Drums became part of the life of Steven Slate from the very beginning. When you start loving drums, you cannot reverse the process in any way. Steven Slate started his career as a recording engineer. This gave him a good relationship with the drums and made him want more from drums.
As a recording engineer, he used to get different sounds from drums but that, made him want to improve these drums. He thought of making the life of drummers easier. Thus, in 2001 Steven Slate created his first drum sample in Boston.
He had to convert his old warehouse into a studio and had several wood planks hung on the room to create a drum room ambiance. Therefore, you can imagine the quality of drum set that this passionate man is producing now.
Therefore, I am going to take you through the most outstanding work of this man. He has so many drums now well structured to suit children, amateurs, and even professionals. These Steven Slate drums include:
Steven Slate Drums 5 review
Are you looking for a simple method of expanding your e-kit sounds for recording? The Steven Slate Drum 5 is the real deal. It produces excellent sounds and is a lot of fun. Slate drum samples are useful in democratizing big studio drum sounds because of the punchy and beefy sounds that it produces.
SSD comes with a library of mix-ready sounds that can be played via MIDI from your kits, giving you plenty of expansion from the onboard sounds in the modules.
Features
Once you open SSD 5, you are welcomed with the Construct kit page. You can select a pre-made kit from the present library on the page. There are dozens of presets for modern kits and vintage kits that are excellent for any music genre; rock, metal, county, funk, reggae, and Indie to jazz.
This SSD kit even has several electronic kit presets for electro, house, and more. This kit runs as a plugin within the host software and comes with over 250 samples of other instruments’ sounds arranged into the kit’s preset.
However, the presets available in Steven Slate Drums 5 are not all-new versions. Others were present in SSD4, and other Slate’s signature kits based on the excellent drum sounds committed to tape.
These electronic drum kits have flexibility regarding individual sound properties such as pitch, room mic position blending, dynamic response, and ADSR envelope for every kit.
The mixer section provides control over the mic levels and routing back to DAW for processing with EQ. This kit’s drum library is divided into eight parts, plus the plugin itself. All Slate’s kits need an iLok dongle or iLok account to offer authorization.
If you have not used Steven Slate drums before, then you will need to familiarize yourself with it in a few hours. Steven Slate’s drums have a unique sound that is heavy and rock-friendly. Even with the inclusion of more jazz and vintage-oriented sounds, the signature flavor of Steven Slate Drums 5 modern sonic aesthetic is retained.
After buying this kit, you will be given a unique code to download the files together with Steven Slate drums 5 plugin installer, a sample installer, and a license file. After getting the samples to your folder, you need to run the Slate Drums 5 plugin installer then the sample installer.
One of the critical strengths of Steven Slate Drums is that it is easy to use. With Steven Slate Drums 5, you can build your custom kit using over 400 instruments included. Each instrument has 24-bit multi-mic WAV samples saved in proprietary format by lossless compression.
The drum instruments available in this kit have up to 24 velocity layers and 12 alterations, making them sound lifelike. You should engage the Audition button in the top right corner to audition the samples before loading them.
To load a sample, drag and drop it into the interactive drum kit or place it in sample sections on the left or right. The dynamic section features a named dynamic user interface control, which adjusts the volume between soft hits and hard hits.
The microphone section is responsible for balancing multiple mics, like a kick in, kick out, Room A, Room B, and overheads. You can also make your custom routing for advanced control. ADSR section allows you to adjust the attack, sustain, decay, and release curves for each sample.
Steven Slate Drums 5.5 Review
SSD5.5 is a drum virtual instrument plugin with hundreds of drum and cymbals samples and thousands of MIDI grooves, and granular customization options. This virtual instrument has a nice appearance, has several controls, a sample library.
It also has MIDI loops and fills concrete MIDI mapping tools and a built-in sampler for booting. I have been using this best drum virtual instrument for about five years now. It has many positive things that every drummer yawns for in his/her drumming.
The create tab of this kit has two sub-tabs along the top, instruments, and kits. You can build your custom from the SSD 5.5 library using the instrument’s sub-tabs. The sample library has hundreds of kicks and snares and dozens of toms and cymbals, each with multiple articulations.
This kit’s sub-tab offers quick access to over 150 presets, which load an entire kit at once. To know when a kit is fully loaded into memory, you click on the kit, and it will display the percentage on each drum and cymbal.
The instruments tab displays the drum view while the samples tab brings a grid where you can load in the one-shots that comes with SSD 5.5.
The edit instrument tab is responsible for controlling each drum or cymbal in your kit. If you select a drum, it will be displayed in the instrument master window with a master volume, tuning, and phase controls.
The bottom of the Edit tab has individual Microphone routing, volume, and pan controls for every available mic that hears the selected drum, like snare bottom, snare ring, overheard, and room mics, for instance.
You can route each mic into one of the 32 channels, and the overhead, rooms, and SLR can be routed into any of the above mentioned.
The mix tab, on the other hand, brings the Edit window and a group of faders below it for additional fine control over the volume, solo, mute, pan, and phase.
SSD 5.5 is shipped to various markets having over 2400 MIDI grooves. You can get them in the library under the category tab. Also, you will see a list of matching grooves. The grooves are divided into various categories, such as verse, intro, chorus, bridge, or fills.
Something fantastic about SSD 5.5 is the precise control available at the drum level. The individual articulation volumes, dynamics, and mic-level make a big difference in fine-tuning the kit. This kit’s ability to customize every note on the piano roll is adorable, and most so when you are using a MIDI keyboard and drum pad.
Steven Slate Drums Trigger 2 platinum reviews
Steven Slate Trigger 2.0 is the audio industry’s most unique trigger that offers professional sounds in mixes. This trigger comes with a phase-accurate multi-layered triggering engine. This means you can trigger eight stereo samples simultaneously, such as a close mic sample, stereo overhead sample, and stereo room mic samples.
The multi-channel triggering functionality allows the user to keep creating natural drum kits with exceptional multitrack samples. This trigger comes with a library of standard samples made by Steven Slate himself.
A dozen international elite mixers depend on Steven Slate’s samples to enhance the drum sounds when creating their mixes. Slate’s samples in the trigger are recorded to 2-inch tape and processed with the current analog gear.
The trigger allows the drummer to layer about eight multi-velocity samples in its mixer. This means that you can use several close mic layers, overhead layers, room mic layers, and others. You can create a final sample tone by using the classic mixer.
The leakage suppression of this trigger allows the player to send spill tracks to the plugin to ignore the leakage in a track intelligently. The transient driven gate has received a lot of praise from audio engineers for its ability to cleanly and precisely clean up tracks easily.
This trigger’s MIDI engine allows the player to trigger audio from MIDI and can convert audio tracks into MIDI tracks through the drag and drop method.
Conclusion
With all said and done, Steven Slate has made work easier for our drummers. With this technological improvement, you can do everything with a single kit. It is useful when a drummer has the vision to simplify work for their fellow mates. You can get great drum sound from these kits.
