Happy to see this vid has helped a few folks out! Check out my Cactuar Collections albums using these Addictive Drums 2 kit tones in full tracks 👇🙏 luomusic.bandcamp.com/album/cactuar-collections Full album playlist also here on YT 🌵: ua-cam.com/play/PL-kiON_oQKPCA-QyzRsiqV4MpvP-gU-41.html&feature=shared
If you don’t use overheads at all, your crash and ride cymbals can vanish. Personally i don’t mind the overheads (the room is indeed in need of muting). I always use convolution reverb with a real studio IR.
Yeah that's true, for clarity that'd only happen if you turned down the OHs or Room bus faders in the bottom right of the UI, or if you went through every cymbal track and individually tuned off the room + OH send for each cymbal. I'm sure you already know but for anyone else reading who doesn't, cymbals in AD have no close mics and can only route out of OHs or Room, so if you turn those off, you won't be able to hear any cymbals. I find it best to leave OHs and Room faders at unity and instead control what's being sent to those busses, using the send controls on each kit piece. Enables having the cymbals still in the OHs, with all the kick/snare/toms/hats as just the close-mics, gets you the best of both. What reverb do you use? There's some good tricks for that using AD in multi-output mode!
@alenvlajnic8076 Yeah that should be possible, you'd have to bounce everything out of AD2 to audio files though! There might be a cleverer way to do this with AD2 in Multi-Output mode, but here's how I'd do what you asked off the top of my head: Remove all OH & ROOM sends from the kick, snare and toms. Solo each one at a time, bounce em out so youve got them dry. Then send them all back to the OHs bus at the level you want, then Solo the Overhead Bus and bounce that out. Boom
@alenvlajnic8076 That's correct yeah, you can get the raw drum samples out of AD2 by setting the Multi-Output mode of their tracks to 'Pre-Fader', this'll bypass all the FX chains/envelope shaping and all that stuff in AD2 to put things on their own mono audio tracks - although a heads up that this can dramatically change or kill the sound of your preset if you made it first in Stereo mode using any of the internal AD2 FX, envelope shaping and so on, as it'll ignore all of your internal levels settings. I've seen this confuses some first-time multioutput AD2 users. Can be worth experimenting with setting some tracks as 'Post-Fader' if you're converting it from a Stereo preset, so things don't sound totally different. Or just don't use Stereo mode at all and simply start building your preset as a Multi-Out one from the getgo, so you don't have to deal with any potential headaches down the line :)
First, I like to say thank you so much for producing this video. I’ve been so needing this for a long time. This video helps a meal is going to help me save a lot of time tweaking in the future. Thanks again great content.
Great workflow, cheers for sharing! that sounds really useful for separetely routing & blending the snare top & bot compared to using that slider. Would be a good feature for them to add in another update
I kind of figured this out myself on my last production, but I went through a lot of agony and mediocre-and-worse drum sounds to get there. And I never knew about the all-purpose slider on the diagram of each kit piece. This is all really helpful! Thanks.
Lots of trial and error for sure. I'm curious about some of the difficulties you've encountered, and would be cool to hear where you ended up after all the tweaking :) Yeah the master slider for each kit piece is an easy control to miss, it's a neat UI design but weirdly small given how important it is. I'm now wondering if there's anything else like that I haven't mentioned in this vid!
Why am I just now seeing this?! lol I have had AD2 for many many years now and have never ever tried approaching the drums this way. This was great taking us thru your workflow. Thanks!
Cheers! They just updated AD2 yesterday for the first time in absolutely ages, I wonder if that’s anything to do with it. Anyway, glad if this was useful 🤜
Thank you! This is super helpful. I’ve been struggling with the overly-characterful AD2. I initialized but then didn’t have the skills to bring them up to snuff. Now I do. ❤
Really happy to hear it mate, thanks for letting me know! There's my preset from this vid for free download in the description if it helps you to have, but equally it sounds like you're able to have your own fun with AD2 now :)
Nice video! I'm trying to decide which plugin to get between EZD3, AD2 and the GGD Benny Greb library. Probably sounds silly but the way AD looks kinda puts me off, just looks very dated. However, seems like it does strike a good balance of giving you quite a few tools to sculpt your sound without being too overwhelming.
Tough if its your 1st drums plugin! I have some thoughts on each, GGD looks great if all you need is realistic, acoustic kit sounds, particularly for contemporary/modern rock and heavier styles of music. Not entirely sure how great it would be for anything outside of that though, i.e. 70s funk or more vintage old-skool kit sounds. Get the sense it's geared towards making you sound like you're in 2024. I could be wrong though, I haven't looked into it a tonne but that's the impression I get. Basically FFO Periphery / AAL / Plini / Polyphia etc, and if you're after that kind of thing, then it's a no-brainer to get GGD I think. AD2 - can do that too, maybe not as good as GGD for it, but is doable with some tweaking and the right kit pieces. AD2 has a lot of flexibility and a wide variety of drum sounds for pretty much any genre you can get out of it. EZD3 - Can't say too much on this cos I haven't touched it for years, but looks basically interchangeable with AD2 now except it seems to have a nicer interface and lots more controls!
For the Toms, if you select the L (Load) symbol you can load all for toms from the same kit at the same time. This is now a a 4squares symbol in the recent update.
I seem to take a similar approach as you. The rides and other cymbals are only in the overheads and have no close mikes, so I treat them as Cymbal mikes, and have them pick up some hihat too. It seems a lot of engineers will get the sound in the Overheads and room mikes and then bring the close mike to level to balance the sound. As the overhead and room sound is baked into the recording in the real world, they have to get this right. But it's not baked in in AD2 so setting up a mix with these first would mean messing with al the knobs on each kit piece and be quite a lot of jumping around. Also I'm not sure I want a fully traditional sound, having my tastes been shaped by dance music, drum machines and samplers over the past 3 decades, and dryer deader drums also seem more of thing right now. So approaching it from dry kicks, snare an hats and building outwards works better for me too. I like running through the presets to audition individual kit pieces playing, as sometimes I find myself overlooking some kitpeices, but then finding they work in some presets. Analyzing just one pieces to see how to capture that character is more achievable then looking at the whole kit.
Grreat video Josh. In your opinion is Addictive Drums good enough to use in a proper song? I'm debating what plugin to use to substitute live drums as hiring session drummers for each song is quite expensive. What do you think?
Yeah I definitely think you can, I personally used AD2 for all the drums on this album for the same budgetary reason! ua-cam.com/video/3dpPJ0ngLic/v-deo.html Personally I think they're pretty convincing, I would usually prefer to record a real drummer but in this case I was really happy with the sound of AD2, considering it cost me a fraction of the price of recording a full album's worth of real drums in a studio. But I guess its not really for me to say how convincing they are, that's up to listeners to decide :)
Click on the Preset Menu at the top & in the middle of the UI, go to the 'All Presets' category and scroll to the top, you should find the 'Initialize (Empty)' Preset there.
@@DL-kc2mw That's strange, I have 2.5 as well and can see it in there! I wonder if its possible I've got it as I've had AD since Version 1, if you've only just picked up 2.5 without having previous versions I'm thinking its possible they've renamed the Preset to maybe something like 'Default'. Should be in there somewhere.
Great video, I learned a lot! I have Fairfax vol. 1&2 and Black Velvet. Is there any way to dry up the ride cymbals so I get more ping and less wash and sustain? Thanks
Oo niche ask. You could try filtering out a fair bit of the low-end of the ride with the EQ, maybe up to like 1200hz so its mostly just the click of the stick attack and less of the ride's body. And then change the envelope so there's less sustain & release. Maybe add some distortion after that to warm it back up again. There's also the Response control, which I think you can set somehow to only trigger the bell sample of the ride IIRC, rather than the edges etc so you get a bit of a clickier and drier sound more consistently 🏜
yeah you could change the velocities of the midi hits, or you could automate some parameters in AD2 to change at different points in the track. Or duplicate the AD2 track and have a 2nd instance of it with different settings
That's a really good idea, why didn't I think of that before. Just added a link to the description pal - if you download it, would you mind letting me know here if you got it working OK your end? You should just have to drag & drop the preset onto AD2 and it should load it up.
@@joshtrinnaman I simply tried drag & drop the preset into the presets window in the open AD2 program. Unfortunately, in the windows where individual drum parts are displayed it says No License.
@@MachoniakHey there, the preset uses kit pieces from two seperate add-on packs for AD2 to get this sound, so requires both of them to load successfully (the Metal pack and the RnB pack, specifically): www.xlnaudio.com/products/addictive_drums_2/adpak/metal www.xlnaudio.com/products/addictive_drums_2/adpak/modern_soul_and_rb I've just added a 2nd version to description only using the Metal pack that you could try, so if you don't have one or both of these add-on packs for AD2, you'd only need to get the Metal one in order for it to load correctly. I'd recommend swapping out the snare from the Metal pack for something else though, personally I find it a bit harsh and washy compared to the punchy-sounding and tighter RnB snares. Similarly in the RnB pack, the kicks and particularly the toms don't hit and slam in the same way as the Metal ones, which is why I opted for this particular combo of packs to get the best overall kit sound for my needs.
@@joshtrinnaman Thank you very much for such an extensive and substantive answer. I will try to do everything according to your description. Thank you once again for your great work and the knowledge you share with us. Have a great day 👍
Its very easy with AD2 presets, you don't need to put the file in a specific folder anywhere - you just drag & drop the preset file onto the AD2 plugin window and it should load it up. Hope you have fun with it!
are you using AD2 in its multi-output mode? If thats the case try experimenting with the pre-fader or post-fader options. If the Kick for example is set to 'pre-fader' then that should come out of its own audio channel as the Close Mic only and then you adjust its level or apply FX on an audio channel in your DAW, rather than in AD2.
Thank you for the useful feedback, brave Tarnished. It's my own music that I use as backing tracks so I think I'm slightly de-sensitised to hearing it. I'll factor this in to future vids. Cheers!
Happy to see this vid has helped a few folks out! Check out my Cactuar Collections albums using these Addictive Drums 2 kit tones in full tracks 👇🙏
luomusic.bandcamp.com/album/cactuar-collections
Full album playlist also here on YT 🌵:
ua-cam.com/play/PL-kiON_oQKPCA-QyzRsiqV4MpvP-gU-41.html&feature=shared
VERY VERY good information here. Removing the OH and Room is killer - given me much more realism and a better starting point for everything.
Thanks for sharing.. Very useful information.. Going to try these techniques out! :)
No worries mate, hope it helped out!
I wish I had this video at hand when I started out on Addictive.
Excellent video , much appreciated for the time and energy you put in.
No worries! Hope it helps. Wish I'd known about the toms early on
If you don’t use overheads at all, your crash and ride cymbals can vanish. Personally i don’t mind the overheads (the room is indeed in need of muting). I always use convolution reverb with a real studio IR.
Yeah that's true, for clarity that'd only happen if you turned down the OHs or Room bus faders in the bottom right of the UI, or if you went through every cymbal track and individually tuned off the room + OH send for each cymbal.
I'm sure you already know but for anyone else reading who doesn't, cymbals in AD have no close mics and can only route out of OHs or Room, so if you turn those off, you won't be able to hear any cymbals.
I find it best to leave OHs and Room faders at unity and instead control what's being sent to those busses, using the send controls on each kit piece. Enables having the cymbals still in the OHs, with all the kick/snare/toms/hats as just the close-mics, gets you the best of both.
What reverb do you use? There's some good tricks for that using AD in multi-output mode!
@alenvlajnic8076 Yeah that should be possible, you'd have to bounce everything out of AD2 to audio files though! There might be a cleverer way to do this with AD2 in Multi-Output mode, but here's how I'd do what you asked off the top of my head:
Remove all OH & ROOM sends from the kick, snare and toms. Solo each one at a time, bounce em out so youve got them dry. Then send them all back to the OHs bus at the level you want, then Solo the Overhead Bus and bounce that out. Boom
@alenvlajnic8076 That's correct yeah, you can get the raw drum samples out of AD2 by setting the Multi-Output mode of their tracks to 'Pre-Fader', this'll bypass all the FX chains/envelope shaping and all that stuff in AD2 to put things on their own mono audio tracks - although a heads up that this can dramatically change or kill the sound of your preset if you made it first in Stereo mode using any of the internal AD2 FX, envelope shaping and so on, as it'll ignore all of your internal levels settings. I've seen this confuses some first-time multioutput AD2 users.
Can be worth experimenting with setting some tracks as 'Post-Fader' if you're converting it from a Stereo preset, so things don't sound totally different. Or just don't use Stereo mode at all and simply start building your preset as a Multi-Out one from the getgo, so you don't have to deal with any potential headaches down the line :)
First, I like to say thank you so much for producing this video. I’ve been so needing this for a long time. This video helps a meal is going to help me save a lot of time tweaking in the future. Thanks again great content.
Thank you man, very happy to hear it was helpful! Happy beatmaking
I bounce out snare bottom and top and both kick mics for use later . Really handy
Great workflow, cheers for sharing! that sounds really useful for separetely routing & blending the snare top & bot compared to using that slider. Would be a good feature for them to add in another update
I love the way you mentioned that 2:37 I’ve always thot that about live drums Plugin so now im interested in seeing how you take that away…
Very helpful, many thanks!
cheers, happy to help!
This is SO helpful homie, great work. Thank you. I use Addictive Drums and these tips are going to be so fun to explore
🙏 thanks my liege, happy if its helped out any music projects etc!
I kind of figured this out myself on my last production, but I went through a lot of agony and mediocre-and-worse drum sounds to get there. And I never knew about the all-purpose slider on the diagram of each kit piece. This is all really helpful! Thanks.
Lots of trial and error for sure. I'm curious about some of the difficulties you've encountered, and would be cool to hear where you ended up after all the tweaking :)
Yeah the master slider for each kit piece is an easy control to miss, it's a neat UI design but weirdly small given how important it is. I'm now wondering if there's anything else like that I haven't mentioned in this vid!
@@joshtrinnaman Comes out Jan 1! I'll shoot you a link then.
@@rickmassimo6192 Noice! feel free to pop a link here when it''s out
@@joshtrinnaman Not 100% happy with it, but ... ua-cam.com/video/IrTwKbCvO5A/v-deo.html
I enjoyed watching it. This is exactly what I was looking for 👌big applause for your work and sharing it with us 👍. Kind regards.
Glad you found what you needed!
Why am I just now seeing this?! lol I have had AD2 for many many years now and have never ever tried approaching the drums this way. This was great taking us thru your workflow. Thanks!
Cheers! They just updated AD2 yesterday for the first time in absolutely ages, I wonder if that’s anything to do with it. Anyway, glad if this was useful 🤜
This was useful, thank you for sharing.
Thank you! This is super helpful. I’ve been struggling with the overly-characterful AD2. I initialized but then didn’t have the skills to bring them up to snuff. Now I do. ❤
Really happy to hear it mate, thanks for letting me know! There's my preset from this vid for free download in the description if it helps you to have, but equally it sounds like you're able to have your own fun with AD2 now :)
So this was what you were working on during your injury, great job mate
Bravo. I'll take it over the Ed Sheeran comparisons I usually get 😅
That was awesome. Thanks
Thankers good squire, hope it helped something out 🤜
Great video Josh!
Cheers Kenneth!
Nice video! I'm trying to decide which plugin to get between EZD3, AD2 and the GGD Benny Greb library. Probably sounds silly but the way AD looks kinda puts me off, just looks very dated. However, seems like it does strike a good balance of giving you quite a few tools to sculpt your sound without being too overwhelming.
Tough if its your 1st drums plugin! I have some thoughts on each,
GGD looks great if all you need is realistic, acoustic kit sounds, particularly for contemporary/modern rock and heavier styles of music. Not entirely sure how great it would be for anything outside of that though, i.e. 70s funk or more vintage old-skool kit sounds. Get the sense it's geared towards making you sound like you're in 2024. I could be wrong though, I haven't looked into it a tonne but that's the impression I get. Basically FFO Periphery / AAL / Plini / Polyphia etc, and if you're after that kind of thing, then it's a no-brainer to get GGD I think.
AD2 - can do that too, maybe not as good as GGD for it, but is doable with some tweaking and the right kit pieces. AD2 has a lot of flexibility and a wide variety of drum sounds for pretty much any genre you can get out of it.
EZD3 - Can't say too much on this cos I haven't touched it for years, but looks basically interchangeable with AD2 now except it seems to have a nicer interface and lots more controls!
Yeah it looks old, still sounds great. I do like Native Instruments Studio Drummer too.
For the Toms, if you select the L (Load) symbol you can load all for toms from the same kit at the same time. This is now a a 4squares symbol in the recent update.
I seem to take a similar approach as you. The rides and other cymbals are only in the overheads and have no close mikes, so I treat them as Cymbal mikes, and have them pick up some hihat too. It seems a lot of engineers will get the sound in the Overheads and room mikes and then bring the close mike to level to balance the sound. As the overhead and room sound is baked into the recording in the real world, they have to get this right. But it's not baked in in AD2 so setting up a mix with these first would mean messing with al the knobs on each kit piece and be quite a lot of jumping around. Also I'm not sure I want a fully traditional sound, having my tastes been shaped by dance music, drum machines and samplers over the past 3 decades, and dryer deader drums also seem more of thing right now. So approaching it from dry kicks, snare an hats and building outwards works better for me too. I like running through the presets to audition individual kit pieces playing, as sometimes I find myself overlooking some kitpeices, but then finding they work in some presets. Analyzing just one pieces to see how to capture that character is more achievable then looking at the whole kit.
Yeep this is exactly what I was looking for 🙌🙌🙌💪.
Thanks my man !
happy you found it, nice one!
Grreat video Josh. In your opinion is Addictive Drums good enough to use in a proper song? I'm debating what plugin to use to substitute live drums as hiring session drummers for each song is quite expensive. What do you think?
Yeah I definitely think you can, I personally used AD2 for all the drums on this album for the same budgetary reason! ua-cam.com/video/3dpPJ0ngLic/v-deo.html
Personally I think they're pretty convincing, I would usually prefer to record a real drummer but in this case I was really happy with the sound of AD2, considering it cost me a fraction of the price of recording a full album's worth of real drums in a studio. But I guess its not really for me to say how convincing they are, that's up to listeners to decide :)
It's good I have that knowledge already
🏅
Hi thanks for the video❣
In the new version I cannot load a new preset
Click on the Preset Menu at the top & in the middle of the UI, go to the 'All Presets' category and scroll to the top, you should find the 'Initialize (Empty)' Preset there.
@@joshtrinnaman Version 2.5 doesn't have one!
@@DL-kc2mw That's strange, I have 2.5 as well and can see it in there! I wonder if its possible I've got it as I've had AD since Version 1, if you've only just picked up 2.5 without having previous versions I'm thinking its possible they've renamed the Preset to maybe something like 'Default'. Should be in there somewhere.
What kits do you get with the plugin it’s self without buying packs ?
You get to pick 3 of your choice to be included with base version of AD2, I'm pretty sure
@@joshtrinnaman cheers, I asked them on one of their videos but they were unclear tbh
Great video, I learned a lot! I have Fairfax vol. 1&2 and Black Velvet. Is there any way to dry up the ride cymbals so I get more ping and less wash and sustain? Thanks
Oo niche ask. You could try filtering out a fair bit of the low-end of the ride with the EQ, maybe up to like 1200hz so its mostly just the click of the stick attack and less of the ride's body. And then change the envelope so there's less sustain & release. Maybe add some distortion after that to warm it back up again.
There's also the Response control, which I think you can set somehow to only trigger the bell sample of the ride IIRC, rather than the edges etc so you get a bit of a clickier and drier sound more consistently 🏜
Can change the intencity of each drum in the same track?...
yeah you could change the velocities of the midi hits, or you could automate some parameters in AD2 to change at different points in the track. Or duplicate the AD2 track and have a 2nd instance of it with different settings
Please add the presets in your description
That's a really good idea, why didn't I think of that before. Just added a link to the description pal - if you download it, would you mind letting me know here if you got it working OK your end?
You should just have to drag & drop the preset onto AD2 and it should load it up.
Thanks for sharing your preset mate.
@@joshtrinnaman I simply tried drag & drop the preset into the presets window in the open AD2 program. Unfortunately, in the windows where individual drum parts are displayed it says No License.
@@MachoniakHey there, the preset uses kit pieces from two seperate add-on packs for AD2 to get this sound, so requires both of them to load successfully (the Metal pack and the RnB pack, specifically):
www.xlnaudio.com/products/addictive_drums_2/adpak/metal
www.xlnaudio.com/products/addictive_drums_2/adpak/modern_soul_and_rb
I've just added a 2nd version to description only using the Metal pack that you could try, so if you don't have one or both of these add-on packs for AD2, you'd only need to get the Metal one in order for it to load correctly.
I'd recommend swapping out the snare from the Metal pack for something else though, personally I find it a bit harsh and washy compared to the punchy-sounding and tighter RnB snares. Similarly in the RnB pack, the kicks and particularly the toms don't hit and slam in the same way as the Metal ones, which is why I opted for this particular combo of packs to get the best overall kit sound for my needs.
@@joshtrinnaman Thank you very much for such an extensive and substantive answer. I will try to do everything according to your description. Thank you once again for your great work and the knowledge you share with us. Have a great day 👍
Thanks. I have downloaded the preset but no idea where on my machine it should go. Any ideas? Thanks
For anyone else wondering, I just dragged the file into AD2. Thanks
Its very easy with AD2 presets, you don't need to put the file in a specific folder anywhere - you just drag & drop the preset file onto the AD2 plugin window and it should load it up. Hope you have fun with it!
me podrías compartir el ajuste preestablecido?
Do you have a link to the preset?
Link's in the description 🥁
Thanks, KDB
😅 not had that one before, yeh fairplay
im routing each to separate outs and close mic doesn't seems to affect anything anymore?
are you using AD2 in its multi-output mode? If thats the case try experimenting with the pre-fader or post-fader options. If the Kick for example is set to 'pre-fader' then that should come out of its own audio channel as the Close Mic only and then you adjust its level or apply FX on an audio channel in your DAW, rather than in AD2.
Whatever music you have playing in the background while you're talking is very distracting, otherwise thank you for the video.
Thank you for the useful feedback, brave Tarnished. It's my own music that I use as backing tracks so I think I'm slightly de-sensitised to hearing it. I'll factor this in to future vids. Cheers!