The deluge of new Toontrack software continues for the metal month of November. But no product has spoken to my inner 13 year old, perpetually writing “Napalm Death” and “Exodus” on the classroom desks in my mind, like the new Rock Warehouse expansion for Superior Drummer. The “warehouse” part of the name comes from The Warehouse Studio, the recording haunt of one Randy Staub (among others). You might know him as “Randy Razorblade,” as Lars Ulrich referred to him in A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica.
Any gear dork, which let’s face it you are or else you wouldn’t be here reading this, who is also a metalhead likely spent hours watching the studio portion of that fine ’90s film. Remember how you dreamed of spending millions of dollars in the recording studio? You were going to spend months making the perfect record? Yeah, you’ll never be able to do that. Hell, Metallica can’t even do that anymore.
But what you can have are drum samples recorded by the engineer of The Black Album (and, um… Nickelback… and Bryan Adams…). The Rock Warehouse consists of three drumkits professionally sampled by Mr. Razorblade, plus a few extra kick drums and snares. 20 freakin’ gigs of raw, unprocessed cocaine drums.
We’ll continue to cover these new Toontrack products as they’re announced, but we’ve also been interviewing several of the engineers behind them. So if you’ve missed our interviews with the likes of Andy “Heartwork” Sneap or Daniel “Future Bread Machine” Bergstrand, it’s not too late. You don’t want to get caught tongue-tied when Amon Amarth guitar tones come up in the discussion at your next cocktail party. I’ll admit though, we neglected to ask Andy if his friends call him “Sneap Dogg.” That’s our bad. It’s on us.
