What is the most realistic sounding drum program?

[rorry]

What is in your opinion the most realistic sounding drum program available?
ie. drumcore, addictive drums? As drummers whats the best?
ps. of course id rather i real drummer but till then.

[MegaDrummer]

I have very limited experience with these. Although years ago a friend got one and was completely lost trying to program it. No matter what he did it came out sounding like someone dropping bowling balls into a trash dumpster off of a ten story building. You almost needed to be a drummer to work it. I hope they are more user friendly now.

I'm in a similar boat when coming to amp modelers. Sure, I can get the Stevie Ray Vaughn sound. But being a hack guitarist by ear, does me no good.

[eyefi]

bfd and dfh are both excellent, no experience with the others you mention. it's all in the playing and/or programming though but these two sound awesome.

[Fullerene]

I just went through this and have a couple quick thoughts:

1. BFD is an amazing program - sounds awesome, and has a lot of options and various ways of being able to create a realistic sound. I tried their demo and found it to be kind of complicated... which leads me to...

2. EZ drummer by toontrack. very intuitive, sounds great through the monitors and depending on which DAW you use, can write MIDI code directly into a track.

What I would offer you also is the importance of understanding what vst drum software your DAW will support and also trying to find a demo version or 2 to make sure that its compatible and sounds like something.

what's nice with ez drummer is that it had many of the things that I liked about BFD but a much simpler flow. You can add other drum sets to it, add a human element, change velocity, room mics, mix it, and easily drop loops into your DAW.

hope it helps, check the ez drummer site for some demo stuff - good luck with your work!!

all the best

f

[thesilentdrummer]

I am not a sample man, but DFH Superior 2 looks INCREDIBLE. If I wanted to buy a drum program, I would pick that one.

[elmagoo]

Man this is the bain of my existence, especially in the past few weeks . I'm a fool for trying too many drum programs looking for the best sound I can get. The good news is there's some good stuff out there for a reasonable price.

I'm not a drummer, hence I have to program. I've been really tempted though to get a good eKit and learn, I just don't have the room p. What was said earlier in the thread though is spot on, a lot of it has to do with the quality of the programming.

Here's my take on what I own and use:

- Battery / Battery 2. Definitely more old-school compared to what's come out on the market these past few years, but I figured I'd list it. It's a software version of a hardware drum machine with the pads. You provide the velocity samples and load them into the pads however you want. I did get the Studio Drums add on, which provides some really nice samples already laid out for you, but if you want to change out a kit piece it's not as simple as with the newer kinds of plugins (i.e. you have to hunt down all of the velocity layer samples and manually set them up on the pad). Also you have to manually setup all of the choking and such that's done automatically for you with the newer programs. For example, you have to use one drum pad per sound type, so for each articulation of a hihat you have to have a pad dedicated to that articulation (one pad for open, one for close, one for partially open, etc...). You have to manually set it up so that when you play any pad setup with a hihat, it will cancel out any other hihat pad's sound that was playing (like going between open and closed hihats). Basically I wouldn't recommend this route as there's much better and easier stuff out there now.

- Stylus RMX. Lots of good stuff here if you like using loop samples, but if you want to program individual drum hits with different kit pieces and such then this is not for you. It's a very sophisticated loop sampler, so if you like to assemble songs out of pre-made loops you should check this out. There's some great videos and such on the Spectrasonics website.

- BFD / BFD Deluxe expansion / BFD2. While the potential is there to get fantastic sounding drums, you have to be a drum engineer to 'extract' the sound. The approach BFD has taken is that they'll give you great sounding raw hits that are mic'd up properly with many different kit pieces. You have to do all the extra work though to get them to sound 'final.' Meaning every stinking trick and nuance of EQ / Compression / Gating / whatever that the pros do to get that final polished sound on your favorite album you will have to do as well. There is SO MUCH flexibility with no simplification in the UI that it over complicates the whole process for a non-engineer. I love the potential, and the tweaker in me really wants to learn all of these tricks and such, but the reality is I'll spend more time trying to get the drums to sound the way I want and really not get anything better than I can get with a different program much easier. The one thing I think I'll use BFD for is that 'classic' drum sound (i.e. funk / Beatles / Zepplin / etc...). One really big beef with all of the BFD samples is that most of their rimshot articulations stink. They just sound like regular snare hits instead. Also it eats up a lot of ram, but you can thankfully tweak it's engine to use less (don't even consider this program unless you have 2GB of RAM). The streaming also presents a bit of an issue at times in that occasionally when playing real-time a pop or click will get in there. You'll need a second HDD for this program as you will most likely have problems if it's stored on the same drive that you record to.

- Addictive Drums. If you want to do electronic music, I personally think this is the plugin of choice if you don't want to go the loop samples route (or you want to make your own loops). For electronic music there's a lot of tonal possibilities. As for wanting to us it for 'real' drums, I'd say it's not bad, but there's better out there. After comparing it to EZDrummer and BFD, I could start to tell that the drum samples were a bit too brittle, too digital. Also if I turn up the room mic everything gets really nasty sounding and harsh. The test I put up in the demo part of this forum showing the Line 6 SpiderValve used AD if you want to give it a listen. The big problem I've had with AD is getting them to sit well within a mix, as well as trying to apply any kind of EQ or compression to them. To me it's just a symptom of the actual samples being too digital and harsh. There is a lot of flexibility in terms of setup and routing, and the interface simplifies most of it so it's really easy to tweak it. The built in EQs and compressor are not very good though. There are also a lot of good articulations to use, and the drum keyboard map for programming is by far the most straightforward.

- EZDrummer. As someone mentioned earlier, it's friggin' easy. The sounds are great, it's very simple to use and program for, by far the quickest and cheapest way to get great sounding drum samples. My one complaint so far is a lack of finer control of the cymbals. There's a song I'm working on now where I need to up the ride a bit, but there's no way to do so without turning up all of the cymbals because they'll only controlled in the overheads (meaning no direct mic channel for each cymbal). Also you can not control the amount of each drum piece that appears in the overheads and room mics like you can with AD and BFD. It would be nice to have this, but it's not a bad trade off for how quickly you can work and get something going. I'm just amazed with the quality for how simple it is to use. There's also several expansions that will give you a good variety of kit pieces and sounds for different styles, and they're fairly cheap (under $100 per expansion). Plus EZDrummer its self is the cheapest of the bunch here. Until Superior 2.0 comes out I think this is going to be my go to plugin for drums.

Someone above mentioned the soon to be released Superior 2.0 (the next evolution of EZDrummer) and from what I've seen of the video, I think this is going to be the best of the best. The drum hits sound fantastic by themselves just like EZDrummer, and they're adding a lot of the flexibility of BFD in terms of routing and mixing and such. Plus the rooms they recorded the samples at are amazing (Hit Factory, Avatar, and Alair studio's). Go lookup the artists and albums that have been recorded at these places and you'll see what I mean (Octavarium from Dream Theater was the last album recorded at the Hit Factory). Here's the product page:

Toontrack

Click the link to the demo video to see what all the buzz is about .

OK, long post, but hopefully some info for you . Most of these programs have sample songs on their websites. Doing an A/B between them might help. Also these sights tend to have tutorial or demo videos to check out as well. And of course if there's a downloadable demo you should check that out.

Something else to consider is if you plan on fully programming the drums yourself, or using midi patterns / groove libraries. You might want to consider this aspect of whatever plugin you choose based on your answer. Personally I like to custom program my drums myself, so I haven't really used this aspect of these plugins. For time's sake I might start trying to use the pre-made midi grooves in EZDrummer to layout the basic foundation of a song in the future.

Best of luck .

[rorry]

thanks for all the help, has put me in the right direction.
if only i could record my thoughts. mm yeh whats that best program for that?

[brandondrury]

DFH Superior is great. I wish it had more in the room sound department but that will all be fixed by the release of DFH Superior 2.0.

Brandon

[Feedback]

Go to Toontrack® and look for Superior 2.0 . When this is coming out, i think it's safe to say that, for the price, it's going to be one of the best available.

[eyefi]

i recently heard BFD with the engineer range from platinum samples. andy johns and evil drums by joe barresi, i was blown away. nothing can beat the BFD engine and these samples at the moment for awesome sounding engineered drums.