So the answer to our question will really depend on how you work with drums and the needs of your productions – it offers unrivalled creative control, customisation, loads of content with incredible detail, and will take care of drum production from start to finish. You can probably tell from our Excellence Award that we’re in no doubt as to the quality of SD3 on its own merits. If you don’t have a MIDI device handy, load and loop a pattern from the Grooves tab while you swap kits. You can start by loading a default ‘clean’ kit from the menu at top right, and although you can trigger it with mouse clicks, you really should use a MIDI device of some kind to fully appreciate the responsiveness.įollowing that, browse the preset kits by genre, or by producer, including George Massenburg, Bob Rock, and Richard Devine. Individual elements from the main display can move into separate windows, and the entire thing scales between 70-250%. Even on the 11-inch MacBook Air, the SD3 layout worked beautifully.
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At the right are controls to edit the currently selected instrument, and at the bottom are macro controls, the MIDI editor, and the Song Creator.Ī series of tabs access views for Grooves, Mixer, and Tracker – all will be explained shortly. SD3’s interface is logically laid out, the centre occupied by a graphic of the kit, where each instrument animates when triggered via MIDI or mouse click. There’s no need to drag the library over to clog up your computer, it runs fine off the SSD – this convenience meant I could do much of the review on a humble MacBook Air.
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SD3 is available as a download, but if the download size scares you, for an additional €189, Toontrack ships an SSD with the library pre-installed, which is how it arrived here for review. Beyond the kits themselves, SD3 features a built-in MIDI editor, MIDI beats ready to use in the form of ‘grooves’, a full-featured mixer with effects, macro controls, and audio-to-MIDI conversion. The kits are from Gretsch, Ayotte, Pearl, Yamaha, and Premier, and the core library includes 230GB of 44.1kHz/24-bit samples, with an additional 350 or so drum-machine sounds.
It’s built around recordings of seven acoustic kits recorded at Galaxy Studios in Belgium (“the most quiet recording space of this size in the world”), by renowned engineer George Massenburg. SD3 runs standalone, or as an AU/VST/AAX plug-in. Toontrack has updated its flagship product, Superior Drummer, and while I admit it’s not something that’s been on my radar – in fact, I’ve never heard of it before – I’ve discovered that many of my fellow producers are fans, especially those involved in soundtrack composition, needing fast access to a large library of high-quality sounds, detailed programming, and possibly a bit of Surround, too.
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