Recording - October 2017 - 34

Toontrack Superior Drummer 3
Figure 2

Figure 3

overheads and room mics, and "kick or
toms into snare bottom" bleed-most of
what you'll need to work in stereo), then
stereo Room Mics (and the other overheads), Surround 1 and 2 (for 5.0 and
11.0 respectively), and Bleed.

have become accustomed to, but they're
all deeply tweakable and enjoy easy
realtime adjustment. The mixer can hide
unused channels to save space, and in
fact the entire interface window can be
drag-resized to taste.

New features

Tracker

Anyone who's familiar with EZ drummer
will recognize a lot of the tools for track
creation that have been added to Superior
Drummer 3. The Grooves window gives
professionals the ability to quickly browse
and sort the huge library of MIDI grooves
by content and style, building songs
rapidly and efficiently. There's even a
function called Tap2Find, which lets the
user tap in simple rhythm patterns and then
have SD3 search for professionally-created
grooves that work with the desired feel.
When it's time to mix, SD3 presents
all of the available tools in a feature-rich,
great-sounding 16-bus Mixer with up
to 16 stereo output pairs (Figure 2). The
amount of bleed from one mic into another is adjustable or defeatable here;
this lets the user find a good balance of
real-room feel and usable resources-a
large kit with lots of bleed enabled can
easily top 3 GB of RAM in use, which
you can track in a usage window in
the top right corner. There's a flexible
busing structure to suit any engineer's
preferences, and nearly three dozen
new effects for insert and bus use-EQ,
dynamics, reverb, modulation, delay,
even distortion. The effects all have the
killer sound quality that EZmix users
34

RECORDING October 2017

Superior Drummer 3 would already be
the best drum instrument out there even if
the new features stopped there. But clicking on the Tracker tab reveals a whole
new feature set that will leave even the
most jaded engineer's jaw hanging open.
Tracker is nothing short of a complete drum
sample replacement program, seamlessly
built into Superior Drummer 3... and it's
easier to use and produces more accurate
results more quickly than most if not all of
the competition.
Figure 3 shows an example of several
drum tracks loaded into Tracker. We've
selected a track, which Tracker has
analyzed for kick sounds and made
best guesses. We can go in and add
or subtract hits, move the detection threshold up or down, and so on, but as you
can see, the initial guess is quite accurate.
The punchline here? The track being
analyzed isn't an isolated kick track with
too much bleed... it's a complete stereo
drum bus!
Tracker's tweakable recognition is
incredible; just for fun, I threw entire
processed drum loops of Indian and African music into it, and created wonderful grooves to map to the SD3 kit in a
matter of minutes. Whether it's surgical

cleanup of substandard audio or creative
reinterpretation of found sound, Tracker
is worth the price of admission all by
itself, and is the new standard to beat in
drum replacement.

Final thoughts

In fact, "the new standard to beat"
seems to be a recurring theme here.
This program's feature comparison
to SD2 is so lopsided it's almost embarrassing. There's more of everything,
and what's there is simpler and more
straightforward to use right across
the board, with everything from MIDI
Learn and time signature and tempo
mapping to style-conscious presets
and templates and user sample import.
Toontrack's even redone the graphics
for older SDX libraries so they look
good in SD3!
Toontrack's intent was to create the
deepest, broadest, best-sounding, most
feature-rich virtual drummer in history,
and they seem to have succeeded admirably. Superior Drummer 3 does so
much, and does it so well, that it doesn't
just raise the bar-it knocks it into the
next county.
Delivery: Web download (236 GB) or 256
GB SSD (add $199)
Formats: Windows 7+ (64-bit) or macOS
10.6+; standalone, VST, AU, AAX
Copy Protection/License: Toontrack
Product Manager, single user/three computers
Documentation: online tutorials and
videos (manual forthcoming)
Price $419 ($219 upgrade from SD2, $319
crossgrade from EZdrummer 2).
More from: Toontrack, www.toontrack.com

http://www.toontrack.com

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