Amy Whitcomb, lead vocalist of The Whits has been competing with the group Delilah in the Sing Off.  You can hear more of Amy singing for The Whits on our demos page.

McKay Crockett, is one of the leads of Vocal Point, BYU’s acapella group.  They are also in The Sing-Off.  McKay Crockett is also featured on our demos page with the song “Unbreakable.”

The Anser, featuring singer/songwriters, Patrick James, Jarrett Burns, and Gray Aydelott are competing on the X-Factor.  They recorded their acoustic songs for their videos, “Dancing in the Light (Unplugged), and “No Strings (Unplugged)” at Noisebox Studios.  These recordings were recorded live with no post editing on the tracks.  Here is their audition for the X-Factor:

Here are their Acoustic Videos:

I love this video that Blind Actuaries made.  Lots of video clips of them recording at the studio and playing live at venues.

With many requests from clients that we work with  We have added Logic 9 Studio to our collection of software tools that we have available in the studio.  Logic is well known through out the industry to be one of the top DAW’s used by composers.  Logic Pro really shines on it’s midi features and implementation and provides many instruments and loops.  But this isn’t all.  Many top artists and musicians on Major Labels have done their recording and music production within Logic Pro (more info here).

With Logic available, this has opened more possibilities for our clients.  For example, we can now help finish off songs that musicians may have started in Garage Ban or Logic Express.  With Wave Burner being a part of Logic Studio, we can do the final CD mastering on our Mac instead of moving to CD Architect on the PC.  We can also help convert projects for people who need to transfer a project from Garage Band to Pro Tools, or Sonar to Logic and etc.

Our flagship samplers that we use are set-up to run inside of Logic.  So if you compose a song in Garage Band with piano, strings or drums that are included in that software, we can upgrade those sounds to Synthogy Ivory, East West Orchestra, Steven Slate Drums, or Superior Drummer.  This will allow us to upgrade your project studio songs and make them big and commercial.

The Real Deal

The thing that impresses me most about this sampler, is that it really gives me the vibe that I am working with professional drum tracks right out of a million dollar facility.  For anyone who has had the opportunity to track a studio drummer in a nice facility, they will know what I mean.  These sounds are fantastic!  But beyond that, you get complete control of the sound by having access to every single microphone you would ever need in a high end recording.  I’m talking about 22 microphones on the drum kit!  3 microphones for the kick drum, 3 microphones for the snare drum, 1 hi hat, 1 microphones for each of the 5 toms, 2 for stereo overheads, 2 for ambient close room mics, 2 for stereo ambient mid room mics, 2 for stereo far room mics, 1 ambient mono room mic, and my favorite – 1 ambient bullet mic (think overcompressed and distorted).  Most “advanced” drum samplers that I am familiar with don’t have this many options.  In fact, the next highest that I am aware of is BFD2 by fxpansion which has about 18 microphones depending on how many instruments you bring in.  But even still, BFD doesn’t have a Sub Kick, has one less ambient pair of room mics, and is missing a bullet microphone track.

Routing Possibilities

With the options to route out multiple outputs from Superior Drummer, you can either mix the drums completely inside of Superior Drummer and deal with just a stereo track in your DAW, or you can mix the drums within your DAW.  I am definitely a fan of having the option to choose.  When I need to add drums to a clients project right in front of them, I love the fact that I can load up a preset quickly and be ready to record great sounding drums within about 20 seconds.  Superior drummer gives plenty of busses and routing flexibility to mix inside of the sampler.  It also includes its own compressor, 5 band eq, filters, transient designer and gate which sound great.  However, if I am working on a project with a bigger budget and I want to use my own choice of compressors, reverbs and gates, I have the option to integrate it inside of Pro Tools as much as possible.  In fact, with 32 stereo outputs, you could output each of the 22 microphones to its own track inside of your DAW.  With your mono tracks, you can pan right or left to the channel outputs and then route the left or right of the channel into a mono audio track in your DAW.  However, you might not choose to use all 22 microphones.   It also makes much more sense to group some of the microphones together as you export to your DAW.  For example, your kick drum microphones might be much easier to control if you send the three of them out together through the same output.  Same with your two top snare drum microphones.  You might also find it easier to blend your room microphones to taste and use the same output.

Microphone Bleed

The ability to control microphone bleed in Superior Drummer 2 is absolutely mind boggling.  All of us engineers that record a lot of drums have had the situation where we later realize the hi hat is way too loud in our snare drum microphone.  Or the snare drum is coming through too strong in one of the tom microphones.  Wouldn’t it be awesome to have the ability to turn down or turn off the bleeding hi hat or drum?  With SD2, you can. Every single microphone has its own mixer window where you can control how much of the other drums are coming through that microphone.  It is important to note that the bleeding of these other drums sound as they naturally would sound coming through that microphone.  For example, let’s say you want to adjust the snare drum bottom microphone.  We all know that the toms and kick drum often rattles the snares.  On the SD Bottom microphone, we can open up a mixer window that allows us to choose which drums and how much of each drum we want to have rattling the snares as they are picked up by the microphone.  In otherwords, SD2 is not just simply turning up a regular tom sample in the microphone.  Instead, it is playing back an actual recording, or simulation of what the toms would actually sound like coming through that drum (my speculation is that it is an actual sample).

As a test, I went ahead and recorded an audio clip of how the Kick drum and each tom sound coming through the SD Bottom mic.  Notice that the snares rattle at different frequencies and at different amounts on different toms (just like every tom doesn’t rattle the snare the same on a real kit).  I also recorded hitting the floor tom from soft to loud so that you can hear how the snares become more effected at higher velocities (harder hit notes).  Although the second example isn’t completely smooth, it is still amazing to think of these tiny details that the sampler takes care of.  These tiny details are what makes SD2 sound so authentic.

Here is the audio clip test of the bleed:SD Bottom Bleed

What also makes this so amazing is the fact that every single drum mic is like this allowing for many creative applications.  For example, by default, I think there is too much hi hat in the overheads and room microphones.  So I can go through those microphones and turn down the hi hat bleed on those microphones (there is also a master bleed control per track and on the whole kit).  I can also choose to just have the Kick, Snare and Toms come through the Bullet microphone.  Or you could turn of the snare bleed in all microphones except for the stereo far ambient microphones.  The options are endless.

The Tweaking Goes On

We have still just scratched the surface of what is possible.  You have the opportunity to choose which type of tool to play the drums with including drumsticks, brushes, rods, or felt mallets.  Each drum also has its own controls to be able to change the shape of its envelope.  You also have the option to shift the pitch of each individual drum.  When you make these changes, it effects how the drum sounds in all of the microphones.  Each microphone has the opportunity to be able to stretch out the sustain of the drums going through it.  This allows you to be able to make a drum really short on the close microphones and then lengthen out the sustain on the room microphones, or vice versa.  You are also able to bring in individual drum sounds from other expansion packs by toontrack to add to your kit.

Avoiding Monotony

Finally, all of these parameters are able to be saved in presets.  Superior Drummer 2.1 makes it possible to be able to recall all or part of a preset.  So if you like your current drum sounds, but want to recall a routing preset, you can choose to just import the routing.

I spent a little bit of time playing with presets and some of the different parameters available and I was able to quickly find a drum sound that I was happy with.

Here are two examples of the variety that is possible with Superior Drummer.  The first example is a demonstration of a preset I might use for a client’s project that needs real, yet big and powerful sounding drums.  The second example is a demonstration of a staccato type preset I made that would work great as a techno/effect type kit.

Processed Kit

Techno Kit

Conclusion

Superior Drummer 2 is an awesome sampler.  The amount of microphones available to tweak are the the most I am aware of from any current drum sampler.  The ability to mix inside of the sampler or in your DAW is huge plus.  The sounds are top notch and while it can be easy to load a great sounding kit quickly, it has the depth to be able tweak all day long. The drum bleeding controls on each microphone along with the ability to change parameters such as pitch and the envelope make this sampler a creative tool that inspires my production creativity.  The biggest downfalls I can see is that it can eat up a ton of memory if you choose to use all microphones (duh!) and I have seen a few GUI bugs from time to time in Pro Tools 8 CS 2 that will probably be ironed out as time goes by and more updates are available.  These bugs have easily disappeared by closing and reopening the sampler window.  I highly recommend Superior Drummer 2 to anybody who is trying to find a drum sampler that is flexible and sounds fantastic.

My Rating 5/5

In high end studios, Pro Tools is the industry standard recording software and hardware.  While many other recording software programs are great tools for recording and can get professional results, Pro Tools packs a punch on the most important basics for recording, editing and mixing.  For example, beyond its unparalleled audio editing capabilities, its audio file management, grouping, automation, and stability are the best in the industry.  Recently, Pro Tools has released version 8 which steps deeper into the midi, virtual instrument world that most studios have been using other software programs for.  Many studios are now able to use Pro Tools as their only recording and composition platform.

Pro Tools 8 is an outstanding upgrade for Music Production.  It has been fantastic for our current projects.  The most exciting part of this upgrade has been the midi improvements.  Previously, we have been doing any complex midi editing in Sonar.  Transferring projects back and forth between different platforms always costs time and money.  However, now projects involving Midi can stay inside Pro Tools and we can make midi edits just as fast as we could in Sonar.

Clients will be happy to know that Pro Tools incorporates Sibelius Notation.  This last week a client came in with a Midi clip he had recorded himself without a click track (metronome).  We spent the time lining up his track to the time line and it resulted in notation that looked surprisingly good.  Pro Tools isn’t meant to take the place of notation software completely (no sequencer is currently meant to do that), but instead, it is meant to be a tool that allows you to get a rough notation of your song that is a usable way of sharing your music with others.  Pro Tools can export the notation as a Sibelius file which can then be taken into Sibelius (one of the leading notation software programs) where you can add articulations and polish it to its professional form.  The good news is that clients can now ask for a decent looking notation of their midi recordings.

Other huge improvements include the sleek new look, a playlist view that allows us to more easily put together the best parts of your takes, 10 inserts per track allowing us to shape each track just the way we’d like to.  New instruments are included such as a great authentic sounding B-3 Organ with leslie (my personal new favorite), a Vacuum Tube synth, Boom drum machine and others.  New plug-ins by Digidesign’s Air group are extremely innovative and will allow some fresh new sounds for artists that are looking for something new.

We give Pro Tools 8 a big thumbs up and we are excited to make it part of your future projects.

Please write 48 Hour Film Project in the subject line, or mail the materials to this address:

You may email the required materials to chadrussey@yahoo.com

Eighth House Productions

358 South 700 East #B136

Salt Lake City, Utah 84102

I look forward to hearing from you,
Chad Jeffrey Russey
www.eighthhouseproductions.com

www.russeyentertainment.com