SD2 utilizes thousands of drum and cymbal hits corresponding to different MIDI velocities to create a detailed yet user-friendly system for engineers and producers to create and supplement acoustic drums.
Superior Drummer 2.0 (or SD2) is a full production multitrack drum-sampling platform. A great deal of available hard drive space is recommended as full installers can run upwards of 25GB. Superior Drummer 2.0 comes bundled with the NYC Vol.1 Avatar recording studio pack and is available for $349.
Superior Drummer 2.0 is available in RTAS, VST and Audio Units formats at 32-bit and 64-bit for both PC and MAC. Employing multi-hit and multitrack capabilities, Superior Drummer is by far the most detailed and comprehensive platform I’ve come across for creating, replacing or augmenting acoustic drums and percussion.
At the head of the class is Toontrack who has revolutionized drum sampling with the Superior Drummer software engine. Today, there are a great deal of high quality drum sampling software platforms and audio packs available to engineers and producers. So while the idea of drum sampling was heresy in the early 90’s, today many drummers assume that their drum sounds can and will be augmented with high quality samples to enhance the overall sound. Today, the quality and detail of drum samples available has changed all that, allowing for seamless blending of the original drums with variable, natural sounding multi-track samples. We showed it to Matt who had no idea and he wasn’t too pleased at all.”īecause each hit was essentially the same exact sample repeated endlessly, drum sampling technology during its infancy in the 1990’s significantly altered the sound of the instruments recorded on tape – creating a robotic, clunky sound. Slash recalls that he had discovered a notebook where Clearmountain “had notated all of the drum samples he planned to mix in over Matt’s drum tracks…he’d brought in samples that would change Matt’s sound drastically. The rest of Superior 2 stock tones are pretty good, however the kicks.uh not cutting it for me.In his eponymous autobiography, Slash recollects a story about legendary mix engineer Bob Clearmountain who’d been originally hired to mix the Guns N’ Roses recordings that became the Illusions albums. Has anybody else struggled with this in the past with Superior 2 stock kicks? I have an old BlueJay soundfont that actually has a few good 16-bit kick fonts that blow away the ones in Superior 2, which is rather frustrating frankly since that is super old technology. But for that late 70's and 80's big, solid thud/whack type of tone I simply cannot get there after trying a number of methods, parallel processing, compression, tape sims, EQ, you name it. They are fine for lighter styles or even Metal (where the beater can be made to reach into more of a clicky smack attack). I cannot find a way so far to get any of the kicks to have a good solid thud to them.
Superior Drummer 2 was a popular drum synth with Sonar/Cakewalk users so I wanted to see if I might get some insight from the forum as to whether users felt the stock kick drums cut it for hard rock or classic metal.