Addictive Drums 2 Presets
May 14, 2014 - Addictive Drums 2 Black Velvet Addictive Drums 2 Engine DW. Black Velvet includes presets covering the cleanest alternative rock to. 
It’s been a long time coming, but the follow up to XLN’s Addictive Drums was worth the wait. There are plenty of virtual drum instruments to choose from, offering highly detailed, top-of-the-range drum kits lovingly recorded in expensive studios. Some people use them solely as a demoing or songwriting tool, others see them as a valid alternative to real drums and put a lot of time and effort into making them an important and featured part of their music.
Whatever your persuasion, it’s factors such as cost, sound quality, the level of detailed realism, expandability and ease of use that affect the decision to gravitate towards one virtual drum instrument rather than another. Since 2006, Addictive Drums (herein referred to as AD) has proven very popular, delivering on all these fronts. Whilst perhaps not as minutely adjustable or customisable as, say, FXpansion’s BFD or Toontrack’s Superior Drummer, it’s XLN Audio’s ‘everything you need and nothing you don’t’ philosophy that has made it so easy to get great results with the minimum of fuss.
Their constantly expanding library embraces many kits from the 1960s to the present day, all eminently tweakable — beyond recognition if desired — using well-designed effects and a very attractive and usable interface. Mindful of the constant demand for newer and better features, Addictive Drums 2 (AD2) addresses some of the limitations of the original version, and benefits from improvements and additions across the board. You can check out the review of the original version here:.
Installation of all XLN products now requires you to use their proprietary online installer, first introduced with Addictive Keys. Once the online installer application is running and you’ve logged into your account, your existing AD libraries (if any) are scanned and checked for available updates. These and any AD2 products you’ve just purchased will show up as ‘update available’ or ‘install’ as appropriate. You can choose to download and install items one at a time, or everything in one go — it’s up to you and how much you enjoy watching progress bars!
AD2’s GUI adopts the same approach as Addictive Keys, using picture-based galleries to navigate through the content. Each kit has two Explorer menus; the Kit menu offers a selection of ‘bread and butter’ presets generally biased towards more natural drum sounds, whilst those in the Selections menu tend to be more processed, often demonstrating how radically the kits can be transformed away from the raw material. Depending on what you have installed, the presets’ audition buttons will show either an arrow (the kit is installed and a short MIDI loop plays) or a headphone icon (the kit is not installed and the same loop plays as an audio demo). The latter gives a taste of what you could have — it’s a useful demo tool, as well as a shrewd ‘carrot on a stick’ sales technique! The Studio Prog kit and its associated presets as displayed in the Explorer’s Kit view.