Produce world-class drums with Superior Drummer 3

Toontrack covers a broad range of virtual instruments including EZbass, EZdrummer 2, EZkeys, EZmix 2 and Superior Drummer 3 with a wide range of expansion content for each. Superior Drummer 3 is the company’s flagship drum production tool, offering unrivaled control and flexibility for producing professional drum mixes for any genre, right in your computer. Let’s dive in!

This drum production program comes with a unique design, specially crafted to improve the workflow while making music. The layout is divided into four sections: Drums, Grooves, Mixer and Tracker. The main Drums section, which is displayed when opening this plugin, will show a fully controllable drum kit. The massive 230+ GB library of drums offers seven full kits as well as a total of 25 snares and 16 kicks. It was recorded by award-winning engineer George Massenburg at probably the world’s most quiet and ideal location for sampling, the Galaxy Studios in Belgium. In addition to close microphones and several ambience positions, the Superior Drummer 3 setup also includes eleven room microphones set up in a surround configuration, for use in anything from stereo to 5.1, 9.1 and all the way up to 11.1 systems. In addition to presets by George Massenburg himself, the library also includes ready-made drum mixes for a broad range of genres by top engineers like Bob Rock, Mark Lewis and Richard Devine. Using these mixes as your starting point, you can easily swap out individual instruments and continue crafting your own unique kits using the built-in sound design tools, mixer effects and features.

Once headed over to the Grooves page, you can start creating your own drum beats either by drawing them in manually or by using material from the comprehensive MIDI library. To refine your search for grooves and fills, you can choose different genres, play styles, types of grooves and rhythms. Every groove is labeled by name, family, intensity, power hand, rhythm, bars, and tempo. Drag and drop your MIDI files into the timeline to organize your song. From there, you can use the Grid Editor to literally edit the grid and fine-tune the performance down to the tiniest detail. Every instrument included in each MIDI file is listed and every hit can be altered, deleted, added, moved or muted.

Toontrack added a complete Mixer tab that every engineer, musician and DJ/producer will be familiar with. A total of 22 microphones, 16 busses and 16 outputs are incorporated in this mixer section. An arsenal of onboard equalizers, distortion effects, reverbs, delays, compressors, limiters, gates and more can be used on any channel. Use bus sends, panning, level/peak metering, level sliders, solo/mute, phase and the output to fine-tune your mix.

Last but not least, the Tracker section allows you to do drum audio to MIDI conversion. Load up entire sets of drum stems and Superior Drummer 3 will automatically generate MIDI data based on trigger information. It will come up with a MIDI map of your drum parts, which allows you to replace or augment the live-recorded parts with samples.

Toontrack’s Superior Drummer 3 is available as a plugin within your favorite DAW or as a standalone plugin. It’s currently available at a price of €379,- and with an additional price of €189,- you receive the full core library pre-installed on an SSD.

Have a closer look at the plugin down below:

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Image Credits: Toontrack