Looking for recommendation for drum software

C

Chris Hurley

Power User
I hear demo clips of original songs with amazing drum tracks in them and find myself wishing that I had access to such a great foundation for demos or just screwing around at home.

From what I gather, there are products that combine a library of kit sounds and a library of MIDI fills and loops. The MIDI segments can be dragged out onto a track in the DAW and then the software performs the hits using the sample library. Hopefully, some sort of humanization features also exist to lend a bit of extra realism to the performance.

Sometimes, I have an idea of what sort of a drum part I want, but other times I would be browsing the library for something inspiring.

I use Reaper on Windows x64. I have multiple computers and would prefer being able to use software on any of my computers. My budget is $150 or less. I don't enjoy Piano Roll Editting. I play hard/alternative rock, but am also interested in jazz and world drumming styles.

I'm hoping that you kind folks might have some suggestions on products that you use and love that seem to fit into my requirements. If anyone wants to educate me more on the subject, I'll be happy to take that in lieu of a recommendation.

Thanks-

Chris
 
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EZdrummer user here, both using the sounds and then programming or using/adapting the built-in library of grooves. When I first used it I found it hard to make the drums cut through mixes (hadn't had so much trouble with sampled loops) but splitting the kit onto separate tracks in the mixer and using EQ carefully solved this and the drums can sound really natural and authentic.
 
Cue a long list of people simply quoting their favourite tool of choice! (as is always the case with such threads)
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Addictive Drums. I found the sound superior to the others, and lots of control over both beats and sound. SD, I think, was the one I found very 'compressed' sounding. Maybe good for metal and such, but I want drums that are unprocessed, natural-sounding. Then, within Addictive Drummer (or within my DAW), I can mess with the individual channels. One downer, though: the cymbals do NOT appear on individual tracks, which I think is a pity. I can think of lots of 'digital molestion' of cymbals that would be fun, were they isolated.
 
I used ez drummer for a long time and loved it. Upgraded to superior and it's fantastic


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JosephGarraty said:
+1

The sounds are pretty good, but the engine for building drum parts is amazing. WAY better than screwing around with MIDI loops. If you find yourself with extra budget, you can pair Jamstix up with BFD 2 or Superior Drummer for more control over the sounds.
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I might do that to go with Superior Drummer which I already have, the Jamstix looks good for quickly building parts.
 
I really like the EZXs from toontrack. They are super easy to use, sound great "out of the box", and come with midi grooves. I personally use Steven Slates drums along with the software it comes with because it allows me to load in my own samples to mix with the software samples. I think Battery even allows you to add your own samples and create multi-shot banks so that you avoid the machine gun effect which I need to look into for my own projects. I know that Kontact will allow this functionality but I mainly use that for recreating synths.

Forget the piano roll and buy a decent multipad. I have a crappy Simmons one that I got from GC for $100 bucks that works great for my purposes. If your trying to play jazz type stuff you may want to think about investing in a reasonable electronic drum kit since jazz can be very difficult to play on a multi pad and is even harder, dare I say near impossible, to program via piano roll.

Any of the major drum vitual instruments (ezdrummer, SD2.0, Slate) with sync with a multipad with minimal effort spent on remapping. I personally DO NOT like the sounds from SD2.0 (I have both the standard Avatar kit and the Metal Foundry) but I have heard plenty of people love it. To me the drums on SD2.0 sound completely unprocessed and then its up to you to make them sound like you want them to, which can be great for some people, but its not my personal favorite. SD2.0 is nice because of the multi-out feature, but I believe Slates program can do this also, and not being able to load your own samples into the toontrack stuff is a deal breaker for me :)
 
AdamCook said:
Superior Drummer only sounds compressed if you use the preset kits that are set up with lots of compression. Which is of course what most users do which is why lots of people think they sound overly compressed.
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Agreed, with no presets loaded it sounds very much like a "regular kit in a nice room". Its really up to you whether you make them compressed sounding.
 
If you don't want to mess with MIDI and would just as soon use your DAW editor to slice and dice WAV files, Drums On Demand is hard to beat. I own Jamstix and use to own Superior Drummer. I prefer the Drums ON Demand slice and dice method. It gets me from point A to B faster. Sounds excellent. Maybe not as minutely tailored to the song, but If I wanted to market my songs I would replace by recording a real drummer anyway. I would do the same if I was using MIDI drum software.

Drums On Demand/Studio Soundware | Drums Loops, Drum Samples & Music Software For Songwriting
 
I've got a half dozen drum loops CD's but I don't see how they would be ideal since the decay of instruments is chopped off at the end of each iteration of the loop. I haven't spent much time with them as a result.
 
Chris Hurley said:
I've got a half dozen drum loops CD's but I don't see how they would be ideal since the decay of instruments is chopped off at the end of each iteration of the loop. I haven't spent much time with them as a result.
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That should only be an issue with cymbals or extremely sustainy shells?

Most loops don't crash at the end for that reason. But kicks / snares / toms / hats... are all good at the loop end.
 
I've used drum loops for 95% of my original music recordings. Except for my earliest attempts I've never had a listener say......'gagg you used drum loops' or 'man I hear instrument decays being clipped off' or 'those drums sound like crap'. A good drummer can pick them off, but when arranged well the average listener cannot. I guess it just depends on your objective. These days I use DOD loops to get the song recorded, give my real drummer a feel for one possible pocket and then record him on a real kit. For that purpose DOD works great.

Although...sometimes it is a challenge to make the real drummers kit sound as good as the kits in the DOD loops.
 
Maybe I'm being silly with the loop decay issue then. I have a half dozen Beta Monkey disks. I think I may have gotten them primarily for samples that I never used and also was concerned about the decay issue and never got kicked off with them.
 
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