EZ Player and easy what with it?

[-J-]

Man this is giving me a headache. I can manage to get a piano roll going with toontrack's EZ Player (in Reaper), but I can't figure out how to get the piano to become drum sounds. I really hate MIDI - it's the least intuititve of anything I've ever learned in music. When I use it, I feel like some 1980s geek programming Duran Duran shit for a new Tron movie. But it seems to be the way to go for drums.

The catch: I'm broke as a joke and need to go with free programs and plug-ins.

so...

- is there another plug-in I need in reaper to get it to work?
- or do I need to load up a WAV drum sound on individual tracks to get it to work?
- should I not be using reaper at all?
- is EZ Player just a gimmick to get me to buy another toontrack product?
- it seems like it needs a non-free application for it to be useful (like cubase, fruity loops, etc.)

DISCUSS

 

[schismatic]

ezplayer is just a midi file manager for the ezdrummer as far as i'm aware. it will document the various grooves that come with ezdrummer in one nice package. what i guess you need is a DAW like reaper or cubase that has midi capability and you need a program such as ezdrummer or battery that will enable to trigger drum samples using midi hits. if you have individual wav files then battery can do the job, however the whole point of ezdrummer is that you can just use pre-built grooves or edit them as you wish and have a whole kit setup that can use these midi files for you quickly and easy. reaper should be fine i think for the job, it supports vst's so it'll support something like ezdrummer. read about it more on the toontrack website, there are some flash demos of how it all works. it's very very easy though and imho excellent for setting up little guide/scratch tracks while you write songs. dfhs is still the way to go midi wise if you want a half-decent drum sound though.

 

[-J-]

cool. the principle seems pretty simple and interesting. yeah, the way the free ez player came, it's got piano hits for the various instruments - reaper has drumagog-type of application where I could replace all the hits with a WAV sound, but that would take forever.

maybe I'll break down and buy DFHS. sick of having tunes with weak ass drums.

 

[doc_backmask]

I've been finding that Reaper's MIDI controller is interfacing really easy with BFD. However, I'm not a huge fan of the MIDI interface in Reaper. IMO the DP5 one is much better, and the PTLE one is even better. I really wish I could get some beat breakdowns like 1/6. I mean 1/2,1/3,1/4,1/8, they just completely skipped the one I would love to be using for some evil double bass work and snare rolls. Oh well, as some people say, drum machines have no souls.

 

[Jaymz]

I really dont understand all these comments about ez being weak, if you have the DFH addon I dont see a problem. Does DFHS have template fills etc?

 

[devouredremains]

The dfh expansion for ezdrummer is extremely weak in the snare department IMO and definately lacking in others. It's currently what i'm using and i always end up replacing what I can.

 

[Jaymz]

Replace the kick and snare and your sorted. Cymbals sound great and the toms are the best ive heard.