Best Drum VST?

[jackson white]

@DeeringAmps  Tom! much appreciated, thx for the clips. i'm good for a round if we're ever in the same area code. if nothing else i'm hearing some variety with the potential expansion packs.  

? question on the "SD 3 Yamaha kit with Cooley snare" clip. Is the ambience something you added or is it a blend of close mics+whatever SD offers for fx or just the base kit sound? at your convenience...

@John Bradley  thx, had thought about it as a couple of peeps are big on slate except ... none of them use the drums (they all use real drummers...) they didn't think I would like it better than bfd, but could at least demo it w/o having to buy it (or maybe a one month sub?) 

@Jesse Screed  ?? lol, the goal is the total opposite of " be like everybody else", which perhaps got lost in an attempt to find someone who uses sd3 and has some experience/opinion with select expansions. i'm specifically -not- looking for the "john bonham/neil peart/ringo starr/etc etc" presets that get marketed with most of the options out there. And np with "myriad of opinions", it's a  forum... but there seem to be more "players" here vs "producers" if you get my drift, and the comments have been helpful.  tl:dr territory, not exactly trying to compete with the "megalith" but working with "emerging artists" to develop a unique sound for them, not me. i just want it to sound as good as possible. fwiw, i find nashville to be pretty diverse with plenty of talent, but not that different from bkn, bos or atx. rock on, it's all good.  

[Jesse Screed]

3 hours ago, jackson white said:

it's all good.  

yes, it's all good.  My apologies if it sounded a as an affront. I guess my whole point was that no matter which drum vst you go with, you will have to dig into it and make the sound fit for what you need.  It sounds like you are the kind of producer that will take the time to find what is best for your clients.  I look forward to hearing some of your productions.

[Tim Smith]

I have a recording here where I picked an unnamed drum vst and selected a kit. I changed the bass drum in it and the snare, but I never went outside of the kit or the GUI, so it was all in house. I did use some outboard reverb , the IK Sunset Sound reverb. I'll tell you the bass is MODO bass side chained into the drums. The bass was tough to deal with because I used a 6 string bass in MODO. 

This is at 96bpm but I sped the tempo up toward the last 1/3rd of the track. This isn't really a finished track, but I think it gives a decent idea, and yes I go over in LUFS on it some.

I picked this kit because BFD wasn't working for me at the time. Two things I like. When the cymbal is hit you can hear the ring from it for 20 seconds afterwards. I grew fond of the snare because of it's unique ring which i thing carries the kit. It isn't my fav drum vst. 

Can you guess which one it is? I don't think it's quite as good as BFD but it isn't bad either in terms of the kit.

 

Edited April 11, 2022 by Tim Smith

[DeeringAmps]

6 hours ago, jackson white said:

question on the "SD 3 Yamaha kit with Cooley snare" clip

It does reflect how I use the SD3 internal mixer (7 internal busses sent to 7 tracks in CbB),
but as far as added ambiance; its just SD3.
The toms are "damped", and the ride as well.
Mybad here, the other kits "blew up" my internal mixer; this of course did not as I didn't re-load it.
I have added just the default SD3 Yamaha kit to the link above. (it of course does blow up my mixer)
Pretty subtle difference really...

In the "full mix" the Guitar, Keys, Bass and Drums are sent to separate instances of IKM's FAME.
But I was careful to mute all instances of FAME in the demo mixes. (at least I got that part right)

t

6 hours ago, jackson white said:

i'm good for a round

If you are ever in the Seattle area...

[DeeringAmps]

1 hour ago, Tim Smith said:

Can you guess which one it is?

no

[Tim Smith]

It's AD2. 

[DeeringAmps]

I was going to come back and quess Session Drummer. 

[Lord Tim]

On 4/11/2022 at 12:27 PM, John Bradley said:

Any love/hate for SSD5.5? Been using the free version for a while now, and think it's decent. Had been thinking about buying the full version for $120 to get a more complete collection of kits and grooves... but maybe EZD3 at $179 would be a better choice given the newness and whatnot?

Looking for something to quickly get acceptable sounding (kit+groove) drums in order to sketch out songs in genres I don't especially do (hard rock / metal), then drag the midi into CW where I can futz with it, do my own specific fills, etc.

SD3 at $399 and other similarly priced packages are not an option for me.

SSD5.x is excellent with a few caveats, especially for hard rock / metal styles.

The first gotcha is that out of the box, this is super processed and pretty much every modern metal production is likely using the kick and snare samples from that particular preset pack. They sound great, but a LOT of other people think so too, obviously (Deluxe Metal > Slate Metal 05 is freakin' *everywhere*). I'd be more inclined to mix and match kit pieces and load in your own custom samples to layer with their ones to get something unique.

The toms, however, are by far the most realistic sounding toms I've used for fast styles of music. Once you learn where the sweet spot is for velocity and program in some realistic accents (rather than doing "ehhh 127 everything") they sound ridiculously real.

The overheads are a mixed bag. I'm not overly fond of anything other than the ride bell or maybe the china for anything other than single hits. The moment you start doing a groove or a cymbal wash, it all sounds pretty triggered. I usually run Addictive Drums 2 as my overheads, and SSD + my own samples as shells. 

That all said, if you're doing more stripped back styles, I'd probably favour AD2 over SSD for those. I'd recommend taking the processing off and running each drum into its own discrete track to process it more like real drums (which I also do for SSD), but it sounds more natural than SSD for that kind of thing.

EDIT: HERE is a good example, this was recorded with e-drums and sent over to me as MIDI, and was processed like I mentioned above. Obviously, being speedy metal, this is much more overhyped than more "natural" styles but you should be able to get any idea of how it works in a metal style mix. THIS one is purely AD2, meant to sound like "a small kit in a club" kind of thing.

 

Edited April 12, 2022 by Lord Tim

[Starship Krupa]

On 4/9/2022 at 3:19 PM, jackson white said:

similar here, except that "dry" = "well recorded acoustic" drums. i'm assuming you're processing samples for effect

What I mean by "dry" is that I want no added reverb. Clean, mostly close mic'd hits. I'm picky about reverb, I use Exponential Audio and Meldaproduction's top of the line stuff.

I'm usually trying for a sonic landscape where everything sounds like it's in the same space, and for me, that's harder to do if individual instruments are doing their own reverb thing. And with most (not all) VSTi's, the built-in reverb sounds to me like the onboard FX in a practice amp.

This goes for virtual drum machines, too. I always go through and turn off all of the 'verb effects. I think companies load their VSTi's with internal reverb so that the patches will sound attractive when auditioning them. I'm looking at you, A|A|S.

[DeeringAmps]

9 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

meant to sound like "a small kit in a club" kind of thing

You nailed that!

t

[John Bradley]

11 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

SSD5.x is excellent with a few caveats, especially for hard rock / metal styles.

The first gotcha is that out of the box, this is super processed and pretty much every modern metal production is likely using the kick and snare samples from that particular preset pack. They sound great, but a LOT of other people think so too, obviously (Deluxe Metal > Slate Metal 05 is freakin' *everywhere*). I'd be more inclined to mix and match kit pieces and load in your own custom samples to layer with their ones to get something unique.

Thank you sir, this was most helpful and informative. 

Bought!

[jackson white]

On 4/12/2022 at 10:11 AM, Lord Tim said:

Once you learn where the sweet spot is for velocity and program in some realistic accents (rather than doing "ehhh 127 everything") they sound ridiculously real.

? -the- key factor. @Lord Tim @John Bradley  any of those awesome toms in SSD5.x kits feature top AND bottom mics? no metal here but i've heard this technique used to great effect before, been looking for something itb.  bfd has -one- kit, been holding off on buying it...

 

On 4/11/2022 at 8:34 AM, DeeringAmps said:

the Seattle area...

 ? duly noted. thx again.

 

On 4/11/2022 at 5:14 AM, Jesse Screed said:

no matter which drum vst you go with, you will have to dig into it and make the sound fit for what you need.

for sure, but a lot like cooking, the freshest/best ingredients make the difference.  horses for courses, just a matter of finding what you need. 

...

On 4/11/2022 at 5:14 AM, Jesse Screed said:

My apologies if it sounded a as an affront .... I look forward to hearing some of your productions.

no worries/affront here at all, just sorta wondering why the "career advice" when all i was looking for was feedback on sounds. ?  not sure it means much, but since you asked (and since clips make more sense than talking about it), posting a couple from this week. as mentioned, the focus is songs/arrangements, just starting to dig into the downstream production side since the pandemic has made a mess of the way things were.

zopilote : a bit of an outlier, written to supplement a treatment for a "western gothic indie" which will never get made, but a bit heavier on the production side than usual. tried for a GY!BE vibe as i knew the director was a big fan. couple of caveats. no limiter on the 2bus, so not quite finished and still using the LV guide track, but ok with the arrangement and overall vibe. the vid is a 'bonus'  ? , just happened to be goofing around to see what all these fx do, like a 3rd grader using every crayon in the box....

caroline (reprise) : this is more typical. all about the singer/song and finding a way to make it unique. the original arrangement was the standard bass/drums/guitar chugging away and blowing out the chorus. went with just the LV/AG/violin to try out a more 'nuanced' arrangement. hack mix with one take placeholder solos for a vibe.

https://kevincondon.hearnow.com/bliss :  final production done in nashville, going for commercial this round and while it does sound great ("I Feel Love" and "High Life" came out the best imho) has a bit of 'sameness' to the overall sound that has never been my jam. all respect and deep appreciation for the craft and talent in play (better than what I can do) but found the pre-production roughs to be more interesting.  and kinda what I meant about expectations...

Edited April 25, 2022 by jackson white
yt embeds taking up too much space, changed to links

[Lord Tim]

5 hours ago, jackson white said:

? -the- key factor. @Lord Tim @John Bradley  any of those awesome toms in SSD5.x kits feature top AND bottom mics? no metal here but i've heard this technique used to great effect before, been looking for something itb.  bfd has -one- kit, been holding off on buying it...

Not for the toms, but as an example, for the snare, it has a built-in mixer that exposes top mic, bottom mic, a "dir mic" (which I would guess is either a sample or an alt close mic), as well as the mic being picked up by the overheads and room mic, plus you can layer in about 20 of your own samples too, so it's very flexible. The bottom mic is great for ghost notes and adding a nice brightness to the snare sound, but can sound fairly papery if you go too far with it.

The toms still have the overheads and room mics applied to them, like the snare, and you can control bleed level into the other mics, so the snare bottom could have sympathetic rattles whenever you hit a tom, which adds a nice live vibe. You *could* layer in your own samples for the toms if you really want to, but I reckon they sound great out of the box, so long as you're either sending them to their own outputs and processing them properly, or being careful with the built-in mixer effects.

Edited April 13, 2022 by Lord Tim

[jackson white]

@Lord Tim  ?, thx, sounds like there's more to SSD than i (or my peeps) are aware of.  BFD has always had great sounds and same/similar capability for bleed, ambient channels and often multiple mics for things like kick and snare > single mix channel. for toms though only found one kit anywhere with "Toms are top and bottom miked with Sennheiser MD409s and MD421s.". thinking there could be phase issues with layering own samples and assuming a dedicated set of samples might be optimal... just an idea atm though, not a problem. 

  

 

[Lord Tim]

1 hour ago, jackson white said:

there could be phase issues with layering own samples and assuming a dedicated set of samples might be optimal... just an idea atm though, not a problem. 

 

Ehh, I wouldn't worry too much about phase issues if the sample set has been prepped correctly,  but any decent instrument should give you the option to route each element to its own discrete track in the DAW and you can invert the phase and check it if so. For your own overlaid samples, yeah - that's a fair point but I think you need to be a little careful how loud you have your own stuff anyway - those really good drum instruments have heaps of multisampling per kit piece, usually some logic in there for detecting rolls and that kind of thing, so when you plop on your neato drum hit, it's not going to compete with all of that stuff going on; it should really just be there as an accentuation to the sound. If you're approaching it that way, you'll be blending it in quietly and kind of doing a virtual "3 foot rule" which really minimises the phase issues, if there happens to be any.

I have experimented a little bit with mic'ing top and bottom toms on live kits over the years and I have to say it really doesn't add too much to the sound for rock/metal, and in fact just causes more headaches with bleed and more mics to manage/check phase on.  Maybe more open styles like folk or jazz might get some use out of it? In those cases I'd be more inclined to throw a couple of nice LDCs up over the kit and keep the close mics minimal anyway.

[Tim Smith]

On 4/12/2022 at 8:55 AM, DeeringAmps said:

I was going to come back and quess Session Drummer. 

I have heard some amazing mixes with Session Drummer. Done right they are still on par with many other drum programs IMHO.

[Lord Tim]

Session Drummer can be great but man, I wanted to stab it after one mix I was sent. The band "helpfully" programmed everything up in Superior Drummer, but also it was to be compatible with the velocity mapping and note mapping on SD3. For some bizarre reason, they couldn't send me rendered audio stems of each kit piece, only the MIDI (also their programming sucked so I had to do a bit of work on it anyway, so I would have probably have had to throw away any stems). Remapping notes to my instruments wasn't a huge deal but just how each drum responded was RADICALLY different to what I use here, so I grabbed SD3 as a stop-gap and somehow wrangled it all in to make it work.

I do like a lot of the sounds on it, although I'm really not sold on the toms at all. Needless to say the band got a hefty bill for this ridiculous tangle I had to sort out. ?

[jackson white]

@Lord Tim  ya, chasing a tom sound i heard on a project which used top & bottom mics,  presence w/o being boomy or the "fwak" on the itb ambience channels. But of course you're right, the toms, tuning, drummer and room are much bigger factors along with mixing chops. I was assuming any kit that claimed this would have addressed any potential phase issues, just wondering about the difference...

and ya, going for a more 'open' sound, 'impact without over-hyped fx' (whatever -that- means), working on how to do as much as possible itb and craft kit presets starting with ambient channels, then adding kit pieces to beef it up. BFD has been great for this, SD3 could be? maybe...?, nothing else has made much of an impression (yet). 

(nice commercial chops on the links btw, thx for those) 

...

@Tim Smith  your clip (love different!) made me go back and pull up the one tune where i tried to use AD2.  the snare had been a problem, thought it might the drum,  only to find i had "baked in" the compressor from AD2 into the track when it got frozen...  that mos def did not help.  Got it sounding a bit better once I cleared that up but their cymbals still aren't working for me, maybe there's a better kit?  idk.