An overview of useful plugins for FL Studio. Part 2: Drums and Bass

Hello, dear residents of the habrasociety.

This is a continuation of the review of plug-ins for FL Studio, in a previous post we talked about writing rock guitars, this will cover plugins for writing more realistic drums, as well as some ways to tune and write bass guitars.

Drums (Toontrack EZdrummer):

The FL Studio standard toolkit, of course, has a tool for writing drums somehow, called FPC. The sound of the FPC drums is not entirely realistic (although not at all realistic), of course, it has the ability to download additional sounds from the Internet, but the quality will not change much from this. This is where we will need EZdrummer (this is not the only drum instrument, but we will consider it here).


Libraries were created at Avatar Studios in New York. When recording, real well-tuned drum kits were used.

Ezdrummerdesigned to create “live” styles of the drum part, the concept of the program is to bring the sound of the instrument as close as possible to the game of a live drummer. This plugin has no newfangled sounds in the style of electronic music. EZdrummer can satisfy the most demanding arranger and sound producer. At its core, EZdrummer is the younger brother of the wonderful BFD program, which is very widespread in music circles. The difference concerns a slightly simplified interface, where there are no unnecessary details, and less voluminous libraries of sounds. Programs do not differ much in sound quality, although EZDrummer has 16-bit libraries.

The difference between this program and the usual sampler library is that EZdrummer is a complete integrated solution, it provides not only sounds, but also special style templates for the game in the form of prepared MIDI tracks. In addition, the user has a fairly large field of activity in terms of creating a studio sound picture, for example, adding the sound of the room in which the recording was made, adjusting the levels of microphones that take sound from the drums.

Ezdrummer Libraries:

• Pop / Rock (default) is a standard drum kit, often used and the most common.
• Drumkit From Hell is a library for heavy music lovers. The famous guitarist Mattias Eklund took an active part in creating the library. The library is recorded in Sweden. It contains specific MIDI files for this style.
• Vintage Rock Brushes / Sticks - this sound library was created to get the rich “vintage” sound of old Ludwig drums, which the Beatles used to play.
• Latin Percussion - the use of this library covers a wide range of musical styles from jazz to modern electronic music.

Creating parties

Creating drum parts is tedious. MIDI "clogging" is very different (for the worse) from the sound of a live setup recorded in the studio. When creating a party, you need to have instruments (sounds), it is good to know the specifics of a person’s game, build the strength and emotion of the blow.

EZdrummer provides unique features that make drum programming very easy, even for beginners. EZdrummer solves many problems and reduces all the work to listening and selecting the right files.

In the opened EZdrummer window:



By clicking on the Open Grooves buttonYou get to the menu where you can select the desired riff. To facilitate the search, there is a preview button. After selecting the desired riff, you just need to drag it into the sequencer window onto the EZdrummer track.



Further, if necessary, in the Piano roll, you can edit the part.

Mixing the installation

After creating a part, the creation of sound coloring begins. When you click on the Open Mixer button, you find yourself in the mixer window, where you can subtly tune the sound of each installation tool, set the reverb, etc.

Demonstration of drums (riffs of the Drumkit From Hell library)

Bas-guitar

You can also write bass guitar on Slayer 2 , but with the initial settings, this instrument is a little bad. To bring the sound to a more or less similar to a bass guitar, you need to do a few tricky settings.

Firstly, to adjust the volume of the instrument, by default it is very loud and overloads the channel, then in the Slayer 2 settings select the Bass Ebass 3 or Bass Ebass 4 library and set the cab to combo (as shown in the figure). You can also conjure with frequencies bass (bass), middle (medium), treble (high).



To expand the sound (more voluminous and deeper) Bass, you can use the Soundgoodizer effect. To add an effect, set a separate channel for Bass in the mixer, and select the Soundgoodizer effect in this channel (as shown in the figure below).



You can also use the following tools to record bass:

• Bornemark broomstick bass
• Steinberg virtual bassist
• Yellow tools majestic
• EWQL Hardcore Bass
• Direct Bass Free (+ NI Kontact)
• Scarbee J-Slap'n Fingered (+ Halion)
• Sacrbee Black Bass (+ NI Kontact)

A few demos:

Demo 1
Demo 2

Success to you in the implementation of your creativity.

Continued: Violins, cello, grand pianos ... (Orchestral)