The Sound Board

Anyone have this? Thoughts? Seems like a good deal...

https://vstbuzz.com/deals/70-off-realid ... 9cebb5cca5

disclaimer - I do work for Mike Greene, so yeah, I'm biased.

But not that biased<G>...

My primary drum library remains Toontrack Superior - I just love the sound, and appreciate the flexibility, although sometimes it is a mixed blessing.

I did not expect to click with RealiDrums, but it is cool, and it does EXACTLY what it set out to do, streamline the creation of drum parts. It is fast, I wish I had similar tools for all the other stuff for which I use libraries.

Part of the speed is the reduced number of choices - you can still go crazy auditioning snare drums of course, but you will run out of candidates sooner than with other libraries, and I'm guessing you won't mind. There are still a lot of choices, just the differences are not quite as subtle.

Same applies to the complexity slider in the groove generator - this is not microscopic MIDI editing, but it is really effective.

I think I use RealiDrums more frequently now than Superior2. I save that for projects where I really do want to obsess over every little detail, even if it is only for me<G>, which of course is never the case.

Cheers for the info Bill

Bill, did Mike eventually add separate outputs? I got an early NFR, and that hadn’t been implemented yet. It was probably my first critique.

Lawrence wrote: ↑Mar 22, 2018 4:01 pm Bill, did Mike eventually add separate outputs?

Yes, he did.

Ha! Thanks, Bill!

Hey, Byzantium -

Didn't know if you were still looking for takes on Realidrums, but I thought I'd pass along a few things on it.

A lot of the cool features have already been mentioned or are immediately obvious, but there's one REALLY cool thing about Mike's "Close - Room - Rock - Beast" mic position setup for each drum: each perspective 'sounds' like it has been re-tweaked for that position. Which is a "well, duh" kind of thing, but for workflow it makes drum selection much more immediate, because there's ZERO tweaking until you've settled on a kit. I'd tended to use Superior 3 or AD2 before I got Realidrums (through the APD 'store', so about twice the price it is now on the offer...) and I can't begin to count the times that I'd started dialing something in with the idea of "I'll just need to dry this up a bit and it'll work great" - and then getting some time in and finding that it didn't work as well as I'd thought - or that another kit and process had been working better, and it's back to the top again. Not really complaining about that - that's the territory and all - but the relative simplicity of the basic sound selection in Realidrums makes getting engaged with the music (instead of the balance of the In and Out Kick mics...!!) that much faster.

Sound of the drums is...well, better than it deserves to be. It's not terribly detailed, but at 1/45000th the size of Superior's latest library, that's not news. It actually reminds me of the SSD3 Classic set of samples in terms of fitting right into a mix - but with WAY more variety thanks to being able to change mic perspectives on kit pieces. If you got any mileage out of those, or wished they had a broader stylistic variety, then you'll love the heck out of Realidrums.

To be honest, I can't really think of anyone who wouldn't get something out of Realidrums, because it carves its own path in drum workflow, and does it really well, and consistently. It doesn't make you choose its workflow necessarily - if you REALLY want to get into the weeds, you have some room to tweak, and can bypass the groove engine and play it in or use MIDI grooves - but you'll tend to find that when you DO trust Realidrums's "native" workflow, that it just works, and works as well as you could imagine it working.

Hey bbunker - thank you so much for taking the time to write up your thoughts - exactly the kind of thing I was looking for! - much appreciated.

I'm definitely not the type to want to have to start fiddling with parameters to get the instruments balanced across the kit etc and to get the velocity response such that they are playable without having to go back and tweak virtually all of the hits later, so yeah this sounds like something that might suit me. I also really like the idea of having a good selection of pre-determined grooves that are tweakable to get up and running quickly and to try things out musically which might spark compositional elements without having to invent and laboriously program stuff in.

I wonder can the midi capture real-time changes to the groove parameters and replay them at the right time if they're not driven by keys but from mouse-selected changes.

I mainly just have just the stock Logic drums and MAD drums currently (I picked up Shimmer Shake Strike recently but haven't had time to use it yet). Don't have any experience with SSD, EZDrummer, Addictive etc. I had a look at SD3 and yeah the sound quality seems amazing, but it is also enormous and not cheap.

Probably the only thing I'd be slightly worried about is whether the out-of-the-box sound is good/detailed/clarified enough, and of course the old chestnut that only-I-can-answer of 'do I really "need" it...', is it worth picking up in the sale, or should I save the dollars for something else... But it seems a lot of functionality for a good price.

Thanks again.