Now you might be thinking that as you don’t actually work on action movies, these sounds aren’t really for you. As usual the tab on each drum pad accesses a drop-down menu of alternative sounds - and there are quite a lot from which to choose. The GUI shows eight drum pads and four cymbals (including hi-hats) set up around a desk, with a kick pad beneath the desk and a couple of six-pad percussion surfaces perched at either end along with a smaller trigger pad, which I first mistook for a computer mouse. Drum parts can be assembled directly in your DAW or in the arrangement section at the bottom of the mixer window, which supports the drag-and-drop placement of MIDI files. You also get the three standard percussion add-ons for tambourine, shakers and claps. Below the mixer are further controls for Delay, Big Reverb, EQ Envelope and Pitch.Īs with other EZX packs, there’s a set of MIDI grooves created specifically for the genre. In common with earlier EZX packs, there’s a mixer section that lets you rebalance the various mics, adjust the included reverb and so on to further customise the sounds. There’s a total of over 450 separate percussive sounds, and these come arranged as 21 kits, though you can change out or retune any kit part and resave your edits as your own custom kits. Think huge timpani, Miami Vice-style gated drums, treated orchestral snares, toms, tam-tams and cymbals, Latin percussion, risers, snaps and so on.
Action EZX leans in the latter direction, blending processed and synthetic sounds with orchestral percussion and vintage drum machines to create the kinds of percussion sounds you might hear as part of an action movie soundtrack. Most of the previous EZdrummer expansion kits are based on meticulously recorded acoustic kits, notable exceptions being the more processed and/or synthetic Dream Pop and Twisted Kit packs. Audio titled Toontrack Action EZX by Sound On Sound