Soilwork‘s/Arbitrator‘s Dirk Verbeuren is a BAMF. He even has a blastbeat named after him. He’s not just a BAMF on acoustic drums either, he seems to be just as at home on an electronic kit hitting mesh and rubber. And when I say just as at home, I mean it appears that he shot this video in his house, and yet it doesn’t sound that way. It sounds like it was produced in a multi-million dollar studio, by, say, Colin Richardson.
Wait! Could it be that it sounds that way because Dirk is using the new ToonTrack EZ Drummer 2 Made of Metal EZX sample pack produced by Colin Richardson? That would certainly be a weird introduction if it weren’t, so of course the answer is YES!
I love the idea of being able to play your parts into MIDI on V-Drums and triggering them with a sample library, it has quite an allure for me even as a mediocre drummer. Tapping parts in on a keyboard or clicking them in with a mouse is so slow and trying to do kick drum parts after the hands hurts my brain. It’s far more intuitive to play them all at once, even if you’re going to quantize it afterward. Many people don’t know that the first Periphery album was performed entirely on V-drums and the sounds are all Superior Drummer. It’s especially cool to think that you can have a performance and completely change the sounds to whatever you want – different drums, different cymbals, fart sounds, farm animals, honking car horns.
Sure, it would sound better to go to a proper studio with a baller live room and record them with a knowledgable engineer and producer. But it’s also really expensive, and for a far lower entry fee you could have some pretty great sounding drums that sound like this:
So if for nothing else than as a great tool for demos (that’s how I use it), EZDrummer has killer sounds with minimal tweaking, and if you like Colin Richardson’s taste, then you should look into the ToonTrack Made of Metal EZX.
