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.
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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.