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Its so difficult,as they all have something to bring to the table.
The Slate 5.5 seems a quick way to get some decent drums down quickly
Superior Drummer leans a bit to much towards hardrock/metal sounding stuff for me.
But i think my favourite, is the BFD3 (Closely followed EZ3) the level of control on the BFD3 is crazy,plus i like the sounds,which helps.
The programming maybe not as straight forward due to the program depth
But again, the price is a bit of a turn off.
I'm just a cheapskate,wanting to have Vinnie Colaiutas drum sound for £9.99 : - )
The quest continues.......well,for a little while longer at least.
Spitfire LABS has a pretty nice sounding indie style kit, and I have a couple of sets from UGRITONE, which are very metal, but nice to have some variety.
I have got in the habit of using a drum bus, with an instance of SSD5 as a 16 channel kit, and then I have another track with an instance of Pluginguru UNIFY, which has a total of 5 different drum VST loaded, these are- Ugritone Norhtern artillery and Anarchy drums, MT power, LABS, and SITALA.
That sounds like overkill, but it is all set up as a track template in Reaper, and takes about 30 seconds to load.
All these VSTs have slightly different mapping, so sometimes there are some unusual results, but UNIFY works as a mixer which allows them to be muted or solo'd to suit.
They all trigger off the same midi tracks, and I tend to bounce out stuff to audio when I want to commit to something.
I use the Unify tracks for some good ambient sounds, and blend with the main SSD tracks, instead of relying on reverb FX.
Highly recommend Unify itself for drum stuff as they have a lot of good libraries available for anything from Breaktweaker stuff to world drum samples.
No shortage of good drum stuff out there.
Next one was Anarchy, ( freebie ) which is a much simpler punk style mixer.
The current one, Kvult, is a more evolved version of NA, I think.
Sometimes it is good to have something quick and dirty, like LABS, for getting a rough vibe together, and I use SITALA, which is free, for the authentic 808, and 909 stuff which can be useful to blend in, and also to play back my own samples.
MTpower is great for quick basic sounds, and I like to blend in some dry stuff.
Unify is very helpful in allowing all this stuff to be played back as a single stereo track, although stuff can easily be muted or solod for rendering, including blends of any elements.
The pre-set packs for Unify are now working with their own midi sequences and mapping, so anything is really possible now, they are all based on sample playback for example, and they just have their own mixer and triggering environments.
Obviously, the major ones are all well developed, and it is all down to personal prefs, but I invested in SSD5, and I use that one as the focus for my more 'real' sounding drums, with the addition of a few things like Blackbird expansion.
There are a lot of packs of midi, from people like Groovemonkey, with all the patterns you could imagine, and it can be interesting to see how they work with random mapping, in the way I have it set up. Most of the big ones are using real time captures of a drummer, which helps to keep the human timing and dynamics real.
A thrash kit can still play back jazz or disco grooves, with some interesting results, and post processing can pretty much get them to sound any way you like.
Sometimes it can be paralysing to be trying to get the one main drum sound you want, which is why I like to have my options quickly available. Reapers track template function makes that very easy.
So far, I've been combining MIDI drums from the iReal Pro program (heavily editing it in the piano roll at the level of individual hits - ugh) with snippets from the DrumGenius app. The latter has great jazz drums but unfortunately they are only 8 bar loops and audio-only so no editing.
I crave what Logic's Drummer does for rock etc. genres for the jazz genre...
In Logic, you can just set the project up with regions and make the regions as complicated as you like, with tempo variations etc. Choose one of the more progressive drummers, and export the midi to be played by any drum VST you choose.
Thats what I do when I am struggling for inspiration, and I have a Logic project set up as a template for that purpose, now you can have more than one drummer in a project, variety is the spice of life.
I hated AD with a passion, could not get to grips at all. I also tried SS5 but the sounds did not fit.
I will look at BFD3 and Superior Drummer 3 when I can scrape enough cash together.
Feedback
SD3 is absolutely able to do that. It has the level of articulation required. It just means you aren’t able to smash blobs in the MIDI editor at 127 velocity constantly. (As a tip, don’t use 127. Default it at 126 for your standard rock stuff. It sounds more natural that way. Save 127 for large hits that absolutely need the whole nine yards on them.)
I’m no stranger to programming a MIDI drum track, I’ve done it literally hundreds of times. I could not make the cymbals on BFD3 sound anything other than a bit rubbish and unnatural regardless of the kit pieces, the settings, the velocities used etc. I have no such issues with SD3.
BFD3 offers incredible flexibility. But it does ask a lot of the user - this is another thing I want to change. Because I want us all to be able to focus on the music, and not titting about with drum engineering minutia.
Both BFD3 and SD3 have been used on best selling albums over the last 17 years, so I'm not too worried about a comparison tbh!
I use SD3 a lot, especially their audio triggering panel. It's fantastic!