EZdrummer

Even by today’s music production standards, it’s not easy to create natural sounding drums. Electronic distorted, heavy, fast or wobbly beats? Sure. But actually making a program imitate a drummer? A bit more complicated.

Still, this is probably what the developers at Toontrack had in mind when they created EZdrummer.

Basically, EZdrummer is a VST (Virtual Studio Technology) instrument that you can use to play drums directly on your computer. Ideally, you will use it as a plugin for your DAW (digital audio workstation), adding the instrument’s sounds to a larger musical production project. However, EZdrummer even has some nice standalone features that help you produce bits of music even without a DAW.

First off, the photorealistic drum rack looks great and it’s easily customizable. Left clicking on any drum will play it, while right clicking will allow you to change the actual instrument that’s played, but also its pitch, volume and velocity. Apart from the kick drum, the snare, the hi-hats, cymbals and toms that are part of a drum rack, you also get to play tambourines, shakers, claps and a cowbell.

Pressing record in the interface and trying to click the drums one by one with your mouse will not result in anything even remotely similar to music. What you can do, however, is go to the Search tab and click the “Tap 2 Find” button. You will be taken to a new window with your customized drum rack, where you’ll hear a metronome and you’ll still be able to click the drums and play them; only this time the program will record one drum pattern and keep looping it while you play another drum, and another, and another.

Now, don’t worry if what you play will sound like garbage, because EZdrummer has a powerful quantizing function that will at least align your beats. The purpose the “Tap 2 Find” tool is actually to use the pattern that you play to find a similar prerecorded (and very well-played) pattern in its library.

This would be a good time to add that the program comes with a library of prerecorded MIDI drum sets that you can use to create your own songs. But don’t think that you can’t input a bit of creativity, as you can actually replace the different drum sounds contained within a MIDI file. Also, the pattern that you record during your “Tap 2 Find” session also gets recorded as a MIDI and, if you’re happy with what you played there, why not use it?

It would be overkill to write about all the EZdrummer’s functions in just one review. You probably won’t be able to produce whole songs just by using this VST (unless you want to make a drum-only song), but if you want natural sounding drum patterns in your production, then this is definitely a plugin that you should consider.