Drums….what do you guys use to make tracks

E

Eman7422

Inspired
For at home practice, and song composition.

DAW

also, what about ipad

I am looking for really realistically sounding, easy to program interface.

fyi, I use mostly reaper at home.
iPad seems interesting as well, but so many apps….but seems easy to work on at any time.

style…instrumental rock, hard rock, metal, hair metal
 
hi there with cubase or logic pro you can get with not so much effort reasonable results (using midi drums) for logic ypu can also use sequencer patterns. I am using logic prox so i have no experiance with cubase but i just saw a video on yputube where a guy programmed midi drums for an easy rock pattern i a few seconds
 
Superior Drummer 3 is what I use. Very realistic sounds. It may be a little over kill if you are just using it for song composition. I know that EZ Drummer and Superior Drummer are similar in sound, but Superior Drummer has a lot more depth to it.
 
I committed to "Addictive Drums" from XLN audio about 7 years ago. I liked the sounds better than EZ Drummer and Superior drummer, and I thought the UI was well done. Probably overkill for you, but there are tons of presets that can have you rocking to very realistic beats in minutes (seconds once you learn to use it). I use it inside Cubase, but it does come as a stand alone as well. I think a basic version of "Groove Agent" (Steinberg's drum program) comes with Cubase. Lately I have been focusing on playing my cajon and percussion with a couple of foot pedals (busking style), but I am far from done with programmed drums!
 
I use Superior Drummer 3 for my tracks. It's definitely a lot of plugin for someone who just wants to find some midi grooves and put them to a drum set of their liking. However, some of the presets are really great and they come pre mixed in the software. This can help if you don't really know how to mix drums (Me! Me! Lol) and want a good starting point.

I find most of the time I'm just adjusting the levels in the SD3 mixer to get what I want. The sounds are pretty great. It also comes with tons of midi grooves and a cool feature where you can click in a beat and it brings up similar midi files. Fantastic for keeping momentum when writing, or trying a different approach writing a guitar part that fits the beat instead.

If you do get more into mixing and recording, it offers the options of multiple outputs to make your own tracks and busses and mix with your daw plugins.

Along with all the bleed option and great room sounds, the pre mixed kits offer you a chance to learn how to process individual drums. You can turn on and off the plugins and see what each of them do, or what types or effects are used and why. They also have the individual drums sent to bus mixes (mixing all like-drums together ie. Snare top and snare bottom to a single fader) with their own processing too. Another learning opportunity that can translate to other bus processing (guitars or basses). Or inspire new sounds like bussing your overheads to a new bus and putting a flanger on it, or a tremolo...that would be neat! Just make sure the effects are 100% wet and you blend in the fader to taste.

Last but not least, I've used the midi files to better understand the way to make my tracks sound realistic. Analyze them and it will be easy to add that to your own tracks.

Slate SSD5 is another option. Most sounds are "pre mixed" so you don't have to do much to them effect wise afterward. Lots of drum choices and you can easily layer (Superior can as well) drums for a fuller sound. The interface is clunky and a little hard to navigate. I found the cymbals to be the weakest point they were a little brash, and the drums are very upfront sounding. Not bad by any means but it has "a sound". But for 150 bucks I'd say it's a great bang for your buck. I don't think it has midi grooves, though I could be wrong I haven't used it in a while.
 
As I'm not a professional I use free software which is more than enough for what I do.
As DAW I use Reaper and I write midi drums.
As VST I use MT Power Drum Kit 2.
I've also been told that Steven Slate Drums 5.5 is a good VST for drums. It's paid but it has a free reduced version for life. I haven't used it.
 
EZ Drummer and Slate Drums 5 are both great. Not aware of anything on iPad that’s anywhere close to in the box plug-in options.
 
An iPad should have garageband which I believe has drums on it. I don't think you are going to get realistic sounding drums on a iPad. The biggest problem with the iPad being that most of the big drum programs have sample libraries that would basically take all of the memory on the iPad. Cubase also has Cubasis, which allows you to work on projects on the iPad that can be transferred to Cubase. Again, there are drum sounds and you can program drums on the app, but you aren't going to get the realistic drum sounds that you are probably after. We are probably a few years away from an iPad being able to run a full DAW. I know that it is coming, but I just don't know how long it is until we are there. The new M1 macs are quite impressive as far as performance goes, and I can imagine Apple putting an M1 in an iPad and it working quite well. The problem is that nobody is coding DAWs for an iPad yet because they generally don't have the power needed to truly run a DAW.
 
I use Superior Drummer 3 - I upgraded from EZ Drummer a while back. What you get depends on your workflow to some extent. If you're going to mainly drag and drop loops, EZD is probably sufficient. If you are going to edit the parts or program from scratch you might want to either go for SD with a full featured grid editor or move to a DAW like Studio One that also has a pretty good drum editor and isn't as complex to use as Cubase, Pro Tools or the like.

And if you're going to use loops, you might want to check out Groove Monkee - they've got a lot of decent genre specific sets for hard rock, metal, etc. and they're inexpensive.
 
If you think that editing drums in Cubase is hard, you are probably doing it wrong. If you set the midi map to a drum map, it is easy peasy. Cubase actually has a drum editor that is easier to use than the SD3 editor and is quite a bit more in depth. That is the thing about Cubase, the MIDI editing is second to none. A bunch of Cubase guys went over to Studio One and brought a lot of the same features over. To compare Cubase with Pro Tools for drum editing says that you don't have it set up right. If you set a drum map on the instrument track on SP3 editing is a breeze. I have set up custom keyboard shortcuts for quantize length and can edit drums easier than ever. It definitely is not the same as Pro Tools.
 
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