Toontrack Superior Drummer 2.0 “The New York Studio Legacy Series” is a total renovation of the previous Superior engine. The Toontrack devlopers applied the same attention to detail and musicality as with the original version.

Superior Drummer 2.0 was re-worked for improved use with e-drums with increased efficient utilization of sample layers and better loading times. It offers MIDI tracks played by Nir Z which can be found in its new MIDI engine and arranger, EZplayer Pro, and ca also function in standalone mode through Toontrack solo. UK-based software developer Sonalksis has also loaded Superior 2.0 with a 5-band EQ, high and low pass filter, compressor, gate, and transient designer filters.

The interface is similar to EZdrummer with its handling and layout but it gives the user many new layers of capabilities to produce much better drum tracks. Superior Drummer 2.0′s samples were recorded by Pat Thrall, Neil Dorfsman, and Nir Z at Hit Factory, Avatar Studios, and Allaire studios, NY. The three have worked with artists like Meatloaf, Celine Dion, Nick Lachey, Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Dire Straits, Beyonce, Björk, Kiss, Joss Stone, Genesis, John Mayer, and Chris Cornell.

Features:

• Latest version of Toontrack’s Superior Drummer virtual drumkit software
• New internal mixer featuring bussing capabilities and built in FX5-band including EQ, high and low pass filter, compressor, gate.
• All new construction windows featuring ADSR ability to read all dfh Superior and EZdrummer sound libraries
• More effective use of sample layers and much improved loading times. Transient designer filters
• RTAS, VST, AU Plug-in

What are Users saying?

N. Schwartz “Malkyore”

These samples are amazing sounding the bleed is such an important part in making drums sound natural.

I use this in all my songs. It sounds great for every type of music, and if it doesn’t sound like you want it to, there’s probably a pack that exists that does sound right for you!

Click here to buy on amazon

EZdrummer was developed to provide you with the best possible drum-sample quality in a small, inexpensive plug-in format that’s really easy to setup. With Toontrack’s EZdrummer, you can easily drag-and-drop audition samples and build drum kits recorded with multi-microphone configurations. You additionally get a mixer window which allows stereo and multi-track routing into your host sequencer through a plug-in and contains presets for fast mix types and speedy sample switching.

With the second-generation “Toontrack Percussive Compression” (TPC), system requirements are minimal, which means it is a readily available virtual drum kit worthy of high-end studios, but accessible for the basement studio too. The EZdrummer sampler includes the recording and producing experience of Pat Thrall (Pat Travers, Black Crowes) and Neil Dorfsman (Dire Straits, Paul McCartney), the drumming expertise of Nir Z (Genesis, Joss Stone, John Mayer), as well as the engineering assistance of Toontrack’s own Mattias Eklund and Henrik Kjellberg.

Their blended efforts have made an in depth assortment of over 8000 MIDI files recorded at Avatar Studios, a 50-year old location which has been home to a veritable who’s who of award-winning musicians. EZdrummer is now Windows Vista compatible.

Features:

• 7000 sound files at 16-bit/44.1kHz equivalent to 5GB of uncompressed WAV files
• Instant access to more than 8000 MIDI drum patterns with pre-listening, quick browsing, and drag-n-drop functionality
• Same extensive layer depth on all drums and cymbals as in EZdrummer’s big brother – dfh SUPERIOR
• Ranges from entry level usability to pro handling
• Features multiple microphone control
• TPC II reduces system requirements to a minimum
• Operates in general MIDI

What Users Say…

Freddie Lamberte:

“For a working musician this software is a must have in ur arsenal. It makes ur life easy n cheaper than hiring a professional drummer”.

EZDrummer is a virtual instrument (says so right on the name). What that means is that you plug it into your favorite “main” sequencer program (FL Studio, Cubase, Mixcraft, whatever) and use it from there. Actually, EZ Drummer *does* come with a stand-alone program as well, but it’s mainly a virtual instrument. Complaining that you need to buy a sequencer to use it is like complaining that you need to have a computer or an operating system, or a disk drive, or a power outlet. Duh! That’s it’s nature, and it’s well understood.

The licensing is not *that* bad. Here’s what it is: you install the program from the disk, you login to their website and fill in some info including the “license key” that comes with your disk, Toontrack generates an automated email containing an authcode that is specific to your computer and your serial number, you type that in on your computer, and you are done.

The bottom line is that you can set two machines up to run with a single copy of EZDrummer. Then if you want to install it on a 3rd machine you have to de-activate one of the licenses that you had previously activated.

Click here to buy on Amazon

A lot of people say that quantization makes the drum track sound robotic.  The same people often manually edit their acoustic drums tightly to a grid and see nothing wrong with it.

The issue here, is that you shouldn’t be blanket-quantizing your track.  

Be selective.  Here are some things to watch out for:

• Quantizing for the proper note division: Make sure you’ve set the right note division in your quantization settings before you start.  Keep in mind that drummers (at least the ones that have something interesting to play) will switch it up and play off-beats, 1/8, 1/12, 1/16, 1/24 notes (you get the idea) and a blanket 16th note quantize will not be a good fit for an entire drum track.  Start by quantizing any straight repeating sections of your song.  Skip fills, transitions, and grooves that fall out of your song’s overall time signature.  Then when you finish, go back and quantize the alternate sections and fills with the correct quantize setting for those individual parts.
• Grooves:  There are musical genres that use quantization as part of their sound— urban, dubstep, and electronic genres are not naturally ‘live’ as their roots come from hardware sequencer technology.  One piece of hardware in specific (MPC range from Akai) has almost defined the feel of many types of hip-hop and R’n'B music.  It gained popularity due to the fact it has some pretty unique quantization settings. I sounds tight and punchy and has been the main choice of many urban producers.  Most sequencers come with a groove quantization setting where you can upload pre-made quantize settings, create your own, or analyze an existing track.  You can also vary the degree of swing and strength of your quantize.
• Quantization Strength:  Depending on the skill of the drummer, you may not need as much quantization.  For some drummers I set the strength to 50%, which means the quantize will only correct the note half way to the note division setting.  I find 50-75% (depending on the drummer) provides enough error correction for my taste, but leaves a good degree of realism and humanity in the track.  I prefer not to fix it if it isn’t broken.  Some people will quantize entire drum tracks that were otherwise perfectly played, just for the hell of it.  What this does is suck the life out of the track.  Music doesn’t have to be perfectly polished all the time!  Go for feel.  In some cases, you might want to change the feel, and an easy way to do this is to move the snare slightly ahead or slightly behind beats 2 and 4 .  Offsetting the snare forwards can give you a looser feel, while offsetting it backwards can give you a tighter snappier sound.
• You are not a squid:  Drummers (as far as I know) usually only have four useful appendages (unless you’re Tommy Lee or Rick Allen from Def Leopard).  What I mean to say is a drummer can only be hitting four notes at a single time.  A big mistake of drum editors with regards to midi and e-drums, is looping sections of cymbals over top of fills.  For example, you might hear the drummer pounding away at the high hat, and when he goes into a fill, the high hat keep going while he’s busy on the toms.  To some people this sticks out like a sore thumb.  You just have to be aware of what sections you’re looping (if you decide to do that), and that there should be no more than four notes at a time in your drum track.
• Accents & Expressions:  Don’t quantize flams unless you know how to set your sequencer to watch for them.  I actually skip quantizing and editing flams altogether unless they’re really out of place because they have their own expressions and timing nuances.  Sometimes a naturally played flam will help to real-ize your track.  If you have a fairly deep drum sample library, you might already have samples of flams, rolls, and other types of accents, so try them out and replace notes that you know the drummer was trying to hit but couldn’t because of the limitations of the e-drums.  It’s easy to manually add accents, double hits, leading notes, cymbal chokes, rim shots, flams, soft notes, fix rolls, and change velocities on any hits that sound the way they should.  Again, drum editing is not very hard, it’s just a time investment, so set a timmer for what you’re willing to spend on a drum track and cut yourself off when it goes off.  Drum editing is a black hole.

Some thoughts before you start…

1. Recording MIDI vs direct outs:

A lot of people who own electronic drum kits seem to think the sole advantages are being able to play with headphones and having the option to change the sounds of individual drums.  However, the biggest advantage is actually the ability to record midi and use external sample libraries.  That said, you don’t need to spend thousands on an electronic drum kit.  In fact, the simpler the e-drum setup the better.  The high-hats that come with the big Roland TD-20 drum kit are actually harder to control than the small rubber pads that come with the Yamaha base model electronic drum kit.  Using a base model electronic drum kit in combination with some premium sample libraries is the best way to get excellent drums sounds.

2. Delay / Latency:  

Depending on how you’ve got your sequencer set, and whether you’ve compensated for the natural delay of the drum trigger to the monitor mix, you might find that your recorded midi track is slightly out of sync with the bedtracks or the metronome.  

3. Easy fix:

Simply select your midi region and move it left or right in the timeline while listening to it, until it matches up to the metronome.  (I recommend changing the settings in your sequencer so that you don’t experience this delay in the first place.

Look up “latency compensation” in your sequencer manual).  Important tip: don’t select the midi notes and move them.  MIDI drum tracks often have controller data contained within the region (such as the high hat open/close control or cymbal choke control) which isn’t directly tied to the notes within the region.  What can happen is you might move your midi notes and accidentally leave the controller data behind which would result in out of sync high hats.  Instead, move the entire midi region.

4. Layered velocity tracks:

I don’t personally do this, but I know it works for some people: an option for having more dynamic and expressive drum tracks is recording multiple layers of the same take with different velocities.  I don’t mean recording multiple takes, I mean you can split the incoming midi signal onto 3 or more separate tracks.  The first track should be set to a low velocity sensitivity, the second – medium, and third – high.  This way you can switch between the three tracks like a comp, and choose whichever velocity setting sensitivity level you prefer for different sections of the song.

Velocity Editing

Velocity is typically the measurement of the speed a MIDI controller’s note off position to it’s note-on position.  Although velocity is a measurement of speed, in the case of MIDI it often translates to how hard a note was pressed.  For example, when you a hit a drum quiet and then loud, the difference between the two hits isn’t just volume, it’s also timbre; the instrument vibrates differently.

Velocity information allows your sequencer to choose which volume level, timbre, and audio sample to trigger.  In a drum sampler program or a drum machine, velocity is typically routed to volume and sample selection.  However, most good modules and drum machines also have velocity routed to a low pass filter which makes the hard hits brighter as well as louder.  It’s something that should be done for you, but isn’t difficult to implement within your sampler program.

5. Rainbows: 

Some sequencers display velocity information in a color spectrum, with red being the heaviest hit, and purple being the softest.  This is handy because it gives you an at-a-glance impression of the dynamic characteristics of a track.

6. Ghost hits or “random purples”:  

Ghost hits are these little minimal velocity notes that sometimes appear all over your track but don’t seem to make any musical sense whatsoever.  They often occur during a swell or a heavier part of the track where the drummer is playing with a little more energy.  What’s actually happening is your drum pads are being triggered by the vibration of the heavier hits of neighboring pads.  If this happens you can easily fix the problem by deleting or muting the ghost hits.

They almost always appear as purple or dark blue notes.   Listen before deleting, as sometimes you might accidentally delete a note isn’t part of a drum roll or an intentionally quieter part of the track.  To prevent this from happening in the first place, you can set up the sensitivity of individual pads on your drum kit, but you’ll need to do this for each new drummer you record because sensitivity and playing style will vary from pad to pad, and drummer to drummer.

7. Machine gun or “wall of red”:  

This goes along with my previous point about ghost hits.  The setup process for pad sensitivity is a lot like setting levels with with an acoustic drum kit: you need to hear the performer before you can set levels, and you need to know the dynamics of the song so you can leave enough headroom.  So, just as vibrations in the frame and pads of your electronic drum kit might trigger ghost hits, when your drummer plays harder than the threshold setting of your drum pads, you’re going to get what I call “a wall of red”.

This is when we start to get into robot / machine gun land.  The machine gun effect is when every note in your midi drum track has been recorded at the same velocity. The samples start sounding like a machine gun as one audio sample is triggered over and over in a loop.    Sometimes this is an effect you want; it might reduce your need to compress your kick drum as every kick hit is already triggering a note at the same volume level.  But, for the most-part this should be avoided.

Some of the better drum sample libraries and sampler programs have a build-in anti-machine gun affect which basically ensures that no two notes of the same velocity played back-to-back will trigger the same sampled audio.  With the anti-machine-gun option turned on, you’ll get a different audio sample for every sequential drum hit.

That said, red walls should still be avoided at all costs because they take away the drummers natural expression and ruin any semblance of realism in your drum track.  It’s easy to transform a line of drum hits into a wall of red, but it’s difficult to change it back to a rainbow without some serious editing.

8. Humanizing or “gaying up your track”:

In most sequencers, the humanizer function take a wall of red (or any color for that matter) and randomizes the MIDI notes by velocity, note length, and note position.  Visually, on the extreme end, it can randomly turn a wall of red into a rainbow of colors (velocities), hence why I call it “gaying up your track”.

With the humanizer function you can set how much your want to randomize your notes.  As well, you can humanize individual hits or entire tracks, so if your cymbals are sounding machine-gunny, then you can gay it up.  The only issue here is that the changes are random.  You can set the parameters and degree of randomization any way you like, but the humanizer function doesn’t know the feel of the song so the changes might not be appropriate.

Editing:  

Editing an acoustic kit takes a great deal of work and skill.  You can’t just move a drum hit on an individual track, you need to move all of the audio tracks associated with the drum recording because each mic has bleed from the next drum over.  If you were to move an out-of-time tom hit to be in time, you’d still have the ghost hits of the tom in the overheads, and surrounding mics.  Not good.  Not to mention the phase problems you would encounter if you did this.

So, what’s the solution?  Usually at the end of a recording session, the engineer will hit the record button, walk out to the drum kit, and hit each of the drums at varying degrees of power.  He’ll also combine drum hits together, such as kick + snare, snare + hat, kick + cymbal, etc.  The purpose of this is to sample the drum kit so that he can take these sampled hits and replace individual miss-played hits within the song.  The main investment for this is time.  The skill of drum editing can be learned quite easily, but the process (especially when editing a sloppy drummer) is a black hole of post-production time.

Drum editing is likely the main cause of psychedelic drug-abuse in the studio.

The biggest advantage of e-drums is the ability to record MIDI.  If you have a set of e-drums, please for the love of polly pocket, don’t record the audio outs.  Even if you have multiple lines outs for each drum, you simply won’t have the control and flexibility of using MIDI.  Why is midi better when it comes to recording e-drums?  First of all, midi actually doesn’t have any audio information.

It simply note and control information and triggers prerecorded sounds, samples, or controls synthesizers.  What this means for drum recording is you can take individual midi notes and move them all you want without worrying about the overlap of audio because the audio is actually generated on the fly while you play back your session.

You also have the added advantage of quantization which automatically retimes your performance so that it is aligned perfectly (or more accurately) to your time signature and tempo gird.  Editing is a chore no matter which way you look at it, but I can tell you that editing is a lot more efficient and easier to do with an electronic drum kit if you approach it the same way that you would an acoustic kit.  The problem is, editing for electronic drums isn’t always just about compensating for errors on the drummer’s part, it’s also about making something fake sound real.  -Just like everything in the music industry (har, har).

Real-izing: making midi sound real

If you simply set up your electronic drum kit, record the midi into your sequencer, throw a sample library on top of it, and mix like normal, you’ll be doing what most people do, and I can almost guarantee you’ll get a robotic drum sound. Real-izing an electronic drum kit is about finessing and coaxing out a realistic sound.  As it stands, the technology that exists today for electronic drum kits and sample libraries is not at the level where we can just “plug & play”.  In part 2 of this blog series, I’ll go over some specific editing and real-izing techniques for your e-drum recordings.

I just watched an excellent movie called Transcendent Man by Ray Kurzweil, and wow.  This man has some incredible insights into the future.  In the movie, which is based off his book The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence Ray goes into detail about the rate of exponential change in our near future.  He talks about nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, merging biological systems with technology, and the possibility that we may live forever.

It sounds pretty fantastical, but I encourage you to check out the movie, he goes into a scarily convincing amount of detail.  I’ve actually been in contact with the director of an upcoming movie of the same subject called “The Singularity”, which also features many interviews with Ray (the movie has been delayed quite a bit but the director assures me it will be coming out early next year).  

Anyway, it got me thinking, with all that Ray Kurzweil talked about with the future of our species and technology, how would it affect music and the way we experience it?  I didn’t do anything more but extrapolate from the predictions in Transcendent Man, but here’s what I think:

• Selective hearing will reach a new level.  Just like cats select their auditory focal point by controlling where their ears point, we might have the option of embedding a biomechanical focussed targeting microphone.  You know, the kind of mic that you can aim at a precise point a kilometer away and hear a conversation as if it were happening right in front of you.  It would be cool to mix like this.  Maybe with bio implants we won’t need to take as many breaks from mixing because of ear fatigue.
• On a similar note, the technology for Hyper Sonic Sound was released recently.  This is a new type of speaker that focuses sound to a specific point by using ultrasound to affect the air.  With Hyper Sonic speakers, sound is not created in the speakers themselves, but actually in the air right by your ears.  Applications you ask?  Well, currently they’re being tested in shopping malls for targeted advertising.  A grocery store actually reported a 130% increase in banana sales by beaming an audio stream to customers standing by the banana stand.  The pre-recorded audio pretends to be your conscience and talks about the merits of buying free trade bananas.  I could see some pretty amazing applications for this type of speaker in the recording studio.  Goodbye headphones, goodbye expensive control room sound-proofing, goodbye difficult surround sound setups, etc.  It get’s pretty easy to mix in stereo when you have two speakers beaming the left and right channels directly to your ears.  In other-words, perfect binaural sound.
• Both synthesis and auto-composition software will grow increasingly sophisticated to the point of any human in the recording chain becoming obsolete.  From the engineer, maybe all the way to the performer.  On the plus side, music will no longer be recorded, but will be created interactively with the listener(s) present and participating.
• How about a program that intelligently listens to you play and can jam with you with the same sense and feel as a real player.
• Oh ya, goodbye cables.
• Maybe in the future they’ll figure out a way to get Logic Pro to stop crashing my session when I press the <save> button.

I think before we get into any discussions about gear, recording techniques, and the like, it might be a good idea to do a little self-assessment to get an idea of what internal problems you can fix before you move on to the external.

A lot of the problems I see with artists seems to be with ego, goal-setting, and competition. Actually, those seem to be general human problems. But having been guilty of the worst of it and having scraped myself out of it, I think I have a few nuggets of advice.

1. Ego.

Learn how to take criticism. Just because you want it to sound great, doesn’t mean it is. Just because you think you’re the best at what you do in your social sphere, doesn’t mean you are. In fact, chances are if you believe you are the best, it’s only because you have a tiny network of friends, which is probably a result of your belief that you are the best.

You are only limiting yourself by not taking advantage of the greatest artistic tool known to man: external criticism. Nobody wants to be around an egomaniac and for some reason there are an overabundance of them in the artistic industries.

A couple of books I would recommend to anyone and everyone (not just artists) for purposeful ego-suppression are: How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age by Dale Carnegie, Love Is the Killer App by Tim Sanders, and The Thank You Economyby Gary Vaynerchuk. I’ve read all three, and they are excellent books.

2. Goal setting.

This is so important; by setting goals, coming up with strategies to meet those goals, and ensuring that progress is being made you can give yourself the best chance to improve. The first step in goal-setting is visualization. By knowing what you want you can begin to deconstruct it into a step-by-step process.

Most people are too afraid to imagine what they could be or what their life could be like, so they never give themselves the opportunity to build a roadmap. It’s the same thing with art. Visualization is not about going into lala land, it’s about solidifying your goals and seeing what kind of steps need to be taken to get there.

3. Competition.

Comparing your work to the work of people you admire is a great way to improve. It’s also a great way to feel shitty about yourself. Provided that you stay aware that the main purpose of comparing is for self-improvement, you can glean a lot of insight into your own shortcomings.

Make several versions of your own work and compare them, then let other people decide which is best.Facebook makes it pretty easy to use votes and polls to get an idea of what other people think. Competition with friends is ok, but we live in the Internet age there is a much bigger talent pool to choose from. Just don’t let it turn into a pissing contest.

So, who the hell am I and why have I decided to start a blog about recording?

Well, my name is Mike Gilliland.  I’m from Vancouver BC Canada.  I have a passion for music, recording, and audio production.  I would say I’m pretty decent at it, but I’m always striving to get better.  One thing I do better than recording is networking.  

So, I’m going to share some my connections with the old farts of the music industry with you, and give you some insights into how they do what they do. 

My main goal is to make learnhowtorecord.com the biggest and best free resource for easy-to-use recording techniques.  Here are the categories that I’m going to organize it into:

• “Get started” –  Tips for newbs.  Whether you lack the motivation, the skills to get started, or you’re trying to build up a solid foundation, these posts are for you.
• “Tutorials and How-To’s” – Here’s where we get specific.  This is where I take questions from you guys, and work towards giving you specific content and instruction to accomplish specific recording tasks.
• “Techgasm” – Gear, gadgets, & apps.  Recording is for nerds and audio geeks anyway, so why not dedicate a whole blog section to it.  I’m drooling already.
• “Ask the Expert” –  Learn from a recording sensei.  Interview with industry pros and leaders.  (This is where the old guys shake a stick at you.)
• “Round-ups” – What would the internet be without Top 10 lists.

Come say hi, chat with me, comment on a thing or two, help me help you help me help you.  I’d love to hear from you.

-Mike Gilliland