4stringplayer I am a newbie to the world of virtual drums. I’ve reviewed all of the pre-sales posts, but cannot find teh answers to all of my questions. I am looking for a solution to create drums tracks and then play them live (as a virtual drummer), in the event our drummer can’t make it to a gig. The ideal solution would be stand-alone program for the Windows platform, where I could use preset rhythms or create my own patterns, save them, then play them live. I’d prefer not to use a plug-in program. From the looks of it, it looks like EZ Drummer may be the solution I am looking for. But I do have some questions:
Q1. Can EZ Drummer be used as a stand-alone program, as well as a plug-in?
Q2. Can EZ Drummer import MIDI? For example, we may occasionally use MIDI Type 1 files and extract the drum patterns.
Q3. Can EZ Drummer export MIDI, so that we might be able to use a Yamaha Tone Generator?
Q4. Can EZ Drummer save drum pattrens in a .WAV format? So that if we have a problem live, we could always play the Drum tracks on a CD player (or similar)
Q5. What is the purpose of using the “Solo” program with EZ Drummer? If our songs are structured, why would we need to use Solo?
MartinHi,
1. Yes. Stand-alone requires our (free) stand-alone Toontrack Solo.
2. You can play your own MIDI files through EZdrummer. You just need to put them in your User MIDI folder and they can be accessed through the MIDI browser in EZdrummer.
3. No. When using it as a plug-in however, you can always use the MIDI export function in your host. Toontrack Solo does not have this feature.
4. You would have to export the wave from your host in order to achieve this.
5. Toontrack Solo is mainly designed for live usage with E-drums. It is much less CPU demanding than most other hosts, making it a better choice for live situations (unless you plan on using other VSTi:s simultaneousy, that is. Toontrack Solo only loads Toontrack products). You can to some extent create your own MIDI files in Toontrack Solo, but this requires another product called EZplayer Pro in addition.
Please let us know if you have any further questions.
Martin Kristoffersson
Sound Designer
4stringplayer Martin,
Thank you for confirming that EZ Drummer can be used as a stand-alone program, that’s exactly what I was hoping. If I understand the MIDI capabilities of EZ Drummer correctly, it can import MIDI fine, but in order to export MIDI, I would use EZ Drummer as a plug-in to a host program, correct (like Sonar, etc.)?
I think the workaround for a .WAV output (if using EZ Drummer as a stand-alone program) is to just record the sounds created by EZ Drummer directly off of the computer. It won’t be the best quality, but would only be used as a back-up solution anyway. A .WAV export function would be a great feature to consider for future editions of EZ Drummer, for all of those on a limited budget and can’t afford a host program.
Thank you for clearing up my confusion on the purpose of Solo. Since we would be operating without a drummer, we wouldn’t need to use Solo (in our particular case). But it is good to know that we could extract all of the drum sounds from EZ Drummer if using an eDrum kit and using Solo as the interface.
It sounds like EZ Player Pro might be a good solution for keeping track of our complete library of MIDI drum tracks. Then we could list all of our songs in EZ Player Pro, select the song, then use EZ Drummer to create the sounds live. Does this sound like I have the correct understanding?
MartinYes, to export MIDI you would need to use the export function in your host, like in Sonar for instance. This also applies if you want to export the audio file with the performance, this can not be done in Toontrack Solo.
EZplayer Pro is a good option if you want to play back a full song in MIDI using EZdrummer and Toontrack Solo. You could also create the full arrangement in Sonar and then import the MIDI file into EZdrummer’s groove library and play it from there. EZplayer is needed if you want to build MIDI grooves in Toontrack Solo.
Martin Kristoffersson
Sound Designer
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