XLN Audio Addictive Drums Review

By JP Dubya

Being a guitarist, when it comes to using four limbs at once, I might as well be tasked with dismantling a nuclear bomb. Which means I’m always looking for great drum solutions for composition. This is where XLN Audio’s Addictive Drums comes in. It’s a simple, easy-to-use piece of software that takes the pain out of drum programming.

USER CONTROLLABILITY

The level of user control over Addictive Drums is tremendous. It comes with four full drum kits containing kick, snare, four toms, a hihat, two crashes, a ride, and a splash cymbal. It even comes with two different cowbells for the Queens of the Stone Age aficionados amongst us. You can choose from Tama, Sonor, Pearl, and DW kits. Each piece has an individual volume and pan control, and there are volume and pan controls for the overheads, room, a bus, and the master bus. In the Main Window, each piece has a separate panel with several options, including a button that switches to an Edit Window. In this Edit Window, each individual piece can be processed with compression, EQ, and saturation, amongst other effects. Additionally, the user can control volume and panning of each element in the overheads and room. The Effects Window contains modifiable reverbs that can be assigned to each element. I could go on, but this is a review, not a user manual. Let’s just say there’s no shortage of tweakability.

MIDI LIBRARY AND PROGRAMMING

Another huge selling point is the MIDI loop library that comes with Addictive Drums. Thousands of full beats, songs, and fills are at the user’s fingertips, from Metal to Jazz, Straight to Swung. The loops are searchable, can be synced to tempo, half-timed or double-timed, auditioned, and building a track is as easy as drag-and-drop. While I concede that most loops are rock oriented (and many of the rock fills sound like Keith Moon on speed), they can be a lifesaver if you don’t want to take the time to meticulously program (or can’t play a lick). While AD has its own mapping, the 1.5 update added mappings for General MIDI and several electronic drum kits including Yamaha and Roland. AD also sells add-on packs that introduce additional kits as well as MIDI loops.

SOUND QUALITY

So how does it sound? In short, pretty amazing. If you choose to use the presets, AD fits right into a heavy rock mix. The Startup preset featuring Sonor shells and a Tama kick is punchy and clear, with a good amount of compression, and a nice short small roomy reverb. I will admit that I could pick out Addictive Drums in a track while listening underwater if I had to. The kick, snare, and toms have a very hot, compressed, gated reverb sound that I think I’ve heard in roughly 12 billion production tracks. I usually bring up a clean kit and bus each kit piece out to separate tracks like I would a real drum kit. This is stunningly easy to do, as each kit piece simply has a button that creates a separate out. You then set up each track in your DAW accordingly, and presto, you can bounce out the audio and process as you please. But if you’re short on time, the presets work just fine. There’s even a preset for that early Strokes sound (that no one wants anymore).

There are enough virtual drum instruments out there to make one’s head explode when mulling over the options. If you are looking for ease of use, realistic quality, and almost universal control, XLN Audio’s Addictive Drums might be just what you’re looking for.