I love, love, love Steven Slate. All his products pretty much are mix ready, and I love that you can drop a kit and make beats instantly.

However, all SSD are pre-processed samples, so I wanted to try some unprocessed ones, to get some real customization, and also a humbling learning experience about how to make drums sound like poo poo.

I spent two days messing with my friends copy of SD and MF, The $300 price tag always threw me off but after learning some key tricks, good lord its so worth it!

Here is a demo of the new kit I am working on, so much more powerful than before. I am unhappy with the snare, but I am getting pretty satisfied with most of the kit.

http://soundcloud.com/lascailles-shroud/new-drum-kit

Have you tried "Stacking" The Snare? SLATE will let you stack more than one snare in a given set at a time. You blend in a second snare to make up for the faults in the first one. Don't just leave both at the same volume, generally, or it doesn't work quite as well. But for example, you might add a tight snare to a big marching snare to get BIG and TIGHT on the same snare sound.

Also, If you are not doing this aready, process your drums just like a pro would in a mixdown and give each one it's own track. Many drum apps will let you do this. That way, in reaper, you get a track for each giving you TONS more control. You then bus all that to say BUS 2 and control the volume with one fader.

The, bus all of it to BUS 3, and on Bus three use a compressor at crazy high settings. Then blend in just a bit of this track to add punch.

I will often take the easy way out on demo stuff and just process all of the drums as one stereo track, but you can only get so far that way.

Here's an example of quick and dirty using only one stereo track for drums. I usually end up spending much more time on the guitars, but for important tracks, it's a good idea to set up a reaper project with the track per drum idea. You can always use it as a template once it's ready.

 111_GMC.mp3 ( 567.88K ) Number of downloads: 55


This post has been edited by Todd Simpson: May 24 2012, 06:39 AM

Software drums benefit from a bit of exra sauce as you know, per your KILLER vid about adding ozone to drums to give them some life. There is a new plugins set called the SOLID MIX SERIES that's part of guitar rig in the new KOMPLETE bundle and it has an SSL DYAMICS rack, and a SSL Bus Compressor, and several classic compressors as a bonus. These are emulations of course, but emulation of gear that has helped make great drums for decades.


http://soundcloud.com/techniqueswithtodd/spiffdrums-ez-drummer-with

Here is the preset in case you'd like to try it. It's a guitar rig 5 patch using one of the compressors and SSL dynamics.

 BIG_DRUMS.ngrr.zip ( 4.17K ) Number of downloads: 81




Give this a listen and see what you think. It

Getting there and sounding pretty spiff! It's maybe a tad of a stretch to think of software drums as "Mix Ready" but it's more than plenty for Demo work and such. But give yours a listen back to back against the track I just posted and the differences should stand out. Without some sort of dynamics/compression, the drums can sound less than MONSTER even with really great samples like they use in SLATE and SUPERIOR. The good news is, starting with good samples gets you much further from go!




This post has been edited by Todd Simpson: May 24 2012, 07:10 AM

Hey

I just messed around with Ezmix2 demo and this is result.
Metal Machine drums from Toontrack.

https://soundcloud.com/alfafirefox/my-drums-metal-machine-with

Is this a function of the software? I've just ave done this manually using the drumagog plugin that allows to trig a sound. I also use to add a second snare (or even two) when I record real drums to get what the snare is lacking.

I did it with Cirse's songs for example...

Good tune

Yes it is, inside SD2 you can set up a secondary kit to be triggered (X-Drum) whenever the corresponding kit piece is hit on the main kit. On the kit I used, there are 3 kick drums layered, 2 chinas, 2 crash's, and 2 snares. I ditched the two snares in that clip and have worked out a much better sounding one.