Today’s producer looking to create ‘acoustic’ drum tracks entirely in the box is truly spoilt for choice when it comes to sound sources, with countless impressive sampled-based instruments vying for their attention and cash. In this round-up, we’ll look at what we consider to be five of the very best options on the market, across a range of price points and complexity levels. Our selection criteria saw us focusing on the quality of each contender’s sample bank and included MIDI grooves, tweakability of individual drums and cymbals, mixing and processing features, and e-drum playability. The last is only of direct relevance to actual drummers, of course, but also reflects the overall depth of multisampling involved.
While guitars, strings, winds and other more nuanced, tonally sensitive instruments inevitably involve some degree of creative compromise in the pursuit of authentic results, the relative simplicity of the drum kit makes it easy to realise utterly convincing drum tracks in the virtual space. All you need is a great plugin with which to do it – read on…
Toontrack Superior Drummer 3
Representing the current state-of-the art in sample-based percussion, Superior Drummer 3 not only ships with a ridiculous 230GB of massively multisampled tubs and metalwork in up to 11-channel surround (recorded by engineering demigod George Massenburg, no less), but also furnishes you with literally everything required to produce mix-ready beats from start to finish. From comprehensive editing and customisation of the kit itself, to sequencing (a ton of grooves is included), big-console-style mixing and bleed control, and processing with a wealth of top-quality effects, it’s like a mini DAW for drums, running standalone or as a plugin. In terms of playability, it just doesn’t get any better than this for e-drummers; and you can even use it for drum replacement thanks to the brilliant machine learning-driven Tracker system.
A huge range of stellar SDX and EZX add-on kits is available, too, and it all adds up to the biggest, baddest, most extravagant virtual drum platform money can buy.
Full Toontrack Superior Drummer 3 review
Toontrack EZdrummer 2
Often, the considerable bells and whistles of Superior Drummer are far more than is required to get the drumming job done – indeed, they can be quite overwhelming when all you need is a tweakable prefab groove for your latest singer-songwriter project. For those producers, Toontrack also offer the more affordable EZdrummer 2, a sort of ‘Superior Drummer (very) lite’ that does exactly what the name suggests, making it a breeze to program and mix believable faux acoustic drum tracks, either via MIDI in the host DAW or using the onboard grooves and Song Creator system. Five factory kits are included, and compatibility with Toontrack’s ever-increasing range of EZX Expansions – covering everything from funk and reggae to metal and alt rock – ensures real longevity.
Full Toontrack EZdrummer 2 review
FXpansion BFD3
Despite being almost seven years old, FXpansion’s beautifully designed virtual acoustic drum studio sounds every bit as good as it looks, and is an absolute joy to play. The 55GB core soundbank nets you seven kits, recorded by the likes of Andrew Scheps and John Emrich, plus an outstanding library of MIDI grooves by a pantheon of session drumming divinity including Steve Ferrone (Average White Band, Eric Clapton, Bee Gees), Peter Erskine (Weather Report, Stan Kenton, Joni Mitchell) and Stanton Moore (Galactic, DJ Shadow). The roomy onboard mixer is well-stocked with professional-grade effects, and technical highlights include tom bleed and cymbal swell modelling, and a powerful system for working traditional drumming rudiments into your beats. Like its closest competition, Superior Drummer 3, it’s also expandable with a sizeable roster of excellent multi-gigabyte supplementary kits.
IK Multimedia MODO Drum
The follow-up to the superb MODO Bass combines ‘modal synthesis’ and sampling for the best of both worlds: the punch and clarity of samples married to the adaptability of physical modelling synthesis. The individual drums and cymbals of the ten included kits are freely mix-and-matchable, and the synthesis angle comes into play in the highly detailed real-time component editing – everything from the shell dimensions (24x28” kick drum, anyone?) and bearing edge profile, to drumstick and beater type, and left/right-hand stroke positions.
The mixer features an extensive menu of T-RackS- and AmpliTube-sourced effects, and you also get just shy of 1500 grooves in the usual styles (rock, pop, jazz, soul, etc) with which to trigger the kits. These can only be dragged out as MIDI files, however, not edited within MODO Drum at all.
Innovative, flexible and hindered only slightly by an overly laborious interface, MODO Drum impresses with its technology and sounds fantastic.
XLN Audio Addictive Drums
Sitting somewhere between the heavyweight Superior Drummer 3 and BFD3, and the lighter, more streamlined EZdrummer 2, Addictive Drums 2 strikes a well-judged balance of speedy workflow and versatility. Kits are bought as required from the XLN store, and various bundles are available as starting points. With each kit averaging around 500MB, the multisampling is comparatively shallow, but the samples themselves are top notch and there’s plenty of sound-shaping on offer, including the transformative Tone Designer, velocity modulation of volume, filter and sample selection, and a pitch envelope. Also notable are the per-channel effects (compression, EQ, distortion and more), two ‘Delerb’ (delay/reverb) send effects, and thousands of bundled MIDI grooves – although, like those in MODO Drum, these have to be dragged into the host DAW for editing.
Quick, efficient, sonically solid and immensely enjoyable to work with.
UJAM SOLID
Julian Rodgers loves the UJAM stuff, this is what he thinks of UJAM SOLID., “UJAM’s SOLID 2 Virtual Drummer excels at simplicity, we describe it as programmed drums for people who don’t like programming drums. If you want to dig in and tightly control the performance you can, particularly since version 2 introduced drag and drop MIDI and individual outputs, but it doesn’t offer so much control that it gets in the way of just dialling in some drums and playing some music. SOLID excels at natural drum sounds with understated playing offered by the included styles. Its counterparts HEAVY and PHAT offer more hyped sounds for rock and hip hop respectively. All three share a simple control interface which encourages playing the instrument in real time, changing patterns and performance parameters on the fly. Try it if you want creative results which get the job done without taking over the production.”
Slate SSD5
James Ivey took the Slate SSD5 for a spin and this is what he said. “If you want a big fat drum sound fast then Slate SSD 5 is not going to disappoint you. Right out of the gate the drums sound big and powerful and in a Rock or Metal track they are going to sit in just fine after a little tweaking. For my tastes however I found all the kits to be a little over processed. There might be a time when you don’t want the crack of the Snare drum to leap out and smack you around the face on beats 2 and 4. Just pulling the fader back is not going to change the fact that all the SSD 5 drums are very up front even when played back at a lower dynamic (MIDI note on level). Even the Au Natural kit, which I was hoping would be totally unprocessed felt quite compressed. It sounds great but it might be nice to be able to dial that back a little more. But hey, you would not book Lars Ulrich of Metallica to play drums on your traditional Jazz album, so who would you ask a sample set that is so obviously built to rock to do it either?
As I mentioned before CPU load and RAM usage with SSD 5 are very good. This package is not going to bring your computer to it’s knees every time you swap kits of change cymbals.”
We Test The New Steven Slate Drums 5 Drum Sampler In A Real World Recording Session
Is your favourite here? If not, then which ones have we missed? Let us know in the comments.