So...my buddy has a PT rig and uses the exact SSD set-up as I do (Kontakt 5, identical presets, etc.) but his kit sounds ENORMOUS compared to mine. Crystal clear, in your face, and BIG. He inserts Smack! in the channel buss (which sounds incredible), followed by an eq with 1.6db gain at 203Hz. That's it. All of his mixing is done within Kontakt...he doesn't even run separate outs to each drum. Anyway...I just wanted to know if any of you have any tricks/techniques/suggestions when it comes to getting a great SSD sound within SONAR (parallel compression, etc.). I'm envious of his simple, incredible sounding drums. Thanks in advance.

I use SSD4[even though I have 3.5 in Kontakt as well]and I find it just sounds great,with no particular extra processing,in fact a lot of SSD sounds already have a kind of pre processed sound to them[as opposed to BFD]and often end up sounding squashed,and gutless if you add too much of "anything" to them,they sit in a mix really well just by adjusting levels I find.

Also SSD4 has way more real sounding cymbal sounds than any other program IMO.

I agree Bob-I love the SSD4-great stuff. I also have the Kontakt 5 3.5 stuff-never use it anymore.

Smack is one of the best things about protools.
Have you tried using the PX-64 percussion strip?

I've tinkered here and there with PX-64, but will try to fiddle with it some more with SSD. Yeah...Smack! is pretty awesome. Wish there was a (legit) VST equivalent.

Maybe check out the settings your friend uses on Smack. You may not be able to replicate exactly but you should be able to get pretty close w/ other plug-ins. In essence, the SSD drums are already pretty much "produced". 

I was just listening to the SSD4 stuff this morning and have to say they are very good.
He claims in his video that his presets cover hundreds of genres but I listened to all 87 of the solo drums demo think he might be exaggerating quite wildly.
I didn't even think there were that many genres. It seemed to me that they were very much rock based of the ones I head.

Anyway despite that they are still very good and expressive and lively feeling.

What I wanted to know how well featured is the mixer. I would really not want to mix drums in kontakt as I'm not impressed with it in that respect
I youtubed some tutorials but none showed them mixing within SSD4 it's self but either in contact or their host sequencer which might lead me to think the SSD4 mixer isn't up to much
but it looks better than kontakts which isn't hard.

I think I would definitely recommend SSD4 for anyone wanting very good out of the box presets for anything rock orientated. They sound much better to me acoustically than Addictive Drums.

Steve

Not much happening in term of processing options in SSD4 as you can see in this screen capture.

Still looks better than kontakt  


Steve

Controversial response here but I am finding that plugins under the RTAS umbrella sound significantly better than their VST counterparts. I don't know why but I have run tests in VST and RTAS for the same plugin and there is a clarity and depth on RTAS side of things that I am not getting from VST. Also for the engineering crowd, files don't sum when you compare VST to RTAS although its very challenging getting the same settings accurately which could contribute some of the differences. The drum tracks I get in Superior 2 in RTAS are very realistic under VST same track, duller and not as 3D sounding. I just wonder if developers have to make compromises when porting to the VST framework.