Addictive Drums 2 Presets

It’s been a long time coming, but the follow up to XLN’s Addictive Drums was worth the wait. There are plenty of virtual drum instruments to choose from, offering highly detailed, top-of-the-range drum kits lovingly recorded in expensive studios. Some people use them solely as a demoing or songwriting tool, others see them as a valid alternative to real drums and put a lot of time and effort into making them an important and featured part of their music. Whatever your persuasion, it’s factors such as cost, sound quality, the level of detailed realism, expandability and ease of use that affect the decision to gravitate towards one virtual drum instrument rather than another.

Since 2006, Addictive Drums (herein referred to as AD) has proven very popular, delivering on all these fronts. Whilst perhaps not as minutely adjustable or customisable as, say, FXpansion’s BFD or Toontrack’s Superior Drummer, it’s XLN Audio’s ‘everything you need and nothing you don’t’ philosophy that has made it so easy to get great results with the minimum of fuss. Their constantly expanding library embraces many kits from the 1960s to the present day, all eminently tweakable — beyond recognition if desired — using well-designed effects and a very attractive and usable interface. Mindful of the constant demand for newer and better features, Addictive Drums 2 (AD2) addresses some of the limitations of the original version, and benefits from improvements and additions across the board.

After the massive success of XLN Audio\'s「Addictive Drums」the long awaited「Addictive Drums 2」has been released. Not only the sound, but the functionality has been improved on as well. We will take a look at some of the new functions across the span of a few articles.

You can check out the review of the original version here:. Installation of all XLN products now requires you to use their proprietary online installer, first introduced with Addictive Keys. Once the online installer application is running and you’ve logged into your account, your existing AD libraries (if any) are scanned and checked for available updates. These and any AD2 products you’ve just purchased will show up as ‘update available’ or ‘install’ as appropriate. You can choose to download and install items one at a time, or everything in one go — it’s up to you and how much you enjoy watching progress bars! AD2’s GUI adopts the same approach as Addictive Keys, using picture-based galleries to navigate through the content.

Each kit has two Explorer menus; the Kit menu offers a selection of ‘bread and butter’ presets generally biased towards more natural drum sounds, whilst those in the Selections menu tend to be more processed, often demonstrating how radically the kits can be transformed away from the raw material. Depending on what you have installed, the presets’ audition buttons will show either an arrow (the kit is installed and a short MIDI loop plays) or a headphone icon (the kit is not installed and the same loop plays as an audio demo). The latter gives a taste of what you could have — it’s a useful demo tool, as well as a shrewd ‘carrot on a stick’ sales technique! The Studio Prog kit and its associated presets as displayed in the Explorer’s Kit view. The arrow buttons play short examples for auditioning purposes.

Quick basic level adjustments can be made at the top of the page. The Kit page gives an overview of all loaded kitpieces. Visually it’s less cluttered than before, and rather easier on the eye. There are now 18 kitpiece slots as opposed to AD’s 12, a welcome expansion providing six cymbal slots and two ride slots, a vast improvement on the three cymbals and one ride of the earlier version, which was always a frustration. Additionally, three new Flexi slots accept any kind of kitpiece, so you can add extra toms, cymbals or anything else as the situation demands. These Flexi slots replace the Xtra slot in AD, which was rather limited in its usefulness.

The kick drum and snare can each be linked to any number of other kitpieces, of any kind. Simply click on either drum’s link icon and drag it to the target kitpiece. Making up a composite dual snare sound is as easy as loading your second snare to a Flexi slot and linking the two together.

Flexis also host a number of additional useful ‘trigger’ sounds (sine waves, white noise and uncredited ‘drum machine’ kick and snare samples) designed to be used as layering textures, or indeed used in their own right. The larger complement of kitpiece slots has also caused the mixer to grow in size; there are 10 channels compared to the eight of AD.

It’s been a long time coming, but the follow up to XLN’s Addictive Drums was worth the wait. There are plenty of virtual drum instruments to choose from, offering highly detailed, top-of-the-range drum kits lovingly recorded in expensive studios. Some people use them solely as a demoing or songwriting tool, others see them as a valid alternative to real drums and put a lot of time and effort into making them an important and featured part of their music. Whatever your persuasion, it’s factors such as cost, sound quality, the level of detailed realism, expandability and ease of use that affect the decision to gravitate towards one virtual drum instrument rather than another.

Since 2006, Addictive Drums (herein referred to as AD) has proven very popular, delivering on all these fronts. Whilst perhaps not as minutely adjustable or customisable as, say, FXpansion’s BFD or Toontrack’s Superior Drummer, it’s XLN Audio’s ‘everything you need and nothing you don’t’ philosophy that has made it so easy to get great results with the minimum of fuss. Their constantly expanding library embraces many kits from the 1960s to the present day, all eminently tweakable — beyond recognition if desired — using well-designed effects and a very attractive and usable interface. Mindful of the constant demand for newer and better features, Addictive Drums 2 (AD2) addresses some of the limitations of the original version, and benefits from improvements and additions across the board.

After the massive success of XLN Audio\'s「Addictive Drums」the long awaited「Addictive Drums 2」has been released. Not only the sound, but the functionality has been improved on as well. We will take a look at some of the new functions across the span of a few articles.

You can check out the review of the original version here:. Installation of all XLN products now requires you to use their proprietary online installer, first introduced with Addictive Keys. Once the online installer application is running and you’ve logged into your account, your existing AD libraries (if any) are scanned and checked for available updates. These and any AD2 products you’ve just purchased will show up as ‘update available’ or ‘install’ as appropriate. You can choose to download and install items one at a time, or everything in one go — it’s up to you and how much you enjoy watching progress bars! AD2’s GUI adopts the same approach as Addictive Keys, using picture-based galleries to navigate through the content.

Each kit has two Explorer menus; the Kit menu offers a selection of ‘bread and butter’ presets generally biased towards more natural drum sounds, whilst those in the Selections menu tend to be more processed, often demonstrating how radically the kits can be transformed away from the raw material. Depending on what you have installed, the presets’ audition buttons will show either an arrow (the kit is installed and a short MIDI loop plays) or a headphone icon (the kit is not installed and the same loop plays as an audio demo). The latter gives a taste of what you could have — it’s a useful demo tool, as well as a shrewd ‘carrot on a stick’ sales technique! The Studio Prog kit and its associated presets as displayed in the Explorer’s Kit view. The arrow buttons play short examples for auditioning purposes.

Quick basic level adjustments can be made at the top of the page. The Kit page gives an overview of all loaded kitpieces. Visually it’s less cluttered than before, and rather easier on the eye. There are now 18 kitpiece slots as opposed to AD’s 12, a welcome expansion providing six cymbal slots and two ride slots, a vast improvement on the three cymbals and one ride of the earlier version, which was always a frustration. Additionally, three new Flexi slots accept any kind of kitpiece, so you can add extra toms, cymbals or anything else as the situation demands. These Flexi slots replace the Xtra slot in AD, which was rather limited in its usefulness.

The kick drum and snare can each be linked to any number of other kitpieces, of any kind. Simply click on either drum’s link icon and drag it to the target kitpiece. Making up a composite dual snare sound is as easy as loading your second snare to a Flexi slot and linking the two together.

Flexis also host a number of additional useful ‘trigger’ sounds (sine waves, white noise and uncredited ‘drum machine’ kick and snare samples) designed to be used as layering textures, or indeed used in their own right. The larger complement of kitpiece slots has also caused the mixer to grow in size; there are 10 channels compared to the eight of AD.