What do you most want from your drum software?

My only real gripe is the unrealistic EQ’s they put on presets, I have to carve out almost all the bass in SD3 presets and usually end up just EQ’ing a kit myself. They’re all very hyped on the lows and highs and they’ll destroy a mix if you’re not cognizant of that.

And not enough companies do a snare with the snares off.

More cymbal options; stacks, chinas, splashes, but mostly stacks and various sizes of them.
 
good choice of tuning, good choice of room mics with different decay lengths, good cymbals.

Preferably these would be chosen and mic’d up to sit in some backing tracks to make sure there’s some kind of context/purpose/direction to the drums rather than a pile of unrelated drums and unconnected options.

Cymbal spot mics as well as spaced pair OH.

Mono room mics as well as stereo ones. Trash mics are great to have too

Quite nice to have things like brushes/mallets/snare wires off, as well as different snare dampings.

Would love to see a MIDI editor with a paintbrush tool that’ll put in subdivisions at clever velocities for hats and cymbals and things. Maybe some kind of underlying groove template where you can assign the most important beats in the bar and it can cleverly assign more velocity emphasis to those beats.

Tap to search for MIDI works great for me, as does having a huge pool of MIDI to pick from to find what you need. Maybe to advance that further, some kind of smart tool that will fix MIDI that is being used at a way faster or slower tempo than what it was recorded at. Maybe a smart fill search that will automatically find appropriate fills for the general beats and grooves you’re working with in a track
 
Definitely would like to see more development of a “band member” type feature. Logic Drummer is ok - but doesn’t really cater to metal or modern hard rock type styles and is also stuck in Logic. EZdrummer has some features but I still have a hard time assembling a cohesive starter track - I still have to dig for fills and compatible parts and I usually just end up using one or two grooves on repeat for 3 minutes.

I basically want to select a tempo, a type of feel/genre, and a general song structure to generate a drum track with natural fills and some dynamics.
 
- I want FXpansion's DR-008 back. Best thing f*ckin' EVER!
- I want FXpansion's Geist-alike features to become a part of DR-008, not the other way around (which never worked out well anyway, pretty happy I didn't bet my money on it...)
- I want NI's Battery to be a decent piece of software rather than that POS that they turned it into with version 4 (which, to my utter horror, I will be forced to use once I get a new computer).
- I would love to see a pattern player like Logic's Drummer, but I would want it so I could a) import my own (or third party) patterns easily and b) kind of "train it". Unfortunately, I think the elegance of Logic's Drummer can only be had from something deeply integrated in your DAW.
- I want everything Stylus RMX does integrated, too.

In general, in addition to the usual things such as nice drum kits (which I'm sort of less interested in personally) and patterns (see above) I would love to see a drum machine allowing me to roll my own stuff easily. For instance, I want to slice a loop, spread the slices over the keyboard and extract the resulting MIDI data (by now Logic does that quite well), with the Geist portion (possibly enhanced by AI stuff) to kick in and automatically map, say, all kick slices to just one key.
As far as patterns go, a nicely integrated pattern sequencer (/w MIDI drag'n'drop into either direction) would be welcomed.
And there should be internal synthesis. That's what sat the DR-008 apart - and to this day, there's nothing comparable. Yes, Logic's Drum Machine Designer has caught up a bit, but it's still pretty far away.

That was just top of my head. Fwiw, I wrote all that down in a rather long post @ KVR over a decade ago, people seemed to like most ideas - and yet, anything like that still doesn't exist (Geist possibly being the closest, but it's not suitable for any realistic drums).
 
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Great call on these. I want to build a basic drum beat using kick and snare and then have the drummer fill the rest. needs humanization so it’s not fully quantized and static dynamics.
 
dbagchee said:
Definitely would like to see more development of a “band member” type feature. Logic Drummer is ok - but doesn’t really cater to metal or modern hard rock type styles and is also stuck in Logic. EZdrummer has some features but I still have a hard time assembling a cohesive starter track - I still have to dig for fills and compatible parts and I usually just end up using one or two grooves on repeat for 3 minutes.

I basically want to select a tempo, a type of feel/genre, and a general song structure to generate a drum track with natural fills and some dynamics.
Click to expand...
Totally agree. I suck at drum programming and don't really have the patience for it either. Logic's Drummer is a neat shortcut, even if the results are often not intuitive and require a fair bit of trial and error. But it's at least something other than "carefully place blocks on a piano roll or drum editor" which usually ends up with me making 6 handed drummers since I don't actually know how to play drums.

Most drum software focuses on things like tons of fine tuning options and the differences between drumkits and having a million samples - all good if you are using edrums for example. But this misses out on those who just want some drum tracks to play with and don't want to spend that much time on getting a decent groove going.

I have no idea wtf is a difference between Zildjian and Paiste cymbals etc, all I want is a virtual caveman banging them so the real caveman - me - doesn't have to learn to play drums.
 
I'd like Addictive Drums to perhaps hire a developer to come up with AD3 with some new features instead of discounting their wares to the point that it no longer matters anymore. They haven't had a new version since 2014.
 
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