Toontrack has released their newest expansion for EZ Drummer. It’s called Metal Machine, but is it as good as the rest of the expansions?
I discovered EZ Drummer back in 2008 when I needed a way to produce phatter drums for my tracks. They’ve released expansions with a clockwork’s regularity a few per year. I bought Drumkit from hell last year, but it left a lot to wish for regarding kicks and snares, so when I saw the video below I thought to myself: This could be what I needed all along.
According to the video ToonTrack engaged the drummer John Tempesta and the metal guru Andy Sneap to lay the finishing touch to the sounds. And they did a really awesome job to get the sound done properly!
The drums
The drums is pretty much those bombshells that you want to use when it comes down to really good heavy metal music, but not just that. They also fit pretty well within hiphop and regular pop music as well.
The kicks are awesome to tell the truth. Compared to DFH they really have what the kicks lacked in DFH. They sounds not just your average paper covered kicks like the DFH kicks did. They have a depth that DFH lacked.
The snares is pretty much awesome from the start. Something like 8 different snares that really gives you what you want. The snares has the body that really lifts the music forward, and the crispness that puts you as a composer right in the center of the sound.
The toms has a really bulky sound and a lot of hi-def that really brings the drums alive. Qualitywise the different toms has pretty much what you need. They doesn’t sound like your regular sample pack with one-shots with just one version where you have to work hard to get a realistic sound. It’s like you’re the drummer who play the toms and getting all the quality you need from the kit.
The cymbals is pretty much awesome with different variations for almost all cymbals, crisp and well defined sound that you want to use over and over again. Nuff said.
The mixer has the usual stuff controlling the sounds. Each drum has their own strip on the mixer with volume and pan, you also get 3 strips for the overall sound quality.
The MIDI files leaves little to wish for since they cover most of the aspects of heavy metal music. It has to be said though that the DFH MIDI files works just as well with Metal Machine.
Final review: Metal Machine has what you expect any expansion from Toontrack has. It knows how to do one thing. Deliver high quality each time, every time. The only negative that I see is that with so many drums I wish that EZ Drummer had 32 outputs rather than 8, so one can spread all individual drums on different channels. This is just a minor inconvenience though since the sounds is so awesome anyways.
Review: Metal Machine,
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