Toontracks ez drummer
Do this with the remaining drums as desired, but you probably want to keep the toms, overheads and room mics as stereo. To do this, assign channel 1 in EZD to BOTH the kick and snare, pan them hard left and right in EZD's mixer, then you can route output 1 and 2 separately to different Reason mix channels, one for the kick, the other for the snare. You can can force individual drums to mono to effectively get more outputs. So for the kick drum, you can assign channel 1 in the EZD mixer to the kick, and then route the stereo output pair of 1 & 2 to a Reason mix channel. The easiest way to think of it, is that each numbered output channel in EZD corresponds to one stereo output pair in Reason. So if the kick drum channel is assigned to output 1 (EZD default), it's actually outputs 1 and 2 that contain the kick drum signal. Keep in mind that even though the EZdrummer mixer may show a channel as mono (the kick drum channel, for example), it's still treated as a stereo pair in terms of outputs. Just make sure it covers your specific needs and that it's suitable for your workflow before buying.At the moment, Reason only supports 8 stereo outputs for VSTs, so you won't be able to take advantage of all 16 stereo pairs provided by EZdrummer, but the 8 stereo outs should be enough in most cases. It has surpassed my expectations and I highly recommend it for the type of use I've explained above. To sum it up I'm quite impressed by EZ Drummer. This is a serious shortcoming in EZ in my opinion but with the right pads it's reasonably easy to work around and I guess Toontrack needs to save some features for the more expensive Superior. So if you want to lay out the drum kit in a specific way on your pads you will need to make sure you can change midi-channels on your pads. It's also worth mentioning that unlike Superior you can't change midi-channels inside EZ. It didn't matter much to me though as our plan was never to use the editor. I'm sure it could work fine for copy/pasting 3x vers/chorus + bridge for a 3min pop song but anything more ambitious and it seems rather useless to me.
Very fiddly to use, very limited control with tiny areas to work on. I've not used the editor part of EZ much but I've tried it briefly and it seemed very poorly designed to me. Many of the presets in EZ are great though, if a little heavy on the reverb for my taste. They can still be tweaked quite a bit without sounding bad and they usually need a little work to sit properly in a mix.
#Toontracks ez drummer plus#
Plus I felt the sounds in the basic package felt a lot more processed.Īll the EZ drum sounds ARE processed though (unlike Superior which isn't processed) but for the most part not OVER-processed. The sounds in some of the expansion packs were a much better fit for what we needed with the Southern Soul pack being a personal favourite of mine. We did however NOT use the sounds included in the basic EZ package. But as long as the general groove worked it was worth the effort. Velocity has the hardest part to get right using pads so I had to do quite a bit of midi-editing to fix the odd hits that triggered too low or too hard. Basically we tried to keep things as "real" as possible and not nailed to a grid. We did quantize some tracks but only very lightly.
Nothing programmed, no preset rythms (but I doubt there's any preset packages with anything resebling the rythms we used, mostly odd signatures like 7/8, 5/4, etc.). We played all the EZ drum tracks "live" using pads.
Or at least that's the hardest thing to get right. Getting the cymbal dynamics right on softer songs is the part where EZ fails in my experience. One little trick that made EZ partly usable on almost any song was to re-record only the cymbals with real ones. The softer, more organic/open songs didn't work so well with EZ, or at least we couldn't make them work good enough. Generally the tracks we kept were the busier tracks with tight rythm sections and huge arrangements. Many of the tracks turned out so great that we kept the EZ version and never bothered with real drums. I got this for a prog rock studio project where the idea was to use it for composing/arranging and then re-record the songs properly with a real drum kit.