Realistic Drums VSTi

[CoolDudeClem]

Just wondering if there's any good VSTi's out there that can do good realitic sounding drums.  I don't want one that just sounds like samples being played back by a sequencer, or any crappy 909 or 808 synth, I need somthing that sounds like a real drummer playing real drums.  Free if possible.

[LPChip]

Free is not going to happen, and on top of that, it would be strange too.

If you're after a samplebased drum sound, then use samples.

If you really need a VSTi, then it'll cost you money. Native Instruments Battery would be your choise then.

But for free, just use samples. Its even better to use them in modplug than using VSTi's because you have more control over them. And ofcource, you can use VSTi's and samples together in a song.

[älskling]

KitCore, DrumCore, EZDrummer, DFH, BFD, Battery and Groove Agent all are good supposedly, but it's very difficult not to make sequenced drums sound like sequenced drums. Not sure how well any of them play with MPT.

[bvanoudtshoorn]

Personally, I'd go with NI Battery. But that's 'cos I'm a bit of an NI fanboy... One of the great things about Battery (and Kontakt) is that you can put scripts in - particularly, "humanising" scripts. A humanising script basically changes the offset, pitch, velocity, and volume of each note coming in randomly by a small amount, which gives a much more "organic" feel to the track. Used in conjunction with manual adjustments (SDx is your friend!), you can get some quite fluid percussion lines going.

[Harbinger]

You too can have realistic drums even with boring old overused samples, thanks to MPT and your favorite VST!!

Simply use your old realistic drum samples (even the GM drums work great!) and put them into an instrument slot. Turn on the Resonance and Cutoff options, then adjust the Random settings for volume (just a little), cutoff (a little more), and resonance (a little less). For hihats and cymbals select the 'force hi pass option' and for kick drums 'force lo pass'.
Then apply a great VST (like distort for snare or rezfilter for hihats) to modernize the sound. Now you're cookin'!!!

Seriously, my drummer, when she's not doing acoustic drums for our tracks, she uses MPT to program drum tracks using the same techniques to give the drums a human feel. (Hopefully one day we'll have an option to Randomize Delay for just that purpose.) Usually what she does in this process (if she's not going to record the whole track) is to lay down basic 4/4 tracks, then a bunch of riffs, then she uses MPT as basically a mixer to cut and splice basics with riffs along the melody or bass line i've set up. But she doesn't always use real samples. She can take any synthesized drum sound and make it sound 'played' using the technique above...

[MurdersGalore]

EZDrummer works in MPT. You cant use the submmix option though. With the Humanize feature turned on it ensures that the same sample for each hit will not be used twice in a row which can help the drumtrack sound more realistic. If you take the extra time to add slight offsets to the beats (especially in fast sections) and add volume variations it can sound amazingly human. EZDrummer works with volume commands the same way Battery does as it has different variations assigned to different volumes, though it is all built into the plugin and you cant change the samples in the kit. It has its pros and cons but I have used it with some hacking to good effect.

[XAVT]

BFD has a nifty feature that allows you to control the drunkenness and skill of the supposed drummer. This makes the sequence sound much more human. The sound is amazing too.