I'll see if I can get more time with it before committing the money or blowing it off. Not that hard in Reaper, but still, IMO, a missed opportunity for Toontrack. As the 3 reverbs totally suck to the point of uselessness (seriously, they are a joke), I'd have to send every drum to it's own track and use a separate convolution reverb (Altiverb) on every one of them to place them all in a realistic acoustic space. IRs would have solved so many problems and made 3 a universal home for every library. I brought drums from the other libraries into 3, but they sound like they are in a different space (because they are). The plugin and standalone are very well-designed, but the core library out of the box does not impress. Perhaps the drums in 3 need a ton of eq (as most miced drums do). The selection of snares and kicks in 3 was good, but the toms. I also can't find a snare I like as much as the Music City Black Beauty. IMO, the Avatar toms blow away every tom in 3 for my type of music. The Avatar kit in SD2 made up the majority of my custom kit, along with bits of Music City, Metal Foundry, and others. SD3 vs SD2 the snares alone are worth the price of admission. Some of the absolute crap they put in there under the guise of 'world class blah blah blah' still has me shaking my head but I had to consider this IS a one size fits all program so not everyone has my viewpoint. The sound you want is definitely in there but you have to find it. Point being you could not possibly be more disappointed than I was but I would recommend that you don't give up. I was able to lay down a convincing track in a short time using my keyboard to find licks for the composition.
This is not even to mention other features like tap-to-find. When I A/B it with SD2 the SD3 easily takes it. Opened up some of the 11:1 surround and put just a tweak. I took the Massenburg Yamaha kit and started tuning the drums a bit. I truly loved the Natural Avatar kit in SD2. I must say I am now very impressed but, honestly, it takes some tweaking. The vast majority or fellow forumites came back with how great it was so I decided to keep at it. I too was seriously disappointed in the sounds and made a few post here and on UAD. But there is no demo, thus, no opportunity to warm. Perhaps I'm being too harsh, and I could warm up to it given enough time. Glad I didn't purchase before trying it out, despite the major advancements in the program itself. IMOHO, they majorly dropped the ball when they failed to record IRs of the room and to record a stellar core sample library. You could mix all libraries in one kit and have a cohesive sound. Had Toontrack had the foresight to record impulse responses of the room at Galaxy Studio (they had almost everything they needed already set up), then I could import close-miced drums and had a convincing kit by running them through convolution reverbs of the room captured with their mic setup and a sound source at each kit position. It seems I'd wind up using drums from other libraries within 3, which leads to the major problem of mismatched room ambience due to totally different recording setups. They would have been wise to allow other VST plugins in their effects slots. I guess I've been spoiled by Fractal and UA. The effects have been increased in number from 5 to 35 IIRRC, but the quality of most I tried was shit, especially the reverbs. All in all, I'm not sure what these world-class experts were thinking. Many of the drums also have nasty ringing the kind of ringing that would make me immediately retune or dampen. In order to get a mega-power hit on many toms, you have to simulate one with amplitude and pitch envelopes.
The new tuning algorithm sounds good, but not good enough to extend the range to extremes. The small concert toms are not tuned nearly high enough. Were they afraid they'd hurt the heads? No power whatsoever in many of them. The toms, especially the floor toms, sound like they are being hit by an old lady, even at max velocity. I've read reviews of how awesome the samples are, but I find them lacking compared to many of the SDX libraries for SD2. The interface and workflow are vastly improved, and the new features are great. I recently got the opportunity to try SD3.
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