Ola Englund Teaches You How to Write Drum Tracks in Five Minutes with EZ Drummer 2

Toontrack released EZ Drummer 2 earlier this week, an entirely revamped version of their very popular drum programming software. Since Ola Englund (of Feared and The Haunted) is one of the company’s ambassadors, and an incredibly talented musician to boot, he’s put together a quick demo video highlighting some of the nifty new features that EZ Drummer 2 has to offer. And they look AWESOME.

The biggest new feature Toontrack is touting is “Tap 2 Find,” which allows you to tap a drum beat in using your mouse, then pick from a list of pre-made grooves and beats that the software determines are a good match for what you tapped in. It works surprisingly well, and you can further fine-tune the pre-made beats by changing the “Power Hand,” adding in more drums, adjusting the velocity and number of hits on each drum per bar, adding fills from a large library and more. They’re customizable in pretty much every way. Then you can drag and drop from a list of different verses, pre-choruses, choruses, etc — all based on what you tapped in, all customizable as above — to easily assemble a full song.

What I like so much about these features is that they make it incredibly easy for guitarists to assemble workable demos without having to deal with the minutiae of programming drums hit by hit for an entire song. Sure, that process can be fun, and can ultimately offer more versatility, but sometimes you just want to get an idea down with beats that are “good enough” so you can focus on the rest of what you’re doing, ultimately ceding to a real live human drummer once you get into the studio. Since in this case “good enough” is “really fucking awesome,” I’d say it’s a win-win.

Watch Ola Englund’s quick demo below, and purchase EZ Drummer 2 here: