Making Realistic Kits in Addictive Drums 2
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 มิ.ย. 2024
- A method for creating a realistic-sounding drum kit in Addictive Drums 2, that you can load up quickly and use as a general all-purpose demo or songwriting kit sound. This is useful to me for pretending I'm in a music rehearsal room with a real drummer pal, jamming and trying ideas out.
I love AD2, but I find that most of its preset kits are pretty fruity or have quite specific characteristics to them, which is unhelpful to work with if you're simply trying to quickly write a demo or jot an idea down. I often just want a solid and "normal"-sounding drumkit preset to start with, that I can then colour or process in whatever way I want to later on, or just give me an idea of how things will sound with a real drummer for my projects @CactuarCollective & @luotheband.
It can also sound very 'preset-y' and I think if you know what to look for, it's quite easy to sniff out AD's fakeness, which is something I think lots of producers are keen to avoid. This is how I'd create my own realistic kit sounds for that purpose. This saves me a lot of time as I can load up this preset and get writing immediately, as opposed to spending ages looking for or tweaking a preset that only kind of fits what I need.
Download my kit preset for free below:
Version 1 (Requires both the Metal + Modern Soul and RnB adpacks to load):
dl.dropboxusercontent.com/scl...
Version 2 (Metal pack-only kit pieces):
dl.dropboxusercontent.com/scl...
This kit tone relies on the combo of kit pieces from two different add-on packs for Addictive Drums; version 1 of my preset requires both to load successfully. Version 2 only needs the Metal pack.
www.xlnaudio.com/products/add...
www.xlnaudio.com/products/add...
I think the kicks, toms and cymbals from the metal pack are really punchy and great, but the snare and hi-hats are a little too bright, obnoxious and sloshy to me - so I swap these out for a tighter snare & darker set of hats from the RnB pack to round out and balance the overall kit sound.
Metal Pack kit pieces:
Kick - Ludwig 22"
Toms - Ludwig Classic Maple (12x8", 13x9", 16x16", 18x16")
Crashes - 19" Zildjian K Dark, 20" Zildjian A Custom Reso
Rides - 20" Zildjian K Crash Ride, 24" Zildjian A Medium
Chinas - 18" Zildjian A Custom, 19" Zildjian K Custom Hybrid
RnB Pack kit pieces:
Snare - 14x5" Ludwig Acrolyte
Hi-Hats - 15" Meinl Byzance Dual
00:00 - Intro
00:32 - Why presets are unhelpful
02:00 - Blank Slate
02:26 - Kick & Snare
05:53 - Hi-Hat
06:45 - Toms
09:20 - Cymbals
10:00 - Master FX
13:44 - Using this Kit to Demo Ideas
14:46 - Using AD2 in Full Tracks
Instagram / Spotify / Bandcamp:
linktr.ee/joshtrinnamanaudio - เพลง
Thanks for sharing.. Very useful information.. Going to try these techniques out! :)
First, I like to say thank you so much for producing this video. I’ve been so needing this for a long time. This video helps a meal is going to help me save a lot of time tweaking in the future. Thanks again great content.
Thank you man, very happy to hear it was helpful! Happy beatmaking
Thanks, KDB
😅 not had that one before, yeh fairplay
I wish I had this video at hand when I started out on Addictive.
Excellent video , much appreciated for the time and energy you put in.
No worries! Hope it helps. Wish I'd known about the toms early on
I enjoyed watching it. This is exactly what I was looking for 👌big applause for your work and sharing it with us 👍. Kind regards.
Glad you found what you needed!
Yeep this is exactly what I was looking for 🙌🙌🙌💪.
Thanks my man !
happy you found it, nice one!
Thank you! This is super helpful. I’ve been struggling with the overly-characterful AD2. I initialized but then didn’t have the skills to bring them up to snuff. Now I do. ❤
Really happy to hear it mate, thanks for letting me know! There's my preset from this vid for free download in the description if it helps you to have, but equally it sounds like you're able to have your own fun with AD2 now :)
This was useful, thank you for sharing.
Great video Josh!
Cheers Kenneth!
So this was what you were working on during your injury, great job mate
Bravo. I'll take it over the Ed Sheeran comparisons I usually get 😅
If you don’t use overheads at all, your crash and ride cymbals can vanish. Personally i don’t mind the overheads (the room is indeed in need of muting). I always use convolution reverb with a real studio IR.
Yeah that's true, for clarity that'd only happen if you turned down the OHs or Room bus faders in the bottom right of the UI, or if you went through every cymbal track and individually tuned off the room + OH send for each cymbal.
I'm sure you already know but for anyone else reading who doesn't, cymbals in AD have no close mics and can only route out of OHs or Room, so if you turn those off, you won't be able to hear any cymbals.
I find it best to leave OHs and Room faders at unity and instead control what's being sent to those busses, using the send controls on each kit piece. Enables having the cymbals still in the OHs, with all the kick/snare/toms/hats as just the close-mics, gets you the best of both.
What reverb do you use? There's some good tricks for that using AD in multi-output mode!
@@joshtrinnaman Can I move the kick, snare and toms out of rooms and OHs to export them dry separately while also export the rooms and OHs with all of them in there? To emulate the recording session as close as possible? Or do you have any other advice? Thanks! 🎉
@@alenvlajnic8076 Yeah that should be possible, you'd have to bounce everything out of AD2 to audio files though! There might be a cleverer way to do this with AD2 in Multi-Output mode, but here's how I'd do what you asked off the top of my head:
Remove all OH & ROOM sends from the kick, snare and toms. Solo each one at a time, bounce em out so youve got them dry. Then send them all back to the OHs bus at the level you want, then Solo the Overhead Bus and bounce that out. Boom
@@joshtrinnaman I did some research last night, and it seems as AD2 bounces dry elements when multioutput (kick, snare, toms) while you choose how much of each element you want in the rooms and OHs cause you get those as unique channels also. I have to check it out in the studio tho.
Other logical solution is definitely the one you just wrote.
@@alenvlajnic8076 That's correct yeah, you can get the raw drum samples out of AD2 by setting the Multi-Output mode of their tracks to 'Pre-Fader', this'll bypass all the FX chains/envelope shaping and all that stuff in AD2 to put things on their own mono audio tracks - although a heads up that this can dramatically change or kill the sound of your preset if you made it first in Stereo mode using any of the internal AD2 FX, envelope shaping and so on, as it'll ignore all of your internal levels settings. I've seen this confuses some first-time multioutput AD2 users.
Can be worth experimenting with setting some tracks as 'Post-Fader' if you're converting it from a Stereo preset, so things don't sound totally different. Or just don't use Stereo mode at all and simply start building your preset as a Multi-Out one from the getgo, so you don't have to deal with any potential headaches down the line :)
I kind of figured this out myself on my last production, but I went through a lot of agony and mediocre-and-worse drum sounds to get there. And I never knew about the all-purpose slider on the diagram of each kit piece. This is all really helpful! Thanks.
Lots of trial and error for sure. I'm curious about some of the difficulties you've encountered, and would be cool to hear where you ended up after all the tweaking :)
Yeah the master slider for each kit piece is an easy control to miss, it's a neat UI design but weirdly small given how important it is. I'm now wondering if there's anything else like that I haven't mentioned in this vid!
@@joshtrinnaman Comes out Jan 1! I'll shoot you a link then.
@@rickmassimo6192 Noice! feel free to pop a link here when it''s out
@@joshtrinnaman Not 100% happy with it, but ... th-cam.com/video/IrTwKbCvO5A/w-d-xo.html
I love the way you mentioned that 2:37 I’ve always thot that about live drums Plugin so now im interested in seeing how you take that away…
Nice video! I'm trying to decide which plugin to get between EZD3, AD2 and the GGD Benny Greb library. Probably sounds silly but the way AD looks kinda puts me off, just looks very dated. However, seems like it does strike a good balance of giving you quite a few tools to sculpt your sound without being too overwhelming.
Tough if its your 1st drums plugin! I have some thoughts on each,
GGD looks great if all you need is realistic, acoustic kit sounds, particularly for contemporary/modern rock and heavier styles of music. Not entirely sure how great it would be for anything outside of that though, i.e. 70s funk or more vintage old-skool kit sounds. Get the sense it's geared towards making you sound like you're in 2024. I could be wrong though, I haven't looked into it a tonne but that's the impression I get. Basically FFO Periphery / AAL / Plini / Polyphia etc, and if you're after that kind of thing, then it's a no-brainer to get GGD I think.
AD2 - can do that too, maybe not as good as GGD for it, but is doable with some tweaking and the right kit pieces. AD2 has a lot of flexibility and a wide variety of drum sounds for pretty much any genre you can get out of it.
EZD3 - Can't say too much on this cos I haven't touched it for years, but looks basically interchangeable with AD2 now except it seems to have a nicer interface and lots more controls!
Yeah it looks old, still sounds great. I do like Native Instruments Studio Drummer too.
It's good I have that knowledge already
🏅
Great video, I learned a lot! I have Fairfax vol. 1&2 and Black Velvet. Is there any way to dry up the ride cymbals so I get more ping and less wash and sustain? Thanks
Oo niche ask. You could try filtering out a fair bit of the low-end of the ride with the EQ, maybe up to like 1200hz so its mostly just the click of the stick attack and less of the ride's body. And then change the envelope so there's less sustain & release. Maybe add some distortion after that to warm it back up again.
There's also the Response control, which I think you can set somehow to only trigger the bell sample of the ride IIRC, rather than the edges etc so you get a bit of a clickier and drier sound more consistently 🏜
Can change the intencity of each drum in the same track?...
yeah you could change the velocities of the midi hits, or you could automate some parameters in AD2 to change at different points in the track. Or duplicate the AD2 track and have a 2nd instance of it with different settings
Thanks. I have downloaded the preset but no idea where on my machine it should go. Any ideas? Thanks
For anyone else wondering, I just dragged the file into AD2. Thanks
Its very easy with AD2 presets, you don't need to put the file in a specific folder anywhere - you just drag & drop the preset file onto the AD2 plugin window and it should load it up. Hope you have fun with it!
im routing each to separate outs and close mic doesn't seems to affect anything anymore?
are you using AD2 in its multi-output mode? If thats the case try experimenting with the pre-fader or post-fader options. If the Kick for example is set to 'pre-fader' then that should come out of its own audio channel as the Close Mic only and then you adjust its level or apply FX on an audio channel in your DAW, rather than in AD2.
Please add the presets in your description
That's a really good idea, why didn't I think of that before. Just added a link to the description pal - if you download it, would you mind letting me know here if you got it working OK your end?
You should just have to drag & drop the preset onto AD2 and it should load it up.
Thanks for sharing your preset mate.
@@joshtrinnaman I simply tried drag & drop the preset into the presets window in the open AD2 program. Unfortunately, in the windows where individual drum parts are displayed it says No License.
@@MachoniakHey there, the preset uses kit pieces from two seperate add-on packs for AD2 to get this sound, so requires both of them to load successfully (the Metal pack and the RnB pack, specifically):
www.xlnaudio.com/products/addictive_drums_2/adpak/metal
www.xlnaudio.com/products/addictive_drums_2/adpak/modern_soul_and_rb
I've just added a 2nd version to description only using the Metal pack that you could try, so if you don't have one or both of these add-on packs for AD2, you'd only need to get the Metal one in order for it to load correctly.
I'd recommend swapping out the snare from the Metal pack for something else though, personally I find it a bit harsh and washy compared to the punchy-sounding and tighter RnB snares. Similarly in the RnB pack, the kicks and particularly the toms don't hit and slam in the same way as the Metal ones, which is why I opted for this particular combo of packs to get the best overall kit sound for my needs.
@@joshtrinnaman Thank you very much for such an extensive and substantive answer. I will try to do everything according to your description. Thank you once again for your great work and the knowledge you share with us. Have a great day 👍
Whatever music you have playing in the background while you're talking is very distracting, otherwise thank you for the video.
Thank you for the useful feedback, brave Tarnished. It's my own music that I use as backing tracks so I think I'm slightly de-sensitised to hearing it. I'll factor this in to future vids. Cheers!