snare, bass, cymbals, etc) can be edited separately on a note-by-note basis for volume and timing. So if you flub a few hits here and there in an otherwise perfect take, fixing the mistakes is as simple and deleting or moving the faulty MIDI notes in your software.

1. Each part of the kit can be switched out with a different drum in the mixing process. So if you decide after adding in 20 layers of guitars that the snare sound is no longer cutting through the mix, you can just choose a different snare from your sample set that sits better. This is way better than the traditional method of adding tons of EQ and compression.

When Die Humpin! was being recorded there weren’t a lot of affordable VSTi (virtual instrument) drum kits available. Now, three years later, there are a whole bunch of great ones in the $50-$200 range. So you can literally have hundreds of different drums to choose from when assembling your virtual drum kit, for less than half the cost of a moderately decent acoustic kit.

After so much praise and hate-mail that came from our Your Big Amp Is Annoying series (seriously, read the comments) we decided to write a little bit about how we use our gear in non-live situations. In upcoming posts of Electronic Drums in the Studio we’ll review various drum VSTi’s such as Steven Slate EX and Toontrack’s Superior Drummer, and will also give you some tips on how to get the best results from an e-drum setup.