I have a friend who is looking for a drum module to accompany his guitar recordings. He doesn't really want to fuss with drum programming or midi maps much, just basically press play and go. He wants to be able to switch between regular grooves and fills easily as well.

Myself being a rap/electronic guy, I don't know much about this since I just program my own drums. I was hoping you guys could make some recommendations. How well/easily does Toontrack SD or EZD work for this kind of thing? Anything better than those?

 

Are you looking for legit or 'anything'? Legit - there's even 'freeware' - drumic'a by sennheiser, but I am not sure if it can run on Kontakt Player. Anything - Addictive Drums for rock and above, Superior Drummer for any high production, EZ drummer for easy-cheesy production.

 

Toontrack all the way for me Even the editor in EZ2 for example is a breeze just drop your midi in switch it around, add your fills without having to cut & paste. You can make a drum track no time.

SD2 better soundwise and many more options but the interface on EZ2 much more user friendly. Having both obviously great as you just write your track in EZ and use with Superior.

Have used most drum VST'is and for me personally Toontrack some way ahead at this moment.

AD2 great and a different sound but not as user friendly or adaptable and more expensive.

SSD4 don't like the interface, midi selections not so hot & loading kits is clunky. Some ok Kontakt kits but they often way to CPU intensive for my liking and is more difficult with your outputs etc. Kontakt imo not the way to go for drums but is all personal choice.

For the price when they have sales on I think it's a given. There were some a few years back that promised but never delivered.

Geist is fantastic for chopping loops arranging & other wierd things like that and not sure what V2 will be like but it FXPansion so it will be pretty good i imagine

BFD is a clear winner soundwise for acoustic type modules but the interface is buggy as hell, not friendly and takes a lot of Disc speed to run the huge libraries. If they improved the interface and you have cash to blow on a dedicated high speed SSD/HDD for your libraries then possibly but its pricey and for the difference in price I don't personally think it's worth it just yet. Plus some of the the libraries are huge so your gonna need one hell of a SSD

Not much else around that comes close imo to a combination of EZ2 & SD 2 but others will disagree & of course different genres then different things are cool

 

XLN Addictive drums or EZDrummer.

EZ is my favorite for its intuitive UI

 

Drummer on logic x would be so good right for this..
but considering you said VSTi clearly doesn't use logic.

 

You are 100 percent spot on. I was thinking the same thing. But yeah, he uses Sonar, which if i'm not mistaken, is Windows only

I thought Addictive Drums was somehow related to Sonar? No? I asked him about that but I haven't gotten a response yet.

 

For simplicity and what he needs I'd defo go with EZD2

Personally I use SSD4 for rock stuff. FWIW SSD dropped Kontakt ages ago and uses Slates own sampler.

 

No addictive drums is not related to Sonar but if you buy or subscribe to the platinum package you get addictive drums icluded with 3 expansions. If you buy the Professional u get one expansion. However they seperate companies and just struck a deal. AD2 will run on any DAW etc

Dimension Pro, Dimension LE, Rapture, Rapture LE, Studio Instruments and the Production Packs are not officially supported on Mac OS X Lion (10.7) hence Sonar platinum etc windows only

 

Last edited: May 22, 2016

Funny I was going to recommend logic x as well for the dummer feature. But yes, i was testing superior drummer 2 today and it is quite good!