XLN Audio has taken a fresh look at the live drum sampler concept and come up with Addictive Drums.
This awesome pluginhas verything a musician needs to work with songs: effects, patterns, processing and the mixer.
Addictive Drums has 3 editing sections: a library, effects processing and performance patterns. The library is quite compact but samples are very accurate and can absolutely be competitive with other familiar plugins of this sector, such as Superior Drummer or SSD.
The library includes three main kits and the source samples were recorded at 24-bit/96kHz. Although at first glance the library might not seem to be that extensive (add-on packs are now available, by the way), the basic kit patches are complemented by about a hundred presets.
Some of those presets are good and some sound a bit strange, due to the strong equalization and compression they choose to put on them, but this is obviously personal and of course the user is completely free to personalize each drum component following its own taste.
Almost these presets give you an excellent palette of sounds that goes way beyond a typical live kit. What's more, they're all fully editable.
What about the onboard processing? Well, there are a number of aspects to this; The main screen has a mixer on it, and each piece of the kit can be opened in the Edit screen to reveal a full chain of processing. Here, you'll find everything from basic sample manipulation controls (envelopes, pitch and filter) to compression, distortion, EQ and saturation devices. And because the mixer is always visible, you can tweak and balance without having to switch screens.
The mixer also hosts a few other notable features, including feed levels to the overhead and room mix mics, mic balance controls for the kick and snare (each has two mics), and send levels to the two reverb busses.
The interface is very user friendly and even if you are new into the vst world you will find out how much easy is to deal with this plugin. The sound library is very compact but accurate.
Simply connect your USB or MIDI device into your computer (mac or windows) and spread out the power of this toy. We've used XLN Addictive Drums to trigger some drums into the new upcoming Vurricator's album (a song of them incoming in the site very soon) and the result is excellent.
Final Verdict:
Addictive Drums is a very reliable drum plugin, which is highlighted by ease of use and sound quality. We found Superior Drummer a bit better about drum samples, but this vst is a great one for sure, very close to his big brother. AD packs are good , expecially the metal pack one which comes with a Getsch kit, very good for metal and heavy rock.
Addictive Drums is one of the most accomplished plug-ins in the market. This one will give the established players a real run for their money.
Pros
Very easy to use. Good, realistic sound. Onboard FXs and processing. Small space-saving library.
Cons
Library could be more varied (only 3 default kits).
Sound Samples will be posted in the next days, so stay tuned!
