Recording - June 2014 - 18

Toontrack EZdrummer 2

Left: The Mixer Tab, with FX controls. Right: The Edit Style display.
touch, letting you add percussive accents to
any track without having to load a special
kit.
New mixer, new effects
If you're keeping count, that's up to 16
sound sources at a time! They're all
accessible in the Mixer tab, which offers
metering and control of level, pan, solo,
mute, and output channel for each drum.
You can output a stereo mix to your DAW,
or up to 16 channels of separated audio
(vs. EZdrummer's 8) for later processing.
But the Mixer tab doesn't just offer raw
sound sources! When you call up a particular mix preset for a kit, the Mixer will
include extra channels for things like reverb
and delay returns, ambient mics (in mono,
stereo, or both) with adjustable mic bleed,
and effects chains. These effects chains are
preset as well; they're laid out intelligently
so that certain drums are sent to them while
others are not (e.g. EQ applied only to the
kick or delay applied only to overheads),
and each effect will have one or two simple
knobs to tweak to your taste.
At first, the idea of someone doing your
effects routing and tweaking for you might
seem intrusive, but the idea here is to give
you musical results in a hurry. You can
always upgrade to Superior Drummer if
you insist on controlling everything (and
you don't want to do it in your DAW). And
anyone who's used EZmix will immediately have confidence in Toontrack's ability to
offer realistic channel strip settings right
out of the box.
By the way, if you're wondering where
these kits come from, they were recorded
specifically for EZdrummer 2 by Chuck
Ainlay at Mark Knopfler's British Grove
Studios in London, using a variety of mics
and processors through Neve and EMI
consoles-the latter for its particular saturation characteristics, which lend the
Vintage kit a lot of its distinctive sound.
18

RECORDING June 2014

The end results are simply gorgeous; a
nice range of usable tones for rock, pop,
and indie styles, with a range of mix/
effects presets named either by genre or
particular effect (Prog Rock, Tape Filter,
etc.) for quick reference and access.
New grooves, new browser
So we've established that EZdrummer 2
has great sounds. How do we put those
sounds to work? There are tools right in the
Drums tab, plus the Browser and Search
tabs, to turn kits into songs in a jiffy.

shorten itself to make room for the fill without any fuss.
While you can't edit drum hits one by
one, there's a great tool for altering
grooves at the MidiBlock level. It's called
Edit Play Style, and it allows you to quickly select the Power Hand (the instrument
where the drummer's dominant hand is
playing) and dial in the Amount (density)
and Velocity (relative energy) for each
drum playing in a MidiBlock. This lets you
quickly change a snare-heavy groove into
one that focuses on the ride cymbal, for
example. It's a lot of fun to play with and
gets you great results in a hurry... and, as
with any other editing operation, there's
Undo/Redo to clean up if you go too far.
The Search tab lets you filter available
grooves by a variety of criteria-Library,
Instrument, Power Hand, Time Signature,
Genre, Type, Play Style, and Resolution.
You can use any or all of these criteria,
and EZdrummer will display a list of matches for you, with a variety of displayable criteria-the Name of the MidiBlock (often
just Chorus 01 or Variation 02 or the like),
but more usefully, the Family (sublibrary) it
came from, its Intensity (busy-ness and
energy level), number of instruments in use,
tempo, and much more. You can decide
which filter and result criteria are on display at any given time, to customize the
Search tab to your needs.
Another cool new feature is Tap2Find,
where you can simply "play" into EZdrummer
2 with a controller or even just with the

Left: The Browser tab. Right: The Search tab, with Tap2Find at upper left.
EZdrummer's basic building block for
sequences is the MidiBlock, which is
essentially a chunk of a song with drum hit
data in it. These MidiBlocks can be colorcoded and tagged as one of eight Song
Parts-Intro, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, PreChorus, Outro, Fill, or Ending. You just
open the Browser tab, select from a column-based browser (which can include
your own folders of MIDI data if you
wish), and drag MidiBlocks onto the timeline, building a song piece by piece.
MidiBlocks can be moved, removed, split
in two, and seamlessly overlaid in whole
or in part by other MidiBlocks. This means
you can drop a short fill onto the end of a
verse and the verse will automatically

mouse, and EZdrummer 2 will find all the
grooves that match or nearly match what you
played. Got a really cool kick pattern repeating in your head? Play it into Tap2Find and
you'll have a whole list of MidiBlocks that feature it (or something very close to it, scored by
a percentage), ready to drag and drop into
your song.
If you're in a real hurry to sketch out a
full song, use Song Creator-a pop-up
window that accepts one MidiBlock of
your choice and offers you a full selection
of intros, verses, choruses, etc., that are
complementary to it. You can drag and
drop from the list of offerings, or drag/
drop a full-on song arrangement (called a
Structure) and then mix and match its

Recording - June 2014

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