EZ Drummer \ Superior Drummer (or other Toontrack apps) Discussion Thread

When I took the dive into DYI and home recording I quickly discovered that the largest obstacle would be drumming. I'm a competent bass player that can fake my way though playing guitar, and I'm putting some time into learning keyboard\piano so I can MIDI other instruments into the mix. However, drums immediately became a problem. Real drums are expensive, hard to record, extremely hard to play for an uncoordinated goof like me, and I'm already on my family's last nerve with this whole home recording thing as it is.
EZ Drummer was the quick and easy solution to this dilemma. I dug into it without any knowledge about program drums, or Toontrack as a company. The effort has been quite a learning experience. I thought I would start a thread here on TB so we can discuss EZ Drummer, its big brother Superior Drummer, or any of the growing roster of products Toontrack offers. Thoughts, likes, dislikes, successes, failures, etc.
"Why not just use the Toontrack forums," you might ask? They stink. There, I said it. TB is the most robust musical community IMO, and also has the best (most usable) interface. So there.

 

My personal experience so far:
I went with EZ Drummer because it was highly recommended for non-drummers that want to get some beats behind their music. I won't lie, the price and size of it were serious factors as well. The full Superior Drummer installation can be a whopping 230gigs! That's before additional MIDI or Expansions.
Despite the EZ part, there as been a pretty steep learning curve to wringing everything I want out of the program. Having that many options is a good thing, but if I hadn't already have experience with more software than most people will touch in their lifetimes, and a few years of DAW experience, I might get lost. YouTube has been a life saver. Once you figure out the work flow of the software, it is very easy to put together a track that can be dumped to your DAW.
Toontrack is diabolically clever with the pricing and easy availability of their products. The MIDI packs are so cheap that it is hard to keep the hoarder instinct in me under control. The Expansions, which include sampled kits and MIDI tracks are also pretty affordable. With a good internet connection I can have what I want at the click of a button. The selection of things is perhaps overwhelming, and making sure you don't blow your money on downloads you don't need or won't use is tough.
Where I find that it falls short are in limitations that are because it is a simplified version of a more expensive product. The drum samples are compressed and processed, so they have a slightly sterile quality to them. I have to warm them up in my DAW with plugins. Superior Drummer has more natural sounding samples, but at a financial and storage cost. The pre-recorded beats also lack a certain amount of human quality, which is understandable. Having accents at the 2, 4 or 8 is super common in live music, but the tracks don't have that, and the "fills" are often way too long to be useful to just drop in. Because it is the EZ version, you also loose a little control over the presets or the processors that can be put on the drums. You have full range of that in SD. There is the possibility that I could get buried under all the options in SD, so it is a mixed bag to me. Finally, the song builder only lets you set the tempo once. That's nuts! Who writes a song with just one tempo? That can be adjusted in your DAW, but that makes setting the tempo while building a song in the software difficult to impossible. Or, what if someone just wants to use this as a drum machine and not bother with a DAW? They are stuck at one tempo. That is something I would like to see them improve on.

 

As a novice to this, I didn't know you could incorporate another party's MIDI into EZD kits. Is that done through the DAW? So as not to immediately derail my own thread, could you message me so places to find MIDI tracks that can be used along with EZD or SD?

 

I have a vague understanding of using my MIDI controller keyboard to write in EZD, but it is very clumsy. Or rathet, I am very clumsy. I knew you could use e-drums to write as well. I wasn't aware that you could dump some other MIDI file into a DAW to have EZD plat it. Good to know. There's another useful feature of the tool.

 

I use Ableton as my DAW since Live 9 came with my Focusrite interface. It took me a while to figure out its two stage interface. I just learned how to break up the tracks in the mixer of EZD into individual tracks in Ableton. That allows me to mix process each one on its own. That gives me back some of the functionality that EZD doesn't have but SD does.

 

I picked up the Doom\Core and Post Rock MIDI packs, along with the Jazz and Prog Expansions from Toontracks. I like the kits, but I don't love the midis. They are ok.

 

I can't play drums for squat. I wish I could. It looks fun, but I can't make four limbs do something different.

 

I didn't know about the difference in libraries. I will definitely pay attention to that.
Like I said, the MIDI pack\EZX thing is diabolical; meaning it is a very smart business strategy. That took me a few looks to figure out as well, and it is still a little confusing. For instance, the Prog expansion has MIDI, but the Prog MIDI says it is what comes with the Prog Foundry SDX. Meanwhile the Metal Machine and Post Rock MIDIs say they aren't what comes with the EZXs. They get you coming and going.

Most of the EZX packs are compatible to EZD 1.4. Do you think it is that big of a difference and do you think they will ever upgrade those?
I haven't ruled out crossgrading to SD someday. It sounds like you didn't use EZD first. Do you really feel like the full SD was worth it for you?

 

Explain the differences between the SDX and EZX packs to me. It seems like there is more happening with the SDXs than just some kits and a hand full of midi tracks like the EZX.

 

The interface is upgraded and a little cleaner. It has the song builder function, a different view of the drums, and a "tracker" tab that looks a lot like a keyboard roll for writing MIDI parts. I don't know much about SD2, so I'm not the best source. There are a bunch of YouTube vids about it.