Toontrack State of the Art SDX Expansion Review
By The Article Master on
Toontrack has been a guiding light for drum libraries for many years. They’ve done this by tracing their perspective of the history of drum styles and kits. The quality and depth offered by Superior 3, and especially their new expansions, offer exceptional realism and versatility to drum tracks with MIDI and audio.
The aptly named State for the Art SDX library traces the musical journey of recording engineer and producer Elliot Scheiner, who over his career has been nominated for 27 Grammy awards and has won 8 times. Check out his credits here. In fact, Scheiner was the engineer for legendary recordings like Van Morrison’s Moondance and Steely Dan’s Aja.
The State of the Art drums were sampled at Clubhouse Studios in the Hudson Valley of New York. Compared to other Toontrack drum libraries it comes in at a comparatively svelte 86GB. Seven different kits were chosen with three room ambiences. The actual studio sound has always been a passion for Scheiner, so there’s a big live room, a dry studio room with the instruments well-isolated, and a small library room with an intimate sound that spans the other two. Great for those looking for a soothing after hours kit.
Design and Usability
With forward-thinking features, Toontrack has designed Superior Drummer with flexibility and ease of use in mind. As with all their libraries, Toontrack's 20 years of experience with creative drum plugin products is a benefit for end users. The Superior interface is intuitive, and the workflow is fast, allowing new users to jump in without feeling overwhelmed. Toontrack also provides helpful presets and mixer settings tailored for various styles, making it easy to get great-sounding drums without spending hours tweaking every detail, unless that's what the user wants to do.
For example, want to get a perfect snare sound the old-fashioned way? Just create a quick loop of snare hits using Superior’s MIDI recording option and open an EQ plugin on the Snare channel in Superior’s mixer. You can EQ the top of the snare or the bottom.
Features and Functionality
For someone looking for many different types of drum hits, they’re here, with multiple sidesticks for the snare and every imaginable way to hit the kick, toms, and cymbals. There are a huge number of well-crafted MIDI drum grooves that can be easily auditioned and just as easily dropped onto a DAW track. Like Toontrack's other applications EZDrummer and EZKeys, the groove files, or any MIDI files created by the user can be added to a timeline and each groove edited much like the piano roll of a DAW. And there is an assortment of tools to manipulate the timing to bring out the subtleties of a drum performance designed to help a non-drummer make their tracks sound like a real drummer is playing the parts.
Sound Quality
The first thing that strikes you with any SDX pack is the excellent sound quality. Elliot Scheiner and the engineering team at Toontrack have captured the kits, ensuring that every hit, from the softest ghost note to the hardest slam, comes through with absolute clarity. Each SDX pack includes multi-channel recordings of various drum kits and additional percussive instruments, allowing you to mix and manipulate mics as you would with real recorded drums. The State of the Art expansion even utilizes a Decca Tree for additional room ambience.
Final Verdict
State of the Art requires that the user own a license to Superior 3. Given the level of detail, sound quality, and the number of instruments included in each SDX pack, the price is well worth it. It's easy to think of Superior 3 and State of the Art as a long-term investment at $179. For anyone serious about their drum sounds, thanks to Elliot Scheiner State of the Art offers the best in historical and current methods of drum recording.
Toontrack SDX expansions are a premium choice for anyone serious about drum production. The sound quality, versatility, and customization options are second to none. If you’re looking to elevate your drum tracks to a professional level, these expansions are worth every penny. Highly recommended for both beginner and advanced users alike.
If we had one nit is that one can't see the titles of the books in the library because we would like to know what Elliot is reading.
The making of State of the Art
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