Toontrack Pop Punk EZX: A Metal Producer’s Guide

The Toontrack Pop Punk EZX might seem like an odd choice for a metal producer's toolkit. The name itself suggests bright, upbeat drums—a world away from the dark, punishing sounds we usually chase. But if you dismiss it on name alone, you're missing out on one of the most versatile and powerful drum libraries for creating modern, aggressive drum tones.

The key is to look past the genre label and focus on the raw sounds. Recorded by legendary producer/engineer John Feldmann (The Used, Blink-182, Atreyu), this EZX is packed with punchy, articulate, and meticulously captured kits that serve as an incredible foundation for heavy music.

Let’s break down what this library offers and how you can manipulate it to build a crushing metal drum mix.

Product Overview: What's Under the Hood?

The Pop Punk EZX isn't just one kit; it’s a collection of some of the most sought-after drums in the punk and rock world, all captured at Feldmann's own Foxy Studios.

Here’s what you get:

• Three full kits: An Orange County Drums & Percussion (OCDP) kit, a Slingerland kit, and a custom Truth Drums kit.
• Multiple Snare Options: A wide variety of snares, including OCDP, Truth, and several classic Ludwig models, giving you everything from deep, fat backbeats to high-pitched, cracking tones.
• Extensive Cymbal Selection: A huge range of Zildjian cymbals, so you have plenty of options for crashes, rides, and effects.

The magic of this pack for metal producers is that the samples are relatively unprocessed. They’re tight, focused, and full of transient punch without being drenched in reverb or compression. This gives you a clean, powerful starting point to shape the sound for a dense metal mix, whether you’re working in EZdrummer or its more advanced big brother, Superior Drummer 3.

Making Pop Punk Drums Work for Metal

Okay, so we have great raw material. Now, how do we turn these energetic punk sounds into something that can stand up to down-tuned 8-string guitars and guttural vocals? It's all about strategic layering, processing, and understanding that samples are a tool for reinforcement, not just replacement.

It’s All About Reinforcement, Not Just Replacement

The biggest mistake producers make with programmed drums is making them sound too perfect. Real drummers aren't machines. Even the tightest players have subtle variations in timing and velocity. Nowhere is this more obvious than in blast beats. A real drummer can't hit the snare at full force during a 220 BPM blast; the hits naturally get lighter.

This is where the Pop Punk EZX shines. Instead of completely replacing a live drum performance, use its samples to reinforce it.

Let’s say you have a live drum recording where the blast beats sound weak and get lost in the mix.

1. Use a drum trigger plugin like Slate Trigger 2 or Drumagog on your live snare track.
2. Load up one of the tight, cracking snares from the Pop Punk EZX (like the OCDP Vented or Ludwig Black Beauty).
3. Blend the sample in underneath the real snare. Don't replace it entirely. You want the consistency and attack of the sample combined with the natural feel and cymbal bleed of the live performance.
4. Crucially, adjust the MIDI velocities of the triggered sample. The blast beat hits should have a slightly lower velocity than the huge downbeat hits in a chorus or breakdown. This mimics a real drummer and keeps the performance dynamic and believable, allowing you to maintain natural dynamics even with samples.

Dialing in the Snare for Maximum Impact

The snares in the Pop Punk EZX have a fantastic “crack” that can cut through a wall of guitars, but they might lack the low-end "thwack" common in modern metal. The solution is blending.

• Layering for Beef: Keep your Pop Punk EZX snare as the primary sound for its mid-range attack. Then, layer a deeper, fatter snare sample underneath it. A classic choice is something from the Slate Signature Drumkits or a dedicated one-shot from a library like GetGood Drums. Align the phase of the two samples and blend the fatter snare in just enough to add weight without losing the pop-punk snap.
• Parallel Processing: Send your main snare track to a separate aux bus for heavy-handed processing. This technique, often called parallel compression, can add immense body.
  • Compression: On this bus, use an aggressive compressor to absolutely smash the snare. A digital emulation of an Empirical Labs Distressor or a classic 1176 is perfect for this. Try the UAD 1176 Rev A plugin or the Softube FET Compressor with a fast attack and release to bring out the room sound and tail of the snare. Learning to properly hear the effects of compression on a snare is a vital skill.
  • Saturation: Add a saturation plugin like the Soundtoys Decapitator or FabFilter Saturn after the compressor to add harmonic distortion and grit.
  • Blending: Blend this "smash bus" back in under your main snare track. This adds immense body and character without making the original transient sound mushy.

Getting Aggressive Kicks and Toms

The kicks in this EZX are punchy and focused, perfect for fast playing. However, they might not have the sub-bass weight or the sharp, clicky attack needed for modern metalcore or death metal.

• The Classic Kick Layering Trick:
  1. Use the main OCDP or Truth kick from the EZX for its mid-range body (the "thump").
  2. Find a dedicated metal kick sample known for its beater attack (the "click"). Many producers have a personal library of these. The kick samples in libraries from Jens Bogren or Will Putney are great examples.
  3. On your EZX kick, use an EQ like the FabFilter Pro-Q 3 to gently roll off the high end above 4-5kHz. This is where knowing the fundamentals of how to EQ a metal kick drum pays off.
  4. On your "click" sample, roll off the low end below 100-150Hz to remove any conflicting sub-bass information—a crucial move for balancing your kick and bass.
  5. Blend these two kicks together. Now you have the best of both worlds: the body and weight from the EZX and the clear, mix-cutting attack from the sample layer. This technique is fundamental for ensuring your kick drum doesn't get buried under layers of distorted guitars. Creating this separation is key, much like the techniques we cover for EQ-ing modern metal guitars.

The Humanization Factor: Avoiding the Machine Gun Effect

Modern drum samplers are amazing, but they can easily sound robotic if you're not careful. The "machine gun" effect—where every hit sounds identical—is the number one killer of programmed drum realism and a well-known problem with modern metal drums.

Here's how to fight it using the features in Toontrack's engine:

• Vary Your Velocities: Never program an entire song with all the snare hits at full velocity (127). A real drummer's dynamics are constantly shifting. Use slightly lower velocities for ghost notes, fills, and fast passages like blast beats, and save the highest velocities for the powerful hits on beats 2 and 4.
• Use Built-in Round Robins: Toontrack products are built on a foundation of multi-sampling and round-robin triggering. This means there isn't just one sample per velocity layer; there are multiple different samples that cycle as you trigger the same note repeatedly. This is automatically handled by the engine and is a huge part of what makes it sound so natural out of the box.
• Don't Quantize to 100%: When editing your MIDI performance, resist the urge to snap every single note perfectly to the grid. Quantizing to around 90-95% tightness will correct major timing errors while preserving some of the natural human push and pull of a performance. This tiny bit of "slop" is what gives a drum part its groove.

See How the Pros Do It

These techniques are a fantastic starting point for turning the Toontrack Pop Punk EZX into a metal beast. But understanding a technique is one thing; watching a world-class producer apply it in the context of a real song is something else entirely.

How do you make these drums sit perfectly with a thundering bass guitar and quad-tracked rhythm guitars? How do you use automation to make different sections of the song hit harder?

That’s where Nail The Mix comes in. We put you in the virtual studio with the producers behind bands like Gojira, Lamb of God, and Periphery. You get the actual multi-tracks from massive songs and get to watch instructors like Will Putney, Jens Bogren, and Nolly Getgood build a mix from scratch, explaining every single decision along the way.

If you’re ready to see how these concepts are applied at the highest level, check out our full catalog of Nail The Mix sessions and take your drum production to the next level.