Created to be a light version of Toontrack’s Superior Drummer, EZdrummer is an easy-to-use, powerful virtual drum tool for music production. Coming with 7000 sound files and 8000 MIDI carefully crafted drum patterns, this piece of software impressed me right from the beginning. The interface has a beautifully pictured clickable kit so you can sample its sounds right off the bat. All the sounds were professionally captured at Avatar Studio in NY from performances of world class drummers sampling top-notch drum brands products like Sabian, Zildjian, Slingerland and GMS. You can also add your own sounds to its library, and Toontrack offers expansion packages with specific kits sounds that covers pretty much all your drumming needs. I will be reviewing every single expansion package, so make sure to come back and to check them out.
Plenty of tools, easy to use
The EZdrummer comes with the Pop/Rock Kit and a free expansion package, The Cocktail Kit EZX. The Pop/Rock Kit features GMS’ 12", 14", 16" and 18" toms and 22" kick drum played with felt or plastic beater. There is also a open kick option for this drum. The sampled snares are 14" Roger and Slingerland and a 13" GMS Piccolo with damped options for each of them. There are two choices for hi hats: 14" Sabian HHX and 16" Zildjian Crash Hats. The crash and ride cymbal selections are entirely Sabians, 13" and 18" Jack Dejohnette Encore, 16", 17" and 18" HHX Evolution, 19" AA Medium Thin, 19" HHX Evolution Ozone, 21" Handhammered Vintage and 22" Handhammered Raw Dry. Each of these sounds can be selected through a drop down menu from the arrow icon in each drum and cymbal. In the top left you will find presets for your kit sound, (default, tight, ambient and basic) each giving a quick way to answer your drum needs. You can also customize the kit with your preferred sounds and save it as a new preset. On the bottom left you will find the Open Mixer button, which gives you control over the mix between all the components of the kit. It also offers four presets: default, roomy, dry and mono, which can also be customized and saved with your own settings. In the Mixer window you can control not only the output volume of each drum but also panning, bleed control of certain microphones, solo and mute, and output routing, so you can craft each drum separately on your main recording application. The Mixer window also offers a pan switch button that will flip the whole panning configuration.
Groovey!
In the bottom center you will find the grooves button that gives you access to all the pre-created MIDI grooves. Let me point out that this library of grooves is huge and very well crafted. You can also use any of this MIDI grooves with any other EZX kits, so the possibilities here are enormous. The Pop/Rock MIDI grooves library comes categorized under 4/4 straight, 4/4 shuffle, 4/4 with 6/8 feel, 3/4 and 6/8, each containing drum fills, pop/rock, funk/rock, motown, ballad and sidestick drum style grooves. Each offers dozens of groove choices and variations. The true beauty of this library is the drag and drop simplicity: find the groove you want, drag and drop on your main production application, re-craft if you need to, mix and combine with the other MIDI variations, etc. And of course I don’t have to say that they will synch to the tempo of you application, do I? Obviously if you are more of a performance guy (or gal) you can just hook your MIDI keyboard or pad controller and do your thing. You can access to a MIDI layout of all the sounds under the upper right help button. Back to the bottom center of the interface, you will see a “humanize” button that, as you might guess, gives the grooves a more human feeling, combining drum hit randomizing and non-cycling. You can also control the hits velocity with the Velocity Knob and set the tempo to half or double time.
Switching quickly to the Cocktail kit can be easily done by clicking in the top center drop down button. You will see a beautiful and more comprised kit that will fit to your more “loungy” tune needs. Now you will play with three Yamaha drums, Zildjian hi hats and Mikaelsson rides. The kit presets are default, open brushes and sticks. The Mixer presets are: default, roomy, flat, onlyoh and dry and the MIDI grooves offers 4/4 styles of Brazilian rhythms of Baiao and Samba with dozen of variations and fills.
The thing I love the most on this Toontrack product, besides its simplicity and small disc requirements, it’s its superb drum sound quality. This is an awesome tool for those who need great sounding drums and don’t have the time to look for a drummer or don’t want to drop some serious money in a professional studio. I love how you can mix up kits with other MIDI grooves from other kits and being able to add you own sound samples. Besides being the Superior Drummer’s little brother, the EZdrummer does a terrific job on making you achieve professional sounding drums on all of you musical productions. You might want to free up a good chuck of time because if you are anything like me, once you start messing around with this you won’t want to stop.
EZdrummer’s EZX expansion packages are: Eletronic, Jazz, Funkmasters, Twisted kit, Claustrophobic, Nashville, Drumkit From Hell, Latin Percussion and Vintage Rock. All libraries can be loaded on Superior Drummer.
You can purchase the EZdrummer at www.toontrack.com for $179.
In volume 1 of On The Beaten Path, Rich starts from the most basic of basics by introducing the drum set components and positioning, stick and foot techniques and music reading. From there on you will be following the footsteps of famous drummers with each beat/lesson excerpted from one of their hit-songs. Focusing on the Rock genre, volume 1 of On The Beaten Path goes from the wonderfully simplistic grooves of Meg White to Bonham’s remarkable D’Yer Mak’er’s initial drum fill, passing through Phil Rudd’s rock basic beats and Dave Grohl’s modern rock grooves. With a quick bio/introduction of the drummer behind each beat, Rich dissects each part of the groove patterns, so one can easily understand how it was created. And one doesn’t need to fry their neurons once the staff gets more complicated. The book comes with a CD with all the grooves contained within, played by Rich himself, allowing the use not only to more easily understand the beat, but also to improve their music reading and vocabulary. This first volume ends with a little more information about the general anatomy of an acoustic drum such as drumheads and drum sticks types and selection, as well as the most common and user friendly way of tuning the kit. The only thing I find to be missing from this first volume of On The Beaten Path is a section about basic drum rudiments. Even though they are usually not the most exciting things to practice, in the end they are a strong foundation needed when developing great drumming technique (in my opinion anyway).
After a quick recap on music theory, volume 2 of On The Beaten Path dives right back into beats and fills. This time with 63 drum patterns excerpted from famous Blues and Jazz songs. Beats from songs such as “Manish Boy”, “Sweet Home Chicago” and “You shook Me” will get you into the blues, while “Chelsea Bridge”, “Moanin’” and “So What” will bring you the jazz. Throughout the three volumes of On The Beaten Path you will see tips, terms and drum concepts that will improve the user’s knowledge of drumming little by little while they go through the lessons, which becomes a great way of not overloading a beginning drum student with too much information at one time. Some of the concepts touched throughout the books include flam, drags, double stoke, buzz rolls, rim shots, stick shots, cues, first and second endings, polyrhythm, sextuples, ritardando, accelerando and many more. Cleverly, at each point these concepts are introduced, Rich follows the explanation with an example of how the concept was used in the following hit-song’s beat. And that’s how On The Beaten Path methodology works, unveiling the basic concepts of the art of drumming through some of the best examples we might find easily in the contemporary music, giving users a great point of reference for the new vocabulary and technique they are learning. No boring examples or exercises, the focus of On The Beaten course seems only on the fun part of music, which is, as silly as it may sound, the simple fact of playing it and feeling it through a song.
Like Vol. 2, On The Beaten Path Vol. 3 jumps right from the beginning into 43 more beats and drum fills, but this time the book touches other music genres such as Country, with the use of songs like “On the Road Again”, Funk, through songs like “You Can Make It If You Try” (some words of wisdom here for sure), and Reggae by jamming with “One Love” and “Buffalo Soldier”. Volume 3 even takes the user south of the border with Brazilian Latin beats from “Girl From Ipanema”, “Desafinado” and Phish’s “Fee”. Continuing to build on what was started in the previous volume, the user is brought back into Jazz with some advanced patterns using beats from “In Walked Bud” and fills from “So What” and “Blues Walk”. On vol. 3, Rich also teaches beats in different time signatures such as Neil Peart’s “The Trees” and Nick Manson’s “Money” as well as concepts of half and double time found on Lars Ulrich’s “Whenever I May Roam” and Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee”. The third volume of On the Beaten Path finalizes with a very nice example of tempo manipulation using the famous song “Stand” from Blues Traveler.
With clean graphics combined with direct and simple writing, this collection truly sets itself apart from all other educational drum books. Every page kicks open a new perspective of the drum universe through an easy-to-learn and enjoyable methodology. With On The Beaten Path: Beginning Drumset Course Vol. 1, 2 & 3, Rich Lackowski blends effectiveness and excitement, so anyone can learn basics of the art of drumming by having the greatest drummers of our time as their teachers. Without tedious exercises like ones found on many drum learning books, Rich takes a drum student on a journey throughout drumming history and knowledge that will make him (or her) enjoy every single moment.
On The Beaten Path” Beginning Drumset Course Vol.1, 2 & 3 can be purchased at www.alfred.com or at your local music store. The three books retail for $9,99, $14,99 and $14,99 respectively.
Rich Lackowski’s also wrote award winning “On The Beaten Path: The Drummer’s Guide to Musical Styles and the Legends Who Defined Them”, “On The Beaten Path: Metal”, and “On The Beaten Path: Progressive Rock”.
