What do use for Drums on your DAW

Cirrus

For fear of basically being a mouse wondering into a discussion about drum software between a member of the BFD team and an experienced producer...

Having spent a fair bit of time last year working through the BFD3 library, the point it came to life for me was when I got a feel for which shells and cymbals were recorded in the same spaces and had overlapping room/ distant mic options. Then I spent a couple of hours building a kit template of my own, paying really close attention in the mixer to how the overheads, rooms, "amb" mics and other available distant mics presented the whole kit sound on their respective channels.

Sometimes that's a bit of a faff in the software as it is at the moment, because if you want to balance the whole kit's sound coming through, say, the room mic channel, you need to go into each kit component piece by piece and adjust its individual volume in a sub menu off to the right. But, it really made the kit sound gel when I got those tracks well balanced.

I actually don't use the cymbal close mics at all, except for the occasional hi hat or maybe to give a ride definition in a chorus, because I don't work in really aggressive/dense musical styles and don't use close cymbal mics when I record real drums. In fact, it was my experience of recording real drums that gave me the understanding of how the balance of the drums is presented when you track "drum overheads", "drum room" etc, and once I got them sounding right in my template, I could just go forward as if it were a real audio recording of a performance, albeit one where I could go back and adjust the playing. I know Drew and Nerine are both well experienced in that regard. I guess for a user who'd never tracked drums before, the interface would suggest that you get a kit balance with the individual close shell and cymbal mics, then use the oh/amb options just for some depth/ cohesion.

WiresDreamDisasters

Oh I wasn't being arsey or offended or anything @Cirrus, no worries about discussion wanderings!

I love feedback like this! Helps me make my cases for the next version. Keep 'em coming!

Nerine

WiresDreamDisasters said:

Oh I wasn't being arsey or offended or anything @Cirrus, no worries about discussion wanderings!

I love feedback like this! Helps me make my cases for the next version. Keep 'em coming!

I should probably have caveated my post a little more thoroughly. 

I'm not saying BFD is bad by any means. And it's likely it has been updated since I last used it. 

I did think the shells on BFD3 sounded better than SD2.

For my needs, and the sounds I go for, I find SD3 just works better for my use case. 

I usually find the weak link to be the overheads/cymbals in a lot of these programs. 

SD3 seems to have sorted that all out and they are the most natural I have used. I know @WiresDreamDisasters works on the BFD stuff, so I'm certainly not going to ruffle any feathers there. Kudos where it's due! I'd absolutely love to be involved in projects like that as my day job. 

I dare say a new version is on the horizon at some point, and SD3 is the most recent large release of a drum VI, so it's likely BFD4 will take the lead when it happens, as we usually seem to have a leapfrogging effect with all this stuff. 

IF BFD4 (I've made that name up) is excellent and I find it sounds better than SD3, I'll use that. Simple. But for right now, SD3 gets an awful lot right and I can't really fault the library or how realistic it can be made to sound with quite little effort. 

This next part could possibly be looked at or incorporated or considered.

One gripe I do have with SD3. When changing a entire kit, it seems like a lot of the velocity programming needs to be entirely redone or massaged quite a lot. Some kit pieces seems to react to different velocities much more severely than you'd expect. 
What is nice ghosting on one snare may be quite hard hits on another, which entirely loses the feel of the performance.

If there is a way to scale that effectively between different kit pieces of the same type it would be an excellent addition, and would make auditioning new kits much less hassle.  

I guess essentially making the sample layers within each velocity window more consistent/evenly matched over the different kit pieces would be the solution. 

Grumpyrocker

I've been using EZDrummer 2 for quite a while. But recently I bought a Mac and have been using Garage Band for the very first time. I love the AI drummer in the software. A really clever approach. 

It does have limitations - you can't choose to mix toms and high-hat in a section, and it doesn't do anything like blastbeats - but it's fabulous for creating convincing ideas and cool patterings to play with. 

duotone

EZDrummer 2 currently has a March sale on with 20% off. So it’s €124 instead of €155. 
https://www.toontrack.com/product/ezdrummer-2/

spooner248

I use an electronic drum kit plugged into Addictive drums.

Nerine

FWIW I got the Legacy Of Rock expansion for SD3 this weekend and it’s absolutely stunning. 

Hugely inspiring. 

IntoTheRough

Nerine said:

FWIW I got the Legacy Of Rock expansion for SD3 this weekend and it’s absolutely stunning. 

Hugely inspiring. 

Interesting. I find SD3 hugely inspiring as it is! Will check it out.

Bod

SD3 user here, and it's very good especially when I trigger from my VDrums.  One thing I need to spend more time with though is the mixer.  All the presets sound far too polished and I haven't really found the correct way to process them.  I guess I need to spend some time flattening everything and building my own preset like @Cirrus

darcym

I've never found anything that comes close to Superior Drummer 2 - until Superior Drummer 3 came out, the dynamics, the options, the kits, the mic control etc, I can't think of anything better. 

IntoTheRough

Bod said:

SD3 user here, and it's very good especially when I trigger from my VDrums.  One thing I need to spend more time with though is the mixer.  All the presets sound far too polished and I haven't really found the correct way to process them.  I guess I need to spend some time flattening everything and building my own preset like @Cirrus

Me too. Can't you bus them out through FX? You could add comp/saturation individually then buss them back together and add anything else to the whole. Not tried it but anecdotally I believe this is a solution.

If I were making an electronic track most of the component parts would ahve their own DAW lane and FX anyway.

Cirrus

Yeah, with BD3 part of my template is that the sounds come out the various VI output channels into the DAW's mixer so that it basically looks and feels like a regular multitracked drum recording - for workflow reasons that's much easier than working inside the plugin, most of the time.

andy_k

Has anyone tried 'Modo drums'? I think its called?
very different approach, in that it uses synthesis to generate the drum sounds, and has an incredibly complex level of customisation. 
Each drum has options for heads, hardware, hit area etc etc.
I watched a video on it, and was amazed at the level of tunability, the sounds are then processed as usual in a DAW, which is where most of the magic happens anyway.
I think it was about £300 at the time, and they also do a Bass, I already have all my sounds set up, but it did look like a good way to create a more unique sound, instead of relying on the usual suspects, and the same samples as everybody else.