Recording - July 2010 - 50

By Greg Hurley

Toontrack Superior Drummer 2.0 has become my main go-to drum instrument for producing high-quality drum tracks here in my production studio. It lets me configure practically any type of drumset for any particular style of music. Whole drumsets or individual drums can be quickly loaded, tuned and then configured much the same way an engineer would do in the studio; if you’re like me and don’t have the space or budget for a drum room, Superior Drummer 2.0 (“SD2”) just rocks. Getting set up You can install as much or as little of SD2’s content as you need— there are four different modes of custom installation, from the 4 GB basic install up to the full 20 GB sound bank. SD2 will run on Windows XP SP3 or newer, 2 GHz Pentium 4 or Athlon processor with 1 GB RAM (multi-core CPU with 2 GB RAM or more recommended), or on Mac OS 10.4.11 or higher, 2 GHz G5 with 1 GB RAM (multi-core Intel CPU with 2 GB RAM or more recommended).

It needs a minimum of 4 GB of free hard disk space and a DVD drive, but the recommended configuration is 25 GB free hard disc space, a DAW application to host your tracks, and a professional soundcard MIDI controller such as a keyboard, drum pads or electronic drum kit. It’s possible to start with a smaller set and then merge in “X-Drums” from other Toontrack libraries. So if you are working on, for example, a heavy metal project that may require a double-kick, or an electronic music piece that may call for strange electronically effected drums, it’s all possible by simply calling up a preset. SD2’s built-in effects from UK-based Sonalksis (5-band eq, high- and lowpass filter, compressor, gate, and transient designer filters) are suitably designed to enhance a mix, and its overhead, close, mid, and far ambient mic bleed settings ideally provide all the tools you need to get a great drum mix. You can get great sounds right out of the box or you can dig deeper and tweak almost every minute detail to your liking. The built-in mixer can be used as a proper submix inside your host, or it can be split out to bus assignments and/or also setup as a 16-channel multi-output send to your host. Let’s go In this Walking Tour, I’ll be using SD2’s N.Y. Avatar drumset, and proceed to incrementally build up a song sequence, piece by piece. Then I will build out the submix as we head on to finalizing the mix. To hear what my examples sound like, check out the sound files on www.recordingmag.com; links are in the July 2010 Table of Contents. For this example, the approach will be to set up a quick ‘sketch-pad’ tune using pre-sequenced MIDI loops. SD2 comes supplied with a good baseline MIDI sequence library that runs inside its built-in groove player. (Note that there are many Toontrack and third-party groove libraries that are very good for rapidly building up songs.) For this process I’ll be using the groove player to preview sequences and then drop a desired sequence into Magix Samplitude as I continue to construct a song. I prefer to work this way since I am not a drummer, and I have found that I can build up songs much faster this way and edit as I go. But it’s obviously possible to record drum tracks in real-time if you have a drum pad controller such as a Korg padKONTROL, or a full electronic drumset such as a Roland TD series set. First step is to load up Superior in your host, which will launch a default basic drumset from the preset list. (Fig. 1) The N.Y. Avatar set I’ll use here comes with the main program installation. The basic setup includes multiple types of toms and cymbals, and a single kick drum. Previewing the drums is easy—just click on the drum, and use the pulldown menu at the drum to choose another drum or cymbal. This is where you can load in X-Drums (from other libraries), or import pre configured drum maps, which lets you point any particular MIDI note to any particular drum.

RECORDING JULY 2010

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Recording - July 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - July 2010