EZDrummer 2 thoughts after a while...tell me yours.

[Steinmetzify]

Just wondering what you guys think now that you've had it for a minute. I DLed the demo last night as a drum noob and had a workable beat inside of 5 minutes. Seems pretty intuitive and straightforward.

Still digging it?

 

[Badronald]

Absolutely love it.

It's inspired me to write 3 songs in the past week.

Like you said, you can pull killer grooves that inspire within minutes. I actually wrote and entire tune around a groove I put together 1st before I even picked up a guitar! Did the entire drum track then wrote music to it.

Incredible stuff. I love it more than I thought.

I would recommend it to anyone.

 

[Steinmetzify]

Nice man...I know you were hesitant about buying it so this speaks volumes. Thanks. You pick up any of the extension packs? I'm more of a metal head than anything, and the MetalheadsEFX pack by Tomas Haake looks incredible.

 

[Badronald]

Nice man...I know you were hesitant about buying it so this speaks volumes. Thanks. You pick up any of the extension packs? I'm more of a metal head than anything, and the MetalheadsEFX pack by Tomas Haake looks incredible.

I have not downloaded any add-ons. There is so much to explore within the base package. I'm scratching the surface here.

I play big rock with riffs, acoustic peppered in for intros, big bridges, endings, old school with a modern twist. Not really any metal, but I'm sure the packs sound great and I will look into them. I need more percussion options for sure.

 

[Badronald]

By the way, I'm using it in Garageband. Not the greatest.

Is there a guitar program like Peavey Revalver that you recommend? In general the guitar modelers in Garageband suck so my demo guitar tones are rough. Muddy, generic, you know.

 

[Steinmetzify]

By the way, I'm using it in Garageband. Not the greatest.

Is there a guitar program like Peavey Revalver that you recommend? In general the guitar modelers in Garageband suck so my demo guitar tones are rough. Muddy, generic, you know.

Not a fan of the GarageBand guitar stuff either......Amplitube, Guitar Rig5 and Revalver are decent. I've had better luck with guitar plugins like the LePou stuff, and keep in mind 3rd party IRs are key.....got a really good one a buddy of mine did with his 5150 and an Avatar cab....immediately makes stuff sound better so if you go that route check out Redwirez for their IRs.

Also, since you're using a Mac, you should know that the iOS stuff that I use is being beta tested for a desktop application.....once that hits you're going to want that. I'll let you know when it jumps off if you want. Sometime in the next few months, probably. I love JamUp and BIAS so much more than any of the other programs. Infinitely tweakable and sounds awesome.

I know these aren't your style, but both of these were done in GarageBand with JamUp:

https://soundcloud.com/steinmetzify/gabdrumjammyraf

https://soundcloud.com/steinmetzify/gabsludge

 

[timeroo]

I have superior 2 and a ton of midi packs, they have been instrumental in a lot of song writing for me.

 

[Kapo_Polenton]

I'm still on the fence as to whether or not to try this out.. there is a certain pride in recording your own drum parts but there is also a certain relief when you can nail it on one take and actually compose in relative silence vs having to mic the whole thing and then wait for nobody to be home so I can track it....then go back in and redo certain passages or apply heavy editing..I'm torn! Question is, how "realistic" can you make this sound? By that I mean, how imperfect can it sound? As humans we can be on the metronome but if you were to analyze all the hits, you'd see some fall slightly behind or before the beat. We don't catch it necessarily through one or two bars but when something is just too perfect, that is what separates it from the drummer who actually drummed the part. Is there a randomize or other feature which renders the finished track a little more "imperfect"?

 

[Badronald]

The first track I "programmed" was not perfect at all. Its perfectly greasy. I don't know how, but it sounds great.
There must be some kind of random setting.

Not sterile at all. I would never use it if it was.

Of course, my demos are never perfect anyway. I just whip them together to give to my singers. There are mistakes on them. Nothing bad, but for me it's not an exercise in perfection.

 

[Steinmetzify]

I think I read today that there is a 'randomizer' in EZ2 that's on all the time.

 

[RustyMcTavish]

I'm thinking about buying this, I'm using BFD ECO right now.

Does it authorize over the internet and I'm good to go or do I have to buy a dongle of some kind?

Thanks

 

[Shask]

I'm still on the fence as to whether or not to try this out.. there is a certain pride in recording your own drum parts but there is also a certain relief when you can nail it on one take and actually compose in relative silence vs having to mic the whole thing and then wait for nobody to be home so I can track it....then go back in and redo certain passages or apply heavy editing..I'm torn! Question is, how "realistic" can you make this sound? By that I mean, how imperfect can it sound? As humans we can be on the metronome but if you were to analyze all the hits, you'd see some fall slightly behind or before the beat. We don't catch it necessarily through one or two bars but when something is just too perfect, that is what separates it from the drummer who actually drummed the part. Is there a randomize or other feature which renders the finished track a little more "imperfect"?

Most DAW's have some sort of function like this. I know Reaper has a "Humanize" function you can use.

Also, most drum samplers use some sort of round robin or "anti-machine gun" as some call it, where it will randomly select different similar samples so it doesn't all sound the same.

 

[Kapo_Polenton]

Ok, so the randomizer IS in fact on all the time now, I read that last night. As for the "humanize" function, looks like i could also do that within Reaper to double up on it if I wanted so that would prob go a long way as well. Remaining question, how does it handle snare rolls? Are there libraries of different styles or types of snare roll so you can go from less hard to med to heavy snare hits? So in other words, dynamics?

 

[RustyMcTavish]

Ok, so the randomizer IS in fact on all the time now, I read that last night. As for the "humanize" function, looks like i could also do that within Reaper to double up on it if I wanted so that would prob go a long way as well. Remaining question, how does it handle snare rolls? Are there libraries of different styles or types of snare roll so you can go from less hard to med to heavy snare hits? So in other words, dynamics?

You can download a 10-day demo from the Toontrack website.

 

[Steinmetzify]

Did it yesterday. This thing is a blast. I'd recommend the demo to figure out if you wanted to buy. I'm going to. More companies should do this.

 

[dfrattaroli]

I just finished the 10 day demo. It's really good in that you can drag a groove into the Song Creation section and it will identify other grooves that can be used for verses, choruses, etc. That's not really new as grooves are normally sorted in folders for verses, choruses etc. The GUI to actually create the song by dragging pieces in is nice but when you get down to it, you can do the same exact thing in your DAW. I like the "Tap" feature that will find grooves that match what you tap in. That's very helpful. The fact that the drum sounds are not dry when you are in EZD standalone is nice too since you immediately have a "polished" sounding kit out of the box. It is also faster when loading different kits and sounds that's a nice plus too. At $89 for the upgrade, I'll probably get it. But I'll wait a bit to see if SD3 comes out.

Dave

 

[Kapo_Polenton]

I'm going to be on vacation next week so I'll try it then.. I'll be interested to see if the drum parts for all the songs I have written and play, can be translated to EZ drummer. I know the beats should be straight forward but it is a lot of fills that I do that will be interesting to see. I wonder if the tap 2 find can also be applied to fills? If so I'm in, I 'll never be alone enough in the house to be able to let the drums rip and i'll end up having to use samples in with the mic'd tone anyway..

As for Superior Drummer, are the samples just stronger/better in that program that people tend to prefer it?

 

[fearhk213]

I find it an improvement over EZDrummer 1, and so far I really like it, but there are a couple of things I find very annoying:

1) You can add/subtract hits, but you're limited because EZDrummer2 decides where to add/subtract the hits. I suppose you could export it, edit within your DAW's midi editor, save it as a user midi loop, and then import it back into EZDrummer2. The workflow would be much smoother if you did not have to do this. Maybe you can and I just haven't figured it out yet, but if not, this was a pretty lame oversight IMO.

2) There are inconsistencies kit to kit using their add/subtract hit function also. For example, if you take a loop with X amount of kick hits, the placement of the those hits will be in the same spot whether or not you're using a kit with one kick or two. Makes sense. Now if you edit the loop to have fewer hits, for example, where the hits are subtracted from when using a two kick kit vs. a one kick kit are NOT in the same place. The result is it could sound perfect with one kit and totally whacky with the other. I ran into this last night. The loop I used had 48 kick hits, and I wanted it to take out every other hit. I reduced the hits to 24 and got lucky - the editor took out every other hit. I later tried the already edited loop with a different kit with only one kit, and the kicks where all out of place sounding. I decided to drop in a new unedited instance of the loop and edit it with the new kit loaded. When I reduced the hits to 24 I got the same out of place hits. I'm not really sure why it would do this, but it was very aggravating.

 

[crwnedblasphemy]

^^^^^ this

I agree with those. Did a song on the 10 day trial. If I bought, I would have to pay the full, as I don't have EZdrummer 1.

But, unless i couldn't figure it out, if you want to edit individual hits, you have to pull out the midi file into a daw to change it. Be nice to highlight a midi loop and change individual hits all in EZdrummer window. You can edit amount, or add hits, but seems like I can't drag/drop a hit on my own. It would be a nice option.

The fills are cool. and song creator is a good concept. I do like it, just wish their were a few more editing options.

Is it faster than my Addictive Drums? Yeah, cuz you don't have to search and search for midi fills, dragging and dropping them in to see if they work in a song. In addictive, you audition stuff in 1 single time tempo, then move it and hope it translates. This is the time consuming part...and then it isn't exactly the same, so you have to highlight, drag ride to hihat, etc. kinda a pain...where in EZdrummer 2 you have the powerhand thing. So that is a plus.

One more problem:

I did a song with 4/4 to 5/4 time sig changes, and EZ drummer doesn't recognize those changes. Only matches the tempo of the song. Kinda weird, so when you are using the EZdrummer window, the measure numbers don't match up.

 

[kasperjensen]

I have the programme, and the Music City expansion pack, along with some mix presets and MIDI library.

I don't think I could live without it.

Once you really get to grips with it, it's really great. YouTube how to multichannel out, so you can mix it in your DAW as individual channels. You can really beef it up that way.

I also use other samples underneath it sometimes...

All in all... A really awesome programme. I am still learning.

This tune is with that SD2 (I really wanna go back and re do the drums, as I have discovered a few new things

I am no expert by any means, but please feel free to ask about anything.