 Why would a drum plugin release nearly 8 years ago still be so popular? What makes it better than other choices? And why do I continue to recommend it? Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. The plugin is Addictive Drums 2 and I'll be asking what makes this plugin so great. As we look at this plugin to find out why it's still so popular, I'll reveal my personal favourite feature which may surprise you and also how you can get it at a great price. Let's start off with what's inside. If you haven't guessed yet, Addictive Drums 2 is a virtual drum plugin. It comes in VST, AU and AAX formats so it can be used with pretty much any door on the planet. It's sample based meaning it uses actual recordings of real drums. Now when you first start it up you see this view here. This is the gallery view and if we flick through we can get an idea of the range of sounds and kits available for Addictive Drums 2 and that's one of the things we'll be talking about later on. The next view we see here is the Explore view. Now here we can actually demo some kits so we can go through to say a kit that we think may work. Let's go through here to black velvet. This may work and we can play some different presets so we'll just press on this play button here. Now there's not only different rhythms being played there but there's different sounds to the kit. You can also do a bit of a rough mix here as well to get a styling point. The cool thing about this view is it includes kits that you haven't actually added or bought yet so you can actually demo some of those ad packs that we'll talk about later that you haven't actually bought. Very cool indeed. Now the page where I find I spend most of my time is on this kit view here. This is where we can see our actual kit and we can swap out drums individually to customize our kit. So let's say I'm using this kick drum here, I think I don't really like the sound of that. I can just click on this load button here and go to some different kits depending on what ad packs again you've bought so I can swap that out and I can then test that out. I can even do it while I'm actually playing a rhythm so I can keep the rhythm going and try different drums. That's very cool. Now down the bottom is one of the most important areas. This is the mix area where we can actually mix our drum kit and importantly it's where we also control our routing to our door which I think is a really important and powerful feature which I will discuss later on. Moving on from there we have the edit page. Here we can actually really craft our individual drums. I've got that kick drum selected here. I can go through and actually shape the sound of it and then apply various effects as well. Things like compression and distortion, EQ, tape saturation, all of that good stuff so we can really tailor the individual drums once we've loaded them up. From there we have an effect section which is basically reverb and delay and there's a nice amount of crafting of those effects that we can do in there. Moving on from there we have a beats area. This is where we can actually use some of the grooves and midi packs that we can get for addictive drums so we can try them here, we can play them and then we can just drag them out from here into our door and start using them right away. And finally I just want to mention here just up in this sort of menu up here the settings menu we have this map window here that we can pull up. This is where we can assign various individual drums to different keys on our keyboard and we'll be discussing that a little bit later on. So that's an overview. Now I want to start off by talking about of course the most important aspect, the sound. So in order for this to be regarded as a great plugin of course it has to have great sound and all of the drums in addictive drums too were recorded in really pro studios with great mics etc. So we have got really nice samples but it's important that those samples are recorded intelligently and implemented intelligently especially when it comes to velocity. So if you don't know velocity is about how hard for example you play the key on your midi keyboard. Now obviously things tend to get louder when we play them harder. Not only that but the character of the sound changes and that's what I really love about addictive drums too because it feels very very natural. So if we take this snare for example here I'll play it quietly and then more loudly and at certain velocities you know the actual snare itself and that sort of fizzy sound becomes more prevalent at louder velocities we get a little bit more ring a lot more knock as well. So the character of the drum is changing in the way a real drum would. Now while we're actually hearing there though when we hear this snare sample it's not just one microphone pointed at the snare but we're hearing some microphones pointed at the snare and the overhead mics and also the room mics as well and we may be hearing some effects. So what I'm going to do is just mute the overheads and the room mics there and I'll just actually turn off the effects. Now have a listen to this snare now. Sounds super dry here now you may want that for your recording but it's more likely that you're going to want that and you're going to want the ability to blend in the other microphones as well and that's what you can do here obviously using the mixer. It really feels like you're you recorded these drums yourself and you're able then to sort of mix them in the way you would in the studio where they were recorded. It's very very powerful and enables you to add your own character to the mix of these drums of course. Now we can actually delve in way deeper into the sound of each individual drum. We'll be looking at that later but as we get into the sounds I have to talk about the range of sounds we have available as well. So one of the strengths of Addictives Drums 2 is the range of kits that you can get for it. They're called ADPACs and you know if you ran a semi-professional or professional studio you may want to get many of them to cover different genres of music but if you tend to focus on one or two genres of music then you may only need one or two different ADPACs. There really is a massive range. We get your Fairfax kits to begin with here. I think of those as the sort of basic kits I guess. Then you've got things like black velvet sort of rock orientated. This one curious boutique mallets are really sort of I can't really describe it really but a kit using mallets it's just a really unique sound. Soul and R&B kit there. Another heavy kit. We do get a few rock kits in here actually. Moving through a pop kit here. A vintage dry which is a really nice sounding old 70s kit here and if you just want percussion and you don't really need a sort of traditional drum kit you've got it here with this session percussion kit. An indie kit really sort of ring it a nice one. A really heavy drum kit here with the metal one. If you want electronic sounds you've got this one. All machines very very handy 808, 909 sounds in there that kind of thing. A really nice funk kit and also like some of the rhythms associated with that one. A couple of drum kits. This one here to do with jazz which is sticks and then another one here which is brushes. I love the brushes kit in here. Retroplex which again is a kind of a rock kit but very 70s in its sound. Then Blue Oyster which again is a really sort of more sort of Led Zeppelin style of sound of drum kit I guess sounds very very good and black oyster as well. And then we've got our three studio kits Prog there and Pop and Rock as well so a massive range of kits there. So what we're going to do now is just set up one beat and play through some of these kits so you get to hear the variation in sound. One of the things that makes this plugin so great is the amount of control we have over individual drums. Of course we can select individual drums as we discussed earlier so we can start off with a basic sound for example with a snare here I can choose which kind of character of snare I want and then of course we've got close mics on each drum overhead and room mics as well. We can blend those with the mixer but it gets really powerful when we go to the edit page. I'll go there now and I'm going to start off by selecting a tom here because one of the things I like to do is change the envelope or envelope for my drums so I can really sort of craft the sound especially in terms of decay and release that kind of thing. And for a tom it's a really good example because you may find that according to your taste it may be ringing maybe not enough maybe too much. We'll have a listen to this tom, got a little bit of ring going on there so I'll just switch on this envelope feature here and let's adjust the release to begin with and also let's adjust the sustain time I'll pull it back here we'll pull this release back again have a listen now. Yeah a much shorter sounding tom there so very very cool you could of course have a really loud attack yeah and then just push the decay down so you've just got a real initial sort of transient there with nothing else afterwards there and you could even do weird things like you know change that attack time so it's got a soft attack not very like you do that but you may want that option. We also have control over things like the pitch for example not just with the drum over as an overall sort of control but also we can control the pitch with the overheads in the room so I'll just push those right down here let's have a listen very cool stuff there as well as all of that kind of shaping control and pitch control you've also got a bank of effects down the bottom here yeah compression EQ tape saturation all that good stuff the kind of effects that you're almost always going to use with drums but they're in a handy place here with the controls that you need to use for drums now of course you can still output these drums to your door and you can use your regular plugins as well if you want to do that but I like the effects which are in here very very handy indeed now with some of the drums let's say look at the look at the snare for example we also have control over the mix of microphones because some drums are recorded with two microphones so the snare has a top and bottom one and we can control that mix there with all of the drums as well we can control how much of their sound goes to the overheads and how much to the rooms also you've just got an amazing amount of control over this initial sound of the drum and then the mix of the drum in a very sort of micro way you can actually control that really really phenomenal now the other thing which I think is really important is the routing now we have this mixer down the bottom here and you could just have this plug-in put into your door insert into your door and just have a stereo output for it fine you could do all of your mixing here but you can also have every single drum output to your door as well so you know we could press this button here and we can send a separate output to our door and have its own channel and we can do that both pre and post fader now as well as having that separate output we could also have the separate output for that drum as well as it going to that master stereo channel that means you don't have to send all of your drums out and mix it all in your door that is my preference by the way but you could decide to have just your mixing done here but maybe with just with one drum say a snare that you want to put a big delay and you've got a favorite delay you can have that going out so it's individual attract and then add effects in your main door there just an incredible amount of control this level of control means that it's hardly surprising that this plug-in has been so popular for so long now all of this becomes possible of course with an interface let's talk about the interface if I'm perfectly honest I think after seven and a half years or nearly eight years the interface may be showing signs of looking a little bit dated we're just not used to seeing these kind of old beveled edges and things these days with design things tend to be much more flat that's the only thing I think is it's really just a fashion thing yeah and it could be just a matter of opinion but in terms of the imagery like the drums and things I think that all looks great especially when we go to this brows view here I mean I don't think that's ever really going to date in terms of the workflow I still think it stood the test of time because it starts off over here with the gallery we've just got this basic overview of kits which are available and you're going to think about that which kits do I want you may or may decide to buy more etc then as you choose a kit you go into this explore and you'll just demo them with different with different sort of kits here different presets for each kit as well and you can also set up a sort of basic mix if you want here once you've done that we get more granular when we move into the kit area here and we're going to you know swap out individual drums and we're going to do a basic mix all of that good stuff you see there's a there's a sense to this workflow because then we move on to the edit area where we're getting really granular with individual drums and we're going to start to shape their sound after that when we've got our basic mix it up then we may look at reverb and delay that's on the effects tab over here you can switch those on and of course we can send individual drums to these effects that's kind of how a lot of us would work in terms of workflow now a little bit of a sort of an outsider with this because it's not in the basic workflow is beats you may or may not use these preset beats these are what they call midi packs you can buy these individually and they suit certain genres of music I don't personally make much use of them because I like to write individual drum patterns for songs but you may love these they may get you off to a great start with your songs and you can just drag them out to your door to get started with them so there's a sense to the workflow here I don't think that that is dated at all and I hope when they bring a new version out they don't really change that because I actually really love it so I guess one of the features of a plugin is its price that's going to determine how many of you actually use it and this is used in pro studios and home studios alike and that's because it's always been at a reasonable price at least and one of the great things is you can start off small just with the core package maybe a couple of ad packs and then grow it as you play different genres of music and you want different drums and maybe different midi packs etc so you can start off small with it and then gradually make it grow so that makes it sort of easier for most of us to buy now I want to say up front this video is not sponsored by anyone at all this is just my own video but I am going to put a link in the description down below to plug in boutique where they usually have some great deals for addictive drum stuff also at the time of making this video without wanting to sound too salesy there's only a few hours left for their black Friday sales and you can get really good prices on this stuff there so definitely check out that link in the description down below whether you're watching this during the black Friday period or afterwards it's always a good price there at plug-in boutique. So I want to talk about my favorite feature about this plug-in and why it's so great for me and why I often choose it over other plugins and this may surprise you because on the face of it it doesn't seem that amazing but I want to talk about the variation of sound with some of the individual drums you see drums can sound really really mechanical if you've always got the same samples playing now of course with the different velocities here as we discussed earlier on something like this snare then it changes its sound but I'm talking also about different articulations different sounds that we get from a snare drum now this is best demonstrated if we go over to the mapping features I'll do that now I'm just going to open the map window this is where we would assign different drums to different keys well I've got snare selected here look at the different sounds we have for the snares available so this snare and rim shot snare open a shallow rim shot side stick I mean so many different sounds now what I like about this is it's not just defined by something you know like velocity we've also got these mapped across several keys so when you're playing your drums live and making your drum patterns you've got access to all of those to my mind that really makes things sound much more natural particularly with snare and also one of my favourite parts with hi-hat if we go to the hi-hat here there's so many different hi-hat sounds now I like the fact that we've got lots of variations on the open yeah the open hi-hat this is particularly useful when you say on a verse and you've got a nice tight closed sound and then the chorus is going to have an open higher you can just in those last few beats of the verse just gradually open that hi-hat up as you go into the chorus for me that makes a world of difference in terms of making drums sound realistic and by the way if you're using an electronic drum kit to trigger these and you've got different zones on your drums which send out different um midi signals depending on where you hit the drum you can also map them to all these different sounds so if you're an actual drummer and you're using a kit you're going to have all of these different articulations of sounds available to you you even have for example on say the cymbals if we go to a cymbal we've got a regular cymbal sound and we've got a choked cymbal and again I'll just try and play that yep and we can choke it like so so really really handy as well of course you know you can map these to your liking so you don't have to stick to the regular addictive drums mapping you may have used another plugin and you've got used to the mapping you could change the mapping there that's all fine but it's a great way to discover all of the various sounds or the variations in sound that you get with these drums very very very powerful now you have to use these features for them to be in operation if you just use addictive drums too in the very basic way and you don't take advantage of all these different articulations then you may get that sort of very ordinary sound to your drums it takes some effort still but you can get great results now before I tell you why I think this plugin is so great I want you to have your say let me know in the comments down below if you already have been using this plugin for a number of years why are you continuing to use it and if you're thinking about buying it which surely you should be then why are you thinking about buying it love to hear in the comments down below but why do I think this is a great plugin well let's start off with the basics design it's got a great workflow I love the way that we sort of start off big and get more and more detail more and more granular as we go along to the range of drum kits for different genres is just incredible there seems to be something there for everyone and you get a great deal of control over mixing and matching them with custom kits etc three the price the price is absolutely awesome for a plugin which you could use for you know potentially like a decade or more it's really great finally I have to say the main thing the main thing of course is the sound I think all of these kits that you get you know or you you can buy with addictive drums to just have an amazing sound which of course you can take an adapt you can make it your own now one of the things you could do is actually output individual sounds to your door and use plugins in your door just the way you would if you'd recorded these drums yourself in a studio now one of the best plugins you can use to manipulate the sound of your drums is eq and I don't think there is any better eq than fabfilter pro q3 I've made a video about that and you can watch it right here I discuss in this why that plugin is so great you should definitely go ahead watch it now go on watch it now go