XLN Audio AD 2 Custom Collection

I'm a long time user of AD 2, and it sounds incredible. It's very responsive and ghost notes sounds sweet. I don't have to tweak the sounds, it sounds almost perfect out of the box. Great for demos and if you wanna show your real drummer a beat or something, but can't really play real drums IRL. This actually sounds better than many real drum recordings to me. I use it both as a tool for my solo music, but also in a band context when writing songs.

This plugin is one of the best midi drum plugins on the market in my opinion.

The drum sounds sound very good but what makes this amazing is the many choices of drum kits, but most of all the midi packs. I’ve downloaded the dry beat drum kit and it sounds amazing and makes it easy to get authentic sounding drums. It adds all the little ghostnotes I want on my tracks and just brings the drums to life.

Overall a great plugin!

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!

3 awesome sounding drum sets... for that alone I almost want to buy it a second time because the kits sound so amazing. Internal processing is good, especially for someone who might not have the plugins to do it.
I admit the interface is not super intuitive, but yout know it by the second or third time you use the program.
Of course the sounds need work to 'get there', as do all VST, but they are really good sounding, very very realistic and diverse drum kits.
The big con here, for me at least, is that XLN present a bunch of loops as a part of the product and well... i don't really care for that. I have no real need or use for it, Though I reckon lots of diferente people make music, beginners and beatmakers might have a use for loops, but they are not for me, at least. I would much much rather have an extra kit instead.