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SSD4 doesn't offer internal effects like other major drum sampler software. In actual use, I almost always layer drums samples from both SSD4 and some other product to get the best of both worlds. However, if that is not your style, Fxpansion and Toontrack products offer better results for music that needs either dampened/dull sounding drums, or drums with long sustain/ringing. I would recommend it if you want your drums to sound like modern pop/rock music heard on the radio. It has a few kits that can be used for other styles of music like jazz, vintage 60s/70s, urban/hip-hop - but it is definitely not its specialty. SSD4 is really good at producing punchy, tight drum sounds - great for rock/metal music. Steven Slate Drums 4 gives you both options.
#Steven slate drums 4 presets software
Other software only gives you polished sounds (Addictive Drums, NI Studio Drums,etc). Most other drum sampler software ( BFD2, Superior Drum 2, etc.) require a fair amount of tweaking to sound polished.
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If you like to tweak, the 'deluxe' kits sound great to eq, compress, and process with other effects. If you don't want to do a lot of tweaking, the 'processed' drums are the fastest way to a polished, 'radio-ready' drum sound. There are also 'unprocessed' drums that are new to SSD4, called the 'deluxe' kits. There are presets of 'processed' drums that came from the previous versions of SSD. Individual drums can be easily loaded, or entire kits can also be loaded. Once the plug-in is installed, authorized (iLok), and instantiated in a DAW, it is pretty easily to get started making drum sounds. Luckily, a recently release appears to have fixed that problem. I also had GUI problems for a long time with the plug-in (Pro Tools, Mac with multiple monitors), which was a well-documented bug. Other users have expressed similar issues on forums, other users don't have any problems.
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I had issues with the download package getting corrupted, and had to download it several times. Steven Slate Drums 4 is not the easiest product to download and install.
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