Can You Tell Toontrack Superior Drummer 3.0 Tracker From Real Drums? Review And Poll
In this video review for Pro Tools Expert, Technical Editor, and Drummer James Ivey takes a look at the Tracker feature in the new Superior Drummer 3.0 from Toontrack. James shows you how quick, easy and pain-free it is to replace and enhance your acoustic drums.
He starts by choosing a Kick drum from the Superior 3.0 library. Then by simply importing the originally recorded audio file Tracker detects, and plays back perfectly in time perfectly in time with your acoustic drums.
He goes on to replace both the Snare drum and Hi Hat parts. The team at Toontrack have put a lot of work into the amazing Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine that analyses and detects what drum or cymbal is being played or not played to give the results that used to take many hours of painstaking faffing and tweaking to achieve.
What Is Tracker
Essentially Toontrack's new Tracker feature is a way to take all the pain and error out of replacing and augmenting your live tracked drums with perfectly recorded samples of some of the finest drums ever made, recorded in one of the best studios in the world, on some of the most amazing microphones money can buy, with one of the greatest audio engineers of all time.
The Test
We have recorded two audio files for you to listen to. In the poll below, please let us know which one you think is the "real" kit and which one you think has had the kick and Snare drum and Hi Hat replaced, Also let us know in the comments why you prefer the one you chose.
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Tracker Testing Example A
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Tracker Testing Example B
Summary
Using Tracker is so simple, you drag your audio file into the Toontrack Superior 3.0 Tracker window and it's very smart artificial intelligence engine works out what that audio file is (Kick, Snare, Tom etc.) and assigns it to the current drum kit component. Most of the time that is all you need to do. The AI is so good that's it, Job done. If you find there are some false triggers you can easily go in and automatically or manually correct these.
You can now get on in there and perfect your drum sound. You can find out more about the up and coming release of Toontrack Superior Drummer 3.0 at their website.