# My thoughts on GGD modern and massive



## Flappydoodle (May 28, 2018)

Bought and installed this into Logic a few days ago. I'm sure others are considering purchasing too, so here are my rough thoughts

I already used GGD for over a year and I am very happy with it. I bought M&M mostly because of the ability to use the "turbo" mode and to have Nolly's drum mixing wizardry working for me. Turbo is adding high and low pass filters, EQ, compression and maybe some other stuff, all on one slider. It sounds better by default than my processed GGD tracks did, which is awesome. 

Pros:

The drums all sound great. Presets are great too. Mixing and matching different drums works fine too - they're all a similar volume and sound
Turbo works fantastically well. A full drum track, with everything on default, comes out as punchy, balanced, obviously processed but not ridiculously artificial. And no clipping, thanks to the compression built into "turbo". 
It sounds better by default than GGD did after my own processing (which I surely suck at compared to Nolly).
More output options (like mono room, kick sub mic etc) which we didn't have in GGD
Default key mapping now includes a lot more hit varieties like snare rimshot, flan, sidestick etc and a bunch of different hi-hat hits are all there by default. That capability was always there in GGD to map those extra hits and use them, but adding them as defaults definitely opened up my options by just putting them right in front of me
All the parameters are simple. There is one reverb slider. One "turbo" slider. Personally I like that, but of course you can turn them off and add your own reverb etc in your DAW using your favourite plugins.
Neutral:

Interface is more modern to look at
Able to get more done inside M&M itself, such as reverb, high and low pass filters, before it hits your DAW
All of the sampled drums are within a certain style - i.e. they are all slightly different flavours of the same sound. Obviously it's geared towards modern metal sounds.
The ability to control mic bleed has been added. Apparently it makes things more realistic, but I just leave it at default and will never touch it.
Groove manager and player. Personally I have little use for it. The add-on packs are $25 each and there are two different packs available right now.
Cons:

Interface only just fits on my 15 inch retina MacBook Pro screen if you turn off all the extra Kontact options such as showing the keyboard. If you're on a smaller screen, you may be stuck scrolling up and down. I feel like M&M could have been more space efficient in design.
It isn't "retina" optimised. I assume that is Kontact's fault, but the pixelated look is really shitty in 2018.
Default key mapping is totally different to GGD, so when I loaded M&M onto GGD tracks, everything was off
Only 1 rack tom and 2 floor toms. GGD had 2 racks and 2 floors. This is a major bummer.
Downloading process means installing some download manager software ("Connect") onto your computer which downloads a bunch of .rar files and unzips them. GGD used to be a simple web-based download. I don't like being forced to install more stuff on my computer.
In summary: 

If you need metal drum samples which sound great and you're happy to process and mix them yourself, I'd still get GGD. 

If you want something which gives better sounds by default, and you are lazy like me, get M&M.


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