Ross Garfield Drums 2 | Electronic Musician Magazine

As you would expect from Ross Garfield, the drums used in these sampling sessions sound great. The tuning is spot-on, and you can tell that care went into prepping the drums for recording the samples.

Black Beauty, Garfield Custom, Ludwig, and Noble & Cooley snare drums are covered in great detail. Of particular note is the collection of multirod snare samples, which are especially strong in this library. Yamaha, Ludwig, and Gretsch toms are also provided along with Gretsch and DW kick drums.

Most of the drums in this 16-bit library have four to eight Velocity layers. Dry and ambient versions are provided for all drums. The hi-hats are good and the cymbals are okay, but they typically only have one or two layers. The library's strength is clearly its collection of drums, so I often use drums from this library mixed with cymbals from elsewhere.

The drum samples are very natural and realistic, very much like what you get when you place a quality microphone in front of a great-sounding drum and simply record it without processing. That may make this library sound a bit smaller and duller than other libraries that have added some EQ and compression to the samples.

Garfield's approach to Drums 2 has its advantages and disadvantages. The sounds are high-quality and take well to compression, EQ, and other processing that you would usually add when working with drum tracks, and that gives you lots of flexibility. On the other hand, the sounds usually need some processing to compete with most of the drum sounds in modern productions. Nevertheless, for high-quality samples and flexibility, Ross Garfield Drums 2 is a winner.