I'm sure it could work fine for copy/pasting 3x vers/chorus + bridge for a 3min pop song but anything more ambitious and it seems rather useless to me. Very fiddly to use, very limited control with tiny areas to work on.
I've not used the editor part of EZ much but I've tried it briefly and it seemed very poorly designed to me. Many of the presets in EZ are great though, if a little heavy on the reverb for my taste. They can still be tweaked quite a bit without sounding bad and they usually need a little work to sit properly in a mix.
EZ DRUMMER VS PLUS
Plus I felt the sounds in the basic package felt a lot more processed.Īll the EZ drum sounds ARE processed though (unlike Superior which isn't processed) but for the most part not OVER-processed. The sounds in some of the expansion packs were a much better fit for what we needed with the Southern Soul pack being a personal favourite of mine. We did however NOT use the sounds included in the basic EZ package. But as long as the general groove worked it was worth the effort. Velocity has the hardest part to get right using pads so I had to do quite a bit of midi-editing to fix the odd hits that triggered too low or too hard. Basically we tried to keep things as "real" as possible and not nailed to a grid. We did quantize some tracks but only very lightly. Nothing programmed, no preset rythms (but I doubt there's any preset packages with anything resebling the rythms we used, mostly odd signatures like 7/8, 5/4, etc.). We played all the EZ drum tracks "live" using pads.
Or at least that's the hardest thing to get right. Getting the cymbal dynamics right on softer songs is the part where EZ fails in my experience. One little trick that made EZ partly usable on almost any song was to re-record only the cymbals with real ones.
The softer, more organic/open songs didn't work so well with EZ, or at least we couldn't make them work good enough. Generally the tracks we kept were the busier tracks with tight rythm sections and huge arrangements. Many of the tracks turned out so great that we kept the EZ version and never bothered with real drums. I got this for a prog rock studio project where the idea was to use it for composing/arranging and then re-record the songs properly with a real drum kit.