The third incarnation of Toontrack’s EZdrummer promises to bring even more to its well-loved combo of ease and sounds, but what do these bring to your production? Three Experts give their verdict…

In The Beginning…

Not so long ago, engineers wanting the best drum sound possible were presented with a binary choice. The first option was to record a great player on a well-tuned kit with decent cymbals, and add or record with a great sounding ambience. With these elements in place, it was hard to get wrong. The second option was to not have the best drum sound possible. That’s not to say that many working engineers without these elements didn’t get great sounds with at least some of these in place, but more that without all of them, the sound’s potential was inherently restricted. In any scenario, most would agree that all real recordings need at least musicality (not necessarily technicality) from the player, and drums that are well maintained and tuned (not necessarily expensive ones).

Earlier Drum Virtual Instruments

When drum virtual instruments (VIs) started appearing around the mid-2000s, engineers found themselves with a new tool that promised everything that real recordings sometimes lacked. That was a real or MIDI-driven performance triggering a whole smorgasbord of sampled studio favourites, as well as a smattering of exotic tubs made out of materials like carbon fibre or plexiglass. By having a choice of drums, as well as virtual acoustics and signal paths to play with, engineers and programmers instantly had the final piece of the puzzle when armed with the right playing or programming. Of these earlier instruments, it could be said that there were still limitations in their use. The main one was inevitably host computer resources, owing to the huge amount of RAM required to hold all of that meticulously sampled realism. Added to that, of all instruments, drums really do hate the latency introduced by slower processors. Owing to these factors, it could be said that developers of drum virtual instruments had to wait a while for computer hardware’s ability to catch up to fully exploit the power of these incredible drum production powerhouses.

The Modern Drum VI

Going back to the holy trinity of getting a good drum sound (playing, drums, and room), the modern VI has got it covered. Not only can parts be manually programmed by pad or mouse, but also they can be driven from vast libraries of MIDI covering a multitude of genres. Better still, players themselves can play into the VI using an e-kit thanks to fewer concerns about the amount of grunt the studio’s system can provide. The drums themselves often come in every size, material and period imaginable, with choices regularly offered in families of sub-products. The acoustic environments in which they are placed can come from the place in which they were recorded (with many studios having developers as prolific clients), as can the signal paths through which they are recorded. Rounding off the ‘real’ experience, engineers can often route out individual channels to the DAW to employ their own drum mixing workflow. Clearly, we are now in place where rather than being a poor relation to a real recording, frequently, the drum virtual instrument could be considered a sonic benchmark by which the former is compared.

Overview - Toontrack EZdrummer 3

Following on from the company’s venerable EZdrummer 2 product, Toontrack’s third instalment of the line hopes to build upon the two things that existing users will recognise: ease of use with great sounds. Does that make it unique? Arguably not, but existing EZdrummer 2 users will nonetheless recognise these two things in its friendly chocolatey brown GUI. Here are EZdrummer 3’s main features, some of which being EZdrummer 2 features that have been expanded upon following user feedback:

Fully Resizable And Scalable Interface

Giving new big, bold window on EZdrummer 3, this new feature brings the instrument into line with a wider trend towards developers’ understanding of how users often have a lot of screen real estate available. For those who don’t, the instrument can of course be scaled to suit their given screen size and/or resolution.

Onboard Grid Editor And Step Sequencer

Regardless of which DAW is being used, the majority of users will recognise the tried and trusted MIDI editing MO employed by many workstations. EZdrummer 3 brings the familiar piano roll editor to the fold, and by doing so, closes the gap between editing sounds in the instrument and performance in the DAW by bringing it all into one place. Any edited MIDI (as well as unedited assets straight from the library) can be compiled into an arrangement by dragging it into the Song Track at the bottom of EZdrummer 3 for compiling the entire arrangement.

Bandmate And Tap2Find

The longstanding problem of conveying your ideas to a drum VI was finally solved when Toontrack introduced Tap2Find to their drum VIs, by essentially replacing a text-based MIDI search with a performance-based one. Allowing composers to work this way certainly sped up the process of marrying MIDI to song, but one problem remained: what if you don’t know what you want? Bandmate listens to MIDI or audio (such as a keys, guitar, or bass part) and comes up with an idea.

Seven Kits Plus, New Snares, Kicks And Cymbals

Everyone understands that developers aren’t going to give up all of their best ‘fireworks’ with a smaller product, hence the existence of Toontrack’s uber-instrument Superior Drummer 3. While, EZdrummer 2 bundled with a versatile set of instruments, for some there were a couple of holes in the basic inventory. EZdrummer 3 is now bundled with a no fewer than five new kits augmented by a generous new cupboard of extra snares and cymbals. These have been updated to reflect more current sounds as well as some extra vintage goodies.

Wide Range Of Mix-Ready Presets

As well as winning MIDI and drum sounds, one of EZdrummer’s strengths has always been its preset mixer, balanced with the option of surgery for those inclined to go a bit further under the hood. Firstly, a sound library comprising of room or kit is chosen, followed by a preset menu populated with different presets made specifically for that sound library. This gives lots of different mixer configurations from simple to complex, with control over channel level, effects, panning, and routing.

More Grooves And Fills

With a welcome ramping up of EZdrummer’s MIDI library, v3 ships with more than 2,500 individually played grooves/fills, greatly expanding upon the instrument’s musical reach with pop, rock, singer-songwriter, soul, latin, funk, metal, hip-hop, afrobeat, EDM, contemporary, and R&B all in there. Time signature offerings are also expanded, with more compound time and head-scratchers in there as well as the usual 3, 4, and 6 note straight, swing, shuffle and/or halftime offerings. These are all rounded off with tonnes of fills and endings that kill those ‘just run out of road’ endings with that go out with a sigh… EZdrummer’s percussion box also comes well stocked with dedicated patterns for tambourines, shakers and one-shot instruments like claps, snaps and cowbells.

Using EZdrummer 3

At its simplest, using the instrument is just about as intuitive as it could be. EZdrummer 3’s tabbed navigation makes it really easy to find a kit in the Drums tab, before grabbing beats, rhythms, and fills in the Grooves tab. These can then be dragged into the ever-present Song Track at the bottom of the window to compile the song together in blocks. Parts can be used as is, or edited using the new Grid Editor, or dragged into the DAW for surgery in the workstation. If you don’t really know what the drums should be doing, the new Bandmate feature is a brilliant creative tool that simply listens and suggests parts. Its bombproof operation will not be fazed by listening to single parts or even whole mixes, and its complexity controls are a doddle to use. Using EZdrummer 3 this way in conjunction with a few mixer presets found top right makes getting a produced, musically sentient drum part into your arrangement trivially simple. All done long before it would take to even set up an acoustic kit, let alone record it.

For engineers and programmers who want to use EZdrummer 3 in a whole production, all the tools are there. Want to add your own samples? Check. Want to play it yourself with an e-kit? Check. The minimal set-up and implementation of this latter feature is excellent according to Sound On Sound’s John Walden when used with Roland drums.

While Toontrack have worked hard to make EZdrummer 3 a one-window drum production mecca, they also leave the engineer the ability to mix and edit entirely in their DAW of choice. For those looking to bypass EZdrummer 3’s (albeit fully capable) mixer and effects, the option to treat it like a real kit in the mix is all there, and using your own audio plugins or hardware on virtual mic channels offers EZdrummer 3’s authentic drumming muscle spread out across your console or mix window.

EZdrummer 3 Sound And Authenticity

How does it sound? To many, its signature will be that of the expertly implemented, modern drum virtual instrument that it is. To others, it will be indiscernible from the real thing. Having a basis for comparison as drummers ourselves, we have definitely heard many recordings that would have sounded better with a tool like EZdrummer 3 behind the band. The drum sounds are, on the whole, excellent, as are the spaces in which they’re recorded. Some of the snare drums, it must be said, have better round robin implementation than others. Some display repetition on fast figures, rather than obvious machine-gunning, but these are few and far between. Overwhelmingly, the sound of EZdrummer 3 is broad, engaging, and entirely realistic.

Expert Panel - Hit or Miss?

In every Expert review we ask three of our team of contributors to give their first impressions of the product. We ask them to give the product a hit or miss, based on factors such as originality, innovation, usefulness, quality and value for money. For each hit the products gets an Expert Award. One hit and it gets our bronze award, two hits gets silver and for a hit from all three of the panel it gets a coveted gold award. Of course if there’s three misses, there’s no award.

Luke Goddard On Toontrack EZdrummer 3

In a way, EZdrummer 3 represents a coming-of-age for this well-known, well-loved VI. By taking advantage of advances in host machine resources, and combining them with innovative, new user-centric features and generously expanded sounds, the instrument will be, for many, a very welcome addition to their production arsenal. With so much choice out there, the question is always going to be about what it doesn’t do. That list is a hard one to write in the context of an instrument that costs around a mere £140/$170. That Toontrack have written-in free backwards compatibility to existing EZX expansions shows their commitment to making an extremely well implemented, great sounding instrument for all. As a previous happy user of EZdrummer 2, living with v3 is even better than before, and to anyone deciding whether or not to jump in, I would say just do it! HIT.

Russ Hughes On Toontrack EZdrummer 3

I’ve been an EZdrummer user since the original. Even then this drum VI punched above its weight. However, this baby has now come of age and offers everyone from the casual user to the pro producer, a powerful set of tools that belie both its entry level positioning and price. Whatever stage you find yourself at in music production EZdrummer 3 is a rock solid investment! HIT.

PJ Gibbs On Toontrack EZdrummer 3

The modern, intuitive VI looks simple, but underneath it's a deep, well thought out piece of software that, when you take time and effort to learn, can get you realistic, high-quality results.

The included kits sound incredible. You really get a feel for the quality and meticulous attention to detail from the folks at Toontrack. There's a huge amount of variety, and as the kits are recorded in the same space, they are highly interchangeable - no matter what musical style or playing ability.

The workflow is logical and easy to figure out, and so far, in the few weeks I've worked with software, I've not had a single moment of inconvenience or frustration. It's just been good fun, and I know I'll be able to level up the drum tracks in my productions. EZ Drummer 3 is a no brainer. HIT.

EZdrummer 3 gets an Experts Gold Award.