Toontrack Superior Drummer 3
The biggest hitters in virtual drums strike back! Drum roll articulation, please…
Virtual drum kits provide the backbone for countless bedroom projects and big-budget productions alike. Now, one of the key players in the virtual drum world, Toontrack, have rolled out Superior Drummer 3, a huge overhaul of their flagship product.
Toontrack enlisted legendary engineer George Massenburg (who, incidentally, invented the parametric equaliser) to capture the raw drum samples constituting SD3’s core library. The recording location, Galaxy Studios in Belgium, is also of the best-of-the-best variety: “probably the world’s most quiet and ideal location for sampling.”
So, about that library. It weighs in at a drive-shattering 230GB, featuring not just close mics and ambience/overhead setups but also 11 additional room mics. These give up to 11.1 surround playback – they work in stereo too, of course. There are 6 drum kits (Ayotte, Gretsch, Pearl, Premier, Ludwig and Yamaha), with additional kicks, snares and cymbals. You also get around 350 drum machine hits, marking a departure from the strickly wood ’n’ metal sound sources of previous Superior Drummers.
The Mixer contains 35 effects, dwarfing v2’s paltry fivesome. Under the Grooves tab, there’s the Tap2Find feature from EZdrummer 2 – tap in a rhythm to reveal the closest matching MIDI groove. The completely new MIDI Grid Editor allows per-note pattern editing.
One Toontrack product we’d forgotten all about is the now-discontinued DrumTracker, a tool for converting drum recordings to MIDI. The concept is reborn with SD3’s integrated Tracker, a tool that takes raw drum tracks and replaces the hits with corresponding MIDI-triggered Superior sounds.
Other features include a resizable interface, sample import, macro controls, and improved pitch editing, bringing Superior 3 right up to the front in the drum ROMpling race.
Out now, Superior Drummer 3 costs £287; £147 to upgrade from SD2; £217 for EZdrummer 2 owners; and an additional £165 to get it on an SSD drive.
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