XLN Audio - Addictive Drums
XLN Audio is fairly new Swedish audio software development company that has recently released the first version of its new drum sampler plugin named; Addictive Drums. First let me get you up to speed with how I produce drum tracks; Roland V-Drums baby! Recording the midi out from an electric drum kit is in my opinion the only way to truly capture a natural drum feel (unless of course you are recording an acoustic kit). You can of course use keyboard controllers, or manually enter midi notes but I am lazy, time is money and that is way to time consuming, so hence the $1k investment in V-Drums. Ok back to the topic at hand, I opened up an existing project I have been working on to try out Addictive Drums. This project already has a midi drum track that I recorded from the V-Drum output, and in this song’s case that track was currently routed to an instance of Toontrack’s EZDrummer.
I fired up Addictive Drums, set the midi output of the drum track to Addictive Drums and hit play. Not surprisingly, the V-Drum midi notes and Addictive Drums did not map well together. A quick search on the Addictive Drum forums turned up nothing, although I did find a post where Lars (An XLN dude) said V-Drum support would be included in a future release. So back to the drawing board; I dug out the V-Drum brain manual, as well as the Addictive Drum midi note list, which you can find in PDF form in the XLN Addictive Drum installation directory. Thankfully both Roland and XNL documented their midi note mappings quite well in an easy to read chart, so creating a custom drum map in Sonar was no sweat. The brain that came with my V-Drum set, can only possibly output around 40-50 midi notes, while Addictive Drums can handle around 90, so using V-Drum’s in my case won’t allow me to utilize everything Addictive Drums can offer. However I am not Neil Pert, and I don’t really need 4 toms and 8 cymbals!
Using my custom V-Drum to Addictive Drums Sonar drum map (which you can download below) I was back up and running, and could finally see what Addictive Drums was capable of. It is very easy to swap out different kits, and drums within those kits (something EZDrummer doesn’t really allow…..but that is why it is called EZDrummer). AD offers some cool features such as the ability to change individual drum pitch, as well as offering effects such as reverb and compression right from the AD interface. One thing I did notice is the speed at which new kits load in AD! I know comparing EZDrummer to AD is not comparing apples to apples, but you would think that EZDrummer would load kits faster, but it does not. Another cool feature that AD offers is the ability to blend top and bottom snare mics, as well as front and back kick mics.
Preset Quality:
Presets are Presets; they are just starting points and rarely should be used in a final mix. That being said, I didn’t really like any of the preset kits that AD offered, but like I said not a big deal to me, as I usually create kits from scratch.
In conclusion: Will XLN Audio catch up to Toontrack? Probably not, but for a little over $200 US you can’t go wrong with Addictive Drums. If you like the EZness of EZDrummer, but are looking for a few more features without going the route of Drum Kit from Hell, then I would say Addictive Drums is the right choice for you.
March 17th, 2008 at 12:07 am
Hey Brett. I, too, am a V-Drummer who just discovered Addictive Drums. It really does sound much better than EZDrummer. i agree with you.
In regards to the Sonar map, you said you had posted one for others to use. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Could you re-post it? I’m really having a difficult time mapping this stuff out and your drum map would help me so much. Thanks, Brett.