Toontrack's EZ Drummer and Superior Dummer have proved hugely popular, in part because of the availability of expansion libraries. While Superior Drummer is the flagship product, offering far more tweakable options, EZ Drummer is no slouch: it takes up less hard‑drive real estate, doesn't confuse you with unnecessary options and allows you to get up and running pretty quickly — and, importantly, it can sound good too! The one thing I've felt this system lacked, though, was a decent range of electronic drums, as the focus has hitherto been on realistic‑sounding acoustic drum kits. That's been frustrating, because with many musical styles I want to be able to pick and choose different drum and percussion sounds, whether electronic or acoustic, without having to flit between different plug‑ins.
Thankfully, with EZX Electronic that's all changed because, as the title suggests, acoustic sounds are not this expansion library's raison d'etre! The user interface is reassuringly familiar, but rather than the usual drum graphics, you get something a little more abstract to reflect the change in content.
Toontrack's promotional literature proudly boasts that "this is Classic, Modern and Future all rolled into one”, and that its contents are suitable for a huge array of different genres. In fact, it's pretty hard to spot a genre that's not listed (Well, OK, maybe not country...). So are these claims justified?
Well, certainly the collection is large: the 1.2GB of data on the DVD encompasses 33 different drum kits, and the kit pieces within them offer a very broad sonic palette. Rather than going down the route of some other electronic drum libraries (Drums Overkill, for example), whereby you simply get a well‑catalogued library of 'classic' sounds derived from various hardware drum machines, Toontrack present a much better thought-out selection. Their choice of the word 'crafted' is accurate: many of the sounds seem to have been designed from the ground up, and the reward for that effort is plain to see. True, you do get most of the basics — a nice array of kicks from the firm to the squelchy, hats and snares from the tight to the acidically distorted, and many of the classic machines are covered — but the USP of this library is the mangled weirdness that you just don't find anywhere else. In fact, I lost several hours playing around with the sounds I was supposed to be reviewing!
The bundled patterns are an impressive demonstration of the programmer's capability, though, personally, I found them rather busy, and thus usually much more use as a demo than something I'd consider actually using in a track.
Classic? Yes. Modern? Yes. Future? We'll have to wait and see... but I've no doubt it will get used on plenty of productions. There are more extensive libraries out there, but the bang for buck (assuming you already own EZ Drummer or Superior Drummer 2) is superb! Matt Houghton