Toontrack Superior Drummer 3
Does a 230GB footprint and revised interface make this the last word in sampled drum libraries? Jono Buchanan makes room
Toontrack’s Superior Drummer 3 (SD3) has been a long time in development. Its previous incarnation was released back in 2008, and whilst several updates and new sound content has been made available in the intervening period, Toontrack have clearly decided it’s been long enough. However, SD3 is no mere ‘update’. George Massenberg was tasked with engineering the drum recordings for this completely revised approach to the Superior Drummer concept, and the result is 230GB of new sample library, across a total of seven drum kits, all recorded at 44.1kHz/24-bit at Galaxy Studios in Belgium. However, it’s not just the sample content which has been reimagined here; all aspects of SD3’s workflow are enhanced in its latest guise, in the hope of making SD3 the mother of all acoustic drum libraries. Has it worked?
In short, yes. But to understand why, let’s delve deeper. Each window with SD3’s workflow can be detached, so you can open the panes you need and arrange them however makes most sense to you. This is likely to start with the Drums screen, where the upper section is devoted to selecting a preset kit, or configuring a custom one if you want to swap out individual kit pieces. Any drums not yet assigned will display with a ‘wireframe’ outline; click on a drum (or cymbal) and select the kit piece of your choice. An additional parameter box on the right-hand side then lets you refine the sound further, with modules to edit Velocity Curves, Reverse sounds, edit Pitch Envelopes and adjust other parameters, per-drum.
The lower section of the Drums window shows a sequencing lane, on to which you can drag and drop drum patterns. There’s a wide selection of these, and the Grooves window lets you choose from them, handily offering a Preview function, so that you can double-check your selection before dragging patterns into the sequencer area. Grooves can be triggered both ‘internally’ (ie, with SD3’s own transport controls, which is particularly handy when you’re working in standalone mode) or triggered via your DAW, slaved to its tempo. As you’d expect, you can use the Grooves as ‘just’ starting points if you like, with a Grid Editor providing step-sequencing style control over individual hits. The Grooves offer patterns in a wide range of styles and these also showcase some of the extended articulations of the drum recordings; the brushed hits assigned to some of the jazz grooves are particularly beautifully played. We’re well used to velocity-rich multisampled libraries these days, particularly composers and producers who work with orchestral libraries, but the range of playability and programmability here is truly stunning, with nuances wonderfully reproduced by SD3’s workflow.
Whilst many producers will work with SD3 in stereo, surround rigs of up to 11.1 are supported too, which will tickle the interest of those working to picture. The Mixer section lets you make critical choices about balances but also offers an insight into the detail which has gone into the engineering of this library: a staggering 22 microphones can be configured, with Overhead Dynamic, Overhead Condenser, Room Ribbon
microphones and several other channels offered. You can also control Bleed from one instrument mic to the next. Outputs for each channel can be chosen individually too, whilst onboard effects can be added to individual channels or drum busses, including the output bus. In short, everything is here to ensure great-sounding drums.
One of the best new features in SD3 is the Tracker. This lets you drag and drop drum recordings captured as audio files to have SD3 analyze them, before creating a MIDI map, ready to be assigned to its onboard library of sounds. This means that advanced drum replacement is now available and, my word, it’s good. So you could record live drums for ‘feel’ alone, without thinking too hard about the nuances of engineering (or without the benefit of an extended microphone collection) and turn your performances into great-sounding drum parts. In terms of exporting sounds, if you want to render your SD3 parts as a single stereo file, you can of course, but equally, if you want to capture every individual track as its own audio file, you can do that just as easily. Macro controls are also offered to assign key parameters to your hardware controller of choice.
Quality oozes from every pore of SD3 and whilst such opinions are subjective, I’d be bold enough to suggest that a new benchmark for sampled drum libraries has been established with its release. From the quality of the audio engineering at the heart of the recorded sounds, the range of kits, the customizability of the content, the interface redesign, to the natural sounding Grooves and the ease with which these can be integrated into an arrangement for your tracks; it’s all here and it all sounds remarkable.
It’s easy to make jokes in reviews of this kind about the fact that real drummers should be worried about the implications of what SD3 might do for their job prospects, but I have no doubt here that SD3 users will be sufficiently impressed by the quality of the library that they’ll think twice about booking session players when budgets are tight. In short, Toontrack have created a remarkable library which raises the bar for acoustic drums to new heights.