Toontrack Superior Drummer 2 (Mac/Win) Review

May 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Emile Menasché

           
 

A BIG KIT RECORDED IN A WORLD-CLASS ROOM IS AT YOUR COMMAND

An ADSHR Envelope Designer lets you control the behavior of the sample itself. You can use it to create realistic choke and swell sounds for cymbals, among other things. You can toggle the envelope on and off and assign it to respond to MIDI Aftertouch, Note On, or Note Off.

Superior Drummer treats each drum in the kit as a number of individual articulations, which helps key instruments like hi-hat and snare behave more realistically. For example, pressing one key triggers a sampled snare roll that continues until you press the key assigned to a single snare hit — totally intuitive and impressively natural-sounding (see Web Clip 1).

When you're editing a drum in the Instrument section, you have the option of working on the entire drum (in essence, all hits on that drum) or a single articulation (for instance, the side stick) by toggling the Edit Articulation Only button. That means you could use the envelope editor to make the side stick attack more slowly or make center hits transpose higher — powerful stuff.

Mix It Up

FIG. 2: Superior Drummer’s Mixer lets you set how much each drum’s bleed will be heard in individual mics.

Superior Drummer's Mixer window sets it apart from other drum samplers I've used (see Fig. 2). Many drums are spread across multiple channels. Load up the Avatar kit, for example, and you'll find three channels for the kick drum, mics for the top and bottom of the snare, and more. Instruments that rarely get individual mics in real life — such as cymbals — get picked up on overheads and ambient mics. There's not a disembodied crash cymbal within earshot.

Each channel sports conventional controls such as faders, pan pots, and inserts for adding EQ and dynamics processors. The effects — highpass and lowpass filters, 5-band EQ, gate, compressor, and even a transient modeler — work well and sound quite good, but I was surprised to find no spatial processors such as reverb. You can, however, add great-sounding room ambience from the mics.

Let It Bleed

Superior Drummer's most intriguing feature is the Bleed control. It lets you set how much of any given drum gets picked up by another drum's mic. You can, for instance, let a bit of the kick drum, toms, or hi-hat bleed into the snare's top or bottom mic, or you can choose to isolate the snare completely (see Web Clips 2, 3, 4, and 5). Bleed works for all mics; by default, the overheads and room mics pick up everything, but if you want them to exclude the kick, you can remove it from their respective bleeds.

The bleed feature adds to Superior Drummer's naturalness, but it can also chew up resources. By turning off individual bleeds, you can take a load off your system while you're editing the drum parts in your sequencer, and then turn them back on later. You can also save resources by bouncing the bleeds to disk, which generates a separate audio file for each mic (see the online bonus material at emusician.com).

Superior Drummer 2.0 boasts killer sounds and a bunch of unique features, but its best attribute may be the way it gets your head out of the machine and into the mix. With the ability to pick up the subtleties of a real performance — either via programming or played with electronic drum triggers — this may be the most realistic digital drum instrument yet.

New York-based guitarist, composer, and producer Emile Menasché is the author of The Desktop Studio (Hal Leonard, 2002). His latest album, Overtones, is available on iTunes.