what are the best ones? I can't download huge illegal files on this server or they'll bone me

Go to the Recording or Your Recordings forum(i forget which. EDIT: actually, it was probably the Your Recordings forum) and find Snaxo's thread, "Drum Samples, For You, Not Them" (or something like that). I believe there are some good ones innit. I haven't checked them meself, as well, i have drums.

Yup the snaxosamples are pretty damn solid. I also think I loaded up all of my Sneap .wavs to see if they were legit, but I don't think anyone ever dled them.

Mine are more geared to electronic stuff, though. There's no multisampled live drums.

Devin, I'm fairly positive I chugged through the slow-ass downloads and the hard drive they are on likes to turn itself off randomly. It also has a lot of my fun recording goodies on there, too, which is suckiness. Basically, it needs to be re-cased (bad jack) so I, er... need to buy a new case. So I cannot at the moment tell you.

Actually, wait, I can. They are legit, but not the full library. It's hard hits, with a few variants. It does have all the mic positions, top, bottom, and room. They do sound good. Make of them what you will.

I have no use for them, I just use SD2

Maybe I will legally acquire his goods sometime, but for now SD2 works just fine for me. I am sure it doesn't sound realistic, but most of my stuff doesn't anyway.

SD2 sounds absolutely fine, if used correctly.

If i was not allergic to programming drums, i would have stolen it and its brother years ago.

SD2, properly implemented, is damn swell. I like it sonically better than what I've heard from the Steven Slate stuff, honestly. I feel it has more room for subtlety. But I suppose I am biased because SSD is the darling sample library for the metalcore crowd and I just don't like how those kind of mixes sound.

When I still cared about making my sampled drums sound realistic I would spend a lot more time in SD2 than I do. I have a good drummer now though, so I just program basic beats and fudge them a little so they don't sound hard-hit-at-127 drummachiney because I use it to represent the real drums in an arrangement.

Yeah, I always figured if I want my drums to start sounding better I will go back and mess with the velocities a bit. I just haven't gotten a song to that point ...

SSD just doesn't sound as good as SD2... that's all there is to it, really. I've tried both, and feel I wasted my money on SSD.

Quite glad I didn't buy SSD when it was cheap then. I still want to try SD2 but remember somebody commenting that they felt ripped off by SD2 after hearing a drum jam of mine done with EZDrummer standard kit

What's your take on the differences? I haven't spent any time with the Slate stuff. (I did like the sound of the Led Zep kit from what I recall, but that was pretty much it.)



SD2 has a lot more depth to it, and if you don't need that depth, it's probably not worth it. Same goes for all the big drum libraries.

Also, your beats are generally awesome, which has something to do with it.

Whenever I start actually trying to promote my music, like on a professional level, then I probably will just go ahead and buy a copy of ez drummer. I am pretty sure I am not capable of using all of the features of superior drummer 2. I just feel like with all of the options on each drum, that I really have no idea what I am doing. I usually just set all of the drum sounds and compressors to the easy mixers setting.

I barely touch that stuff myself. I tamper with the mix and slap a compressor, EQ and occasionally transient shaper across the whole thing. Works fine for demo-ing. If I were seriously trying to mix with it I'd just probably use the multiple outs anyhow and treat it like a real kit.

Slate's samples are kind-of dead sounding, as if they've had the life squished out of them with the stock compressors in Cool Edit Pro or some shit. They also seem to be a bit duller (darker?) than SD2, and there's no real overhead samples or cymbal samples to speak of... usable ones, anyway.

And the snare samples are all tuned weird. Thunk, versus crack. I'll take a cracky ringy snare over a thuddy dead snare any day of the week, personally. Even the piccolo samples sound thuddy. IMO of course.

Yeah, so. That software doesn't automatically assign drums to all of the outs right? I really need to dig deeper into that software. Like I said, I really have no idea what I'm doing.

That's pretty much how I do it.

This doesn't surprise me from... just the mixes I've heard them on.

And I agree with you about the snares. It's rare I hear a snare I like on anything new, heavyrawking or not.

I can tell you that in Logic you have to select the multi-out option versus just stereo when you load it up. I'm assuming you, like everyone else here I think, is on Reaper so I have no idea how to do this.

Logic is actually kinda screwy in how to actually make proper tracks for the multiple outs, too, but this might just be a... er, "feature" of SD2 and not specific to Logic. It treats them as buses or aux tracks, not individual software instrument tracks.

It automatically creates the 16, or maybe it is 12 I don't have my computer in front of me, out. However, everytime I am mixing tracks I only see audio coming up on two of the superior drummer 2 tracks. That is making me wonder if it is just set to stereo.