In Summary
With layered acoustic and electronic sounds a great way to supercharge any drum part, up until recently getting those could be clunky. We show you how to get fast, streamlined results in just a few moves.
Going Deeper
Many engineers will be familiar with the hype surrounding recording and mixing gear. “Bigger, brighter, fatter, clearer” are all superlatives that the industry loves, and it might be no surprise that some of the same claims can be found in the world of drum gear. With amazing instruments, and amazing gear, surely recorded drums should sound perfect right from the start?
We know the reality is different, and there is a whole raft of traditional and cutting edge fixes now available to get drums back on track. Even with well-recorded drums, layering sounds to get huge hybrid flavours is now a common way to supercharge acoustic drum sounds with electronic ones. Not only can this technique be used to bolster ailing drum recordings, but also they can be used to easily spice up high quality acoustic sounds from a drum VI.
Hybrid Drum Sounds With EZdrummer 3
EZdrummer 3 (EZD3) is Toontrack’s venerable VI that sets out to balance great drum sounds with a learning curve that doesn’t get in the way of musicians’ and composers’ flow. Its core library consists of seven acoustic kits across three rooms, but its ever-growing EZX expansions also feature a number of electronic flavours as well.
In the video, we show you a fast way to layer-up EZD3’s acoustic and electronic sounds for hybrid textures that pop. Using its core library Tight Room kit as the basis for acoustic sounds, we double up with a second instance featuring Synthwave EZX. We explain how MIDI and VI mixer channels can be tweaked to get the part playing as it should, before going slightly deeper with some fine tuning in the DAW mixer…
In an era where whole genres continue to blend and morph into new ones, hybrid acoustic/electronic sounds have quickly become part of the music production lexicon in the third millennium. As these recorded sounds have grown, so to have ways to get them live and in the studio, such as with using triggers. For those interested, there are also many ingenious ways to prepare drums to get electronic flavours using just acoustic drums. For everyone else, layering up in the studio with a tool such as EZdrummer 3 has never been easier.