Slate Digital SSD 5.5 Sale, what to get

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slash57

slash57

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Hi guys,

I just saw the sale, I'm curious to know if you can recommend Steven Slate Drums 5.5, or any of the add on packs.

Currently I have EzDrummer 2 (not too happy with that), GGD M&M and Invasion (I prefer M&M)

I'm looking for metal and rock drums mainly.

What to get? Are any expansion packs a must? Does it sound good without very deep mixing knowledge?

Thanks for your help :)
 
What don't you like about EZ2? The sounds or the programming functionality?
 
I'm just not that happy with the sounds, I know it's greatly personal preference, but with this sale, SSD is actually very cheap, so I'm looking for opinions :)
I just found e.g. GGD sounded much more "natural" to me. I know natural is a joke since drums are so heavily processed :D
 
:D exactly, everything is so processed these days that it is impossible to sound natural. What they should have done is also provide everything unprocessed and raw. Then you can do what you want with it and augment it as you see fit. Drums all suck nowadays. They have created this perfect quantized sample sound that few real drums and drummers will live up to. Kills the individuality behind music.
 
True dat.

I do highly recommend SSD however. Unlike SSD4, v5 has "unprocessed" samples / kits added to the factory library, whereas previous versions only had baked-in outboard-processed stuff. The latter was great and a main reason why so many liked the VI. SSD only adds to libraries and removes nothing when the VI is updated, so nothing is lost.

As for add-on packs, there are only 4, so if you can get them cheaply I'd grab all of them. They continue to work too even if you update to v6 or whatever in the future.
 
I got SSD because I was also unhappy without the ability to tweak within EZD2. I opened it up once, played around with it for 10 minutes, closed it and bought SD3.

I know it’s a big price difference, but man, I couldn’t be happier with SD3 and I haven’t even bought an expansion pack for it yet. I mainly wanted to print the individual drums to tracks into Logic so I could tweak the EQ in there, but EZD didn’t allow that. With SD3, I don’t even need to, the mixer section is great and provides all I need there. You can turn everything off and start fresh if you want. There’s aux tracks and everything on there.

You can also stack drums, so if you’re pressed between two snares, you can actually use two different snares (or any other drum) together.

The UI is a breeze after working with EZD2. There’s also another awesome feature, you can drop an audio file of a drum track into it and it’ll separate all the drums for you into MIDI. I haven’t used that yet, but that’s pretty damn cool.

I also have GGD, I’m not sure which pack, but it has the Reptile kit in it. I love the drum sounds on the last Periphery album and while the samples were great, Kontakt gave me a bunch of issues and I just gave up. I also had trouble getting the MIDI mapping to line up with previous MIDI files I made, despite what setting I had it on.

If you bought EZD2, you get like a $50 discount for the crossgrade, I think it ended up costing me $350. While I’m not broke, that was still a good size investment, (considering I bought a 50’s Classic Strat for $300....) but I have ZERO regrets about it.
 
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