EZdrummer 2

The EZDrummer VSTi fits my needs perfectly. It’s my first drum VSTi, except for the ones that come with Cubase SX. Although it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that some of the more expensive drum VSTi have, it’s easy to use and sounds great right out of the box.

GUI: Very nice! The main screen displays whatever drum set you have loaded. You can audition the individual drums and cymbals by clicking on them, or select different ones by clicking on the individual instrument’s dropdown menu. There’s a mixer icon that you can click on to display an eight track mixer if you want to process the drums separately rather than the default stereo spread. The Velocity control changes the selected playing style from light to heavy and the Humanize button adds a randomize factor. The Groove screen lets you select from a variety of grooves and fills that are appropriate for the selected set.

Sound: After listening to demos of several drum VSTi, I selected EZDrummer, in part because the drums sound most similar to the way I have mixed drums in studios and in live performances. They are somewhat pre-processed, so it’s easy to get a good sound without any additional processing. Many of the other VSTi demos that I listened to, although unprocessed, were poorly recorded, so I don’t think any amount of further processing would be an improvement (you just can’t find decent engineers these days).

Features: EZDrummer has most of the features I need. Being able to drag and drop the grooves and fills sure makes life easy. But there are limitations, such as a lack of some common time signatures like 5/4, 7/4 and 9/8. And even though there are plenty of grooves and fills to select from, you can always think of more that aren’t available. Still, that’s not really a problem because you can modify the ones that come with EZDrummer or you can tap out your own on a midi keyboard.

Docs: The documentation is sparse because the software is so simple.

Presets: There aren’t really any presets, unless you consider the grooves and fills (each one measure in length) to be presets. And there needn’t be any.

Support: Posting to the EZDrummer Forum gets quick responses from their support folks, although they sometimes forget to answer all the questions. But they are enthusiastic about their product.

VFM: The retail price is fair for what the software does.

Stability: I’ve had some problems with the samples appearing to unload prior to exporting to an audio mixdown, but I’ll credit that to Cubase because I haven’t heard of this problem occuring with other VST hosts. Other than that, the samples load quickly, the VSTi uses very little CPU and so far it hasn’t crashed.

For me, EZDrummer was the right choice, although I think others might find it overly simplistic for their needs.Read Review