XLN Audio AD 2 Custom Collection

I bought this to trigger my digital kit, (a DTXpress IV module + acoustic, mesh heads triggered drums and various Yamaha PCY cymbals) and for recording through a DAW using Windows 10 and a Steinberg UR 22 MKII.

First off, the drums sound great! The package includes your choice of any 3 ADpaks, MIDIpaks and Kitpieces from the XLN store and there are choices to suit many tastes. I chose the Funk, Jazz and Black Velvet kits to give me a wider choice of drums and cymbals. Setting up each kitpiece within the whole kit is easy and there are many room presets to fit the sound you're looking for, from completely clean kits to very dirty and/or electronic sounding kits. Overall, I'd say the sound is very clean and neutral without any room effects and the drums sound very 'close' and almost perhaps 'pre dampened' sometimes. For me, this is perfect, but you may need to buy either a more rock orientated ADpak or tweak the room settings if you want a more 'open' sounding kit.

The program itself is very easy and intuitive to navigate, and you'll soon be editing kits, kitpieces and room sounds to your heart's content! Furthermore, mapping your module through MIDI is almost effortless as well because XLN have provided MIDI profiles for just about every recent kit from the 'big' brand manufacturers. For me, it was as easy as selecting 'DTXPress IV SE' from the menu and using the 'learn' function to map any drums or pads that weren't recognised by the default settings.

Triggering is also much, much better in AD2 than it is on my module. Trigger settings that would cause double triggering or misfires on my module just don't happen in AD2, so I've been able to increase the gain levels and have a much more responsive and sensitive kit setup all around. Having found the right drum and cymbal mix, if I close my eyes, it's almost like I'm playing my actual acoustic kit. AD2 also supports cymbal choking and positional sensing if your module is capable.

My only possible complaint with AD2 is that it doesn't have many ride and hi-hat options for me. Of the 21 possible acoustic rides, 5 of them are Zildjian while the majority are Sabian and Meinl rides. Of the 23 possible hi-hats, 7 of them are Zildjian pairs. While this isn't really a problem per se, as a Zildjian player I would have preferred more Zildjian products to work with! However, this is by no means a 'deal breaker' for me and your milage may vary if you regulary play a differnt brand of cymbals. With that said, it's perfectly possible to edit the cymbal sounds to more closely match your acoustic cymbals so it's no problem really.

For somebody who has doubts about buying this software, I'd encourage you to download the demo from the XLN site before buying this. Although the demo program only has bass/snare/hi-hat/crash, you can get a good feel for the drum sounds and room editing options and there are plenty of included MIDI groove files to test with.

For the price, I think this is an amazing piece of software. I'm thrilled with it and I can't really find anything to complain about at all. I'd very happily recommend this product to everyone!

I can't remember where I was introduced to AD2 - maybe it was one of those "Best 10 Drum VSTs" articles. It's definitely my favourite. The Custom Collection allows you to choose three full drum kits, three drum pattern collections and three single kit pieces (extra special kick drums, snares or other pieces). You don't have to pick all of your kits, patterns or single pieces all at once if you don't want to, and you can expand your collection whenever you need to with additional custom packs.

It sits really nicely in the midi piano roll (I'm using Reaper 6.47 with paid license). The velocities are really subtle and nice, with multiple different snare hits so you can tailor your drum track really nicely. The midipaks are basically pre-programmed rhythm patterns and fills loaded into complete bars.

That's really useful for a non-drummer (like me) to begin to get a basic pattern but then add fills and other special bits. It's very useful for a rhythm beginner and I found that it gave me a lot of help when creating my own rhythms and fills. It can often be quite a daunting task to program anything more than a simple 4/4 beat, but I found using AD2 helped me enormously.

There's also a lot of customization of almost every aspect of your kit if that's what you want. I have not really done a deep-dive into all the settings, I've mainly used the massive collection of preset kits and relied on midi velocities as much as anything to control my sound. You can make this as easy or as complicated as you want.

Thank you XLN Audio!