EZDrummer or Superior Drummer - in terms of "ease of use"

[ashcat_lt]

Yeah I said internal not external.

Oops! Sorry about that. Too early, too little coffee... I can probably come up with some other excuses!

...But I'm a bit confused by that, too. EZD has less options and control in the internal mixer, but not none. ???

[mjbphotos]

Oops! Sorry about that. Too early, too little coffee... I can probably come up with some other excuses!

...But I'm a bit confused by that, too. EZD has less options and control in the internal mixer, but not none. ???

yes, the EZD internal mixer is very limited - volume and pan. Sending each 'mic' to a separate track for true mixer control is the way to go. Depending on the EZX you are using, some of the cymbals or snare hits on some of the loops are way over the top, so midi editing is almost always necessary to get a good overall sound, but I've never had to add compression to the EZD tracks to make them sit well in the mix. I suspect that would be required with SD.
Oh another thing - almost always, kill the 'room mic(s)' in EZD and add external reverb instead. I also move the stereo width in so it doesn't sound like the drums are spread across the room, but instead are in the close-together spacing that is normal.

[Guitargodgt]

Oh yeah! Bleed control is also more limited in EZ drummer.

But the internal mixdown will spit out some crazy options (wav format) if you want them like:

Each cymbal to thier own track.
Bleed on it's own track.


And honestly even though I end up going to my daw for mixing, the internal Sonalksis plugins that are included in the superior mixer are considerably nicer than any other drum plugin I have tried (BFD eco, AD, EZ, Steven Slate).

[miroslav]

Can anyone comment on the "mixing skills" thing? Is there something extra I have to do with Superior Drums?

I have both...and you probably already read some of my posts in the other thread, but in a nutshell, SD isn't really harder to mix, it just has more options and you can do more complex mixing with it...or not.

That said, I didn't notice anything mind-blowingly *complex* with the mixing in SD. Spend an hour with it...maybe do a couple of experimental tracks...and by then you'll have it down as much as you will ever need for most things.
After that...SD just gives you some more tweaking options that you don't get in EZ.

As soon as I got SD, I stopped using EZ, though I do have/use all the sound packs that work with EZ (I have a few of them)...and speaking of sounds, the SD out-of-the-box kits are IMO much better than the EZ stock kits...but, there are add-on packs as mentioned, and some are quite good from EZ (depends what styles/pack you are into).
The thing I want to get soon is a couple of the extended "legacy" studio packs for SD...which appear to be as or even more killer then the stock one you get with the program....but they cost a bit more than the EZ packs, though on sale, I've seen them for $75.

Also, with SD you get a lot of additional room/ambient files...I mean a LOT!
I didn't bother installing all that extra stuff, 'cuz it's like another 15 GB worth, and since I'm mostly going to go for dry kits when I do my tracks, and then add my choice of room/amb later, I just left those disks in the box for now, but if you want that variety, it's there.

AFA the MIDI grooves, some or good, some boring, lots of the same with minor variations. I went and got a ton of MIDI grooves from Groove Monkee...and it sure saves a lot of time programming them. Then I just tweak them as needed.

Finally, the simple thing is to set up a couple of "default" kits (unless you need radically different kits with every new song you record)...and then just tweak those couple of kits as needed, or switch out some of the drum/cymbal sounds...but you don't need to reinvent the wheel every time you start a new song.
I mean...when you use a real kit, how many times do you change it radically?
Most likely, if you do a bunch of songs for an album....you want to keep a similar vibe, but if not, it's not hard to get way creative with the EZ/SD drums packs.

[pure.fusion]

Thanks all for your help.

As usual, good people and good help here.

Cheers,
FM