Toontrack Drum & Bass EZX [EZX Sound Expansion]

• Product: Drum & Bass EZX
• Developer: Toontrack
• Version: 1.0.0
• Format: EZX Sound Expansion
• Requirements: EZdrummer 3.1.2 or a Superior Drummer 3.4.1 and higher
• Source: toontrack.com/product/drum-bass-ezx

Drum & Bass EZX is a sound expansion for EZdrummer 3 and Superior Drummer 3, pairing four acoustic drum kits recorded through an SSL desk and a 1960s Decca valve console with a library of programmed drum-machine hits. It sits at the kit-selection stage inside EZD3 or SD3, shipping each kit with breakbeat-style MIDI from Andy Gangadeen and Peter Chapman. A dedicated horn-mic spill channel runs alongside the kit mics. It answers the search for breakbeat and jungle drum sounds built from a live room, not a drum machine alone.

Key Takeaway

Activates when a session already runs EZdrummer 3 or Superior Drummer 3 and needs a breakbeat or jungle-leaning kit with grooves already programmed. It displaces browsing separate one-shot packs and drum-machine VSTs for the same era. The electronic layer covers drum-machine tones, not full synthesis or sound design. Producers without EZD3 or SD3 installed can’t load it.

Birch, Maple, Walnut, and a Conga

Four acoustic kits ship inside the expansion: the Scope Kit (Natal Originals walnut, orange finish), the Amen Kit (Rogers Holiday, 3-ply birch with beech reinforcement rings, built around the “Amen Break” lineage), the Funky Kit (Ludwig Super Classic, 3-ply maple), and the Jungle Kit (a hybrid built around a Premier kick and a Percussion Plus conga standing in for the floor tom). Loading a different kit changes the entire timbral starting point, not just the sample selection inside one kit.

The Amen Kit’s birch-and-beech shell construction gives it a tighter, drier attack than the Funky Kit’s rounder, maple-shell low end. Switching between the two for the same pattern changes the pocket the pattern sits in, not just its loudness.

None of the four kits ship pre-blended into a fifth hybrid preset. Building a kit that mixes, say, the Amen Kit’s snare with the Scope Kit’s kick means assembling it manually inside the EZD3 or SD3 mixer. Producers who want one signature blended kit do that assembly once and save it as a custom preset; producers working kit-by-kit don’t need to.

Routing Mics Through the Decca Preamps

Tracking ran through an SSL AWS900+ for one signal path and a fully restored 1960s Decca GENDEC valve console for another, with a number of the kit mics driven through the Decca’s own preamps rather than the SSL’s. That split accounts for the denser, warmer character audible on the sources routed through the valve side versus the ones that stayed on the SSL path.

A dedicated horn mic spill channel was added to pick up bleed the way it would have occurred on the breakbeat-era recordings the kits reference, rather than isolating the drums from room bleed entirely. That spill channel sits in the mix as its own fader, so it can be pulled down or muted independent of the main room mics.

The valve coloration is baked into the multitrack captures themselves, not applied as an insert effect inside EZD3 or SD3. There’s no toggle to switch a kit between a “valve” and a “clean SSL” version of the same hit — whatever saturation exists on a given mic channel is fixed at the sample level.

Neuro and Spikey Sit Beside the Amen Kit

A separate library of programmed kick, snare and hi-hat sounds — names like Neuro, Machine, Spikey and Tight — sits alongside the four acoustic kits, giving a pad-for-pad substitute drawn from electronic rather than acoustic sources. Swapping a pad’s assignment from the Amen Kit’s acoustic snare to one of the programmed snares changes the genre reference of a pattern without touching its MIDI.

Five dedicated transient layers — kick and snare transients plus a drum-machine transient — sit apart from the main hit library and are built to stack under an acoustic or programmed hit rather than replace it, sharpening attack without changing the body of the sound underneath.

The programmed layer covers drum-machine-style one-shots, not a step sequencer or a synthesis engine. There’s no way to design a new electronic hit from scratch inside the expansion, only to select among the ones already recorded or processed into it.

Grooves Built for This Kit’s Extra Pads

The included MIDI was programmed around breakbeat-style patterns, including side-snare hits, percussion fills and effects triggers mapped to the extra pads each kit carries beyond a standard five-piece layout. Dragging one of these grooves onto a track populates a full breakbeat pattern rather than a generic loop that needs the extra pads mapped in afterward.

Because the grooves are written against this expansion’s own pad layout, dropping one onto a different EZX’s kit skips the side-snare and effects hits entirely, since those pads don’t exist on a standard kit. The speed gain from drag-and-drop grooves is specific to kits built for this expansion, not portable across the wider EZX catalog.

Producers building patterns from scratch, piece by piece, get less out of the groove library than producers assembling a track quickly from a breakbeat reference point and editing from there.

No Toggle Between Valve and Clean

Several presets carry a dedicated Tuning section that retunes key components — snares, kicks, toms — independent of which sample is loaded on a pad, shifting a kit’s pitch center without re-auditioning different hits for a different note.

An Envelope on/off switch on many presets swaps between the room’s natural decay tails and a tightened, gated version of the same hit, without inserting a separate compressor or gate afterward.

Every macro on these presets is MIDI-learnable, but the underlying processing chain is fixed to what each preset already routes. Building a signal path outside what the Tuning, Envelope and master-bus controls expose means inserting outside plugins in the host, not extending the preset itself. The saturation lives in the multitrack captures themselves — on the channels that ran through the Decca preamps specifically — so a hit recorded through the valve side can’t be un-saturated after the fact, only blended down in the mix.

FAQs