What do you most want from your drum software?

[TheTrueZoltan!]

2024 will be a year of reckoningses.

On the first day of reckoningses Orvillain finally decides to ditch valve amps and sells his JVM410HJS to a clever, talented and remarkably good-looking guy from Germany.

 

[pipelineaudio]

Why? BFD is a ROMpler. IMO there's still quite some room for a decent drum sampler.

Seems like adding triggering is part of any new sampler. That’s the part we were really going to work on. But perhaps we’ll just do the control and detect system were thinking of and have it control whatever samplers come out

 

[PBGas]

The Get Good Drums thing seems to be all the rage....may have to look into that one eventually. EZ Drummer3 does just fine for me at this point though.

 

[Mooselake]

...

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.

Basically this. Can't say how many times I've lost interest in little scratch projects/sketches because I burn myself out wrestling with drum vsts. Doesn't need to be super elegant, just something to help get things started in a reasonably inspirational way that's flexible enough I can decently mold it to fit what I want to do.

 

[Sascha Franck]

Basically this. Can't say how many times I've lost interest in little scratch projects/sketches because I burn myself out wrestling with drum vsts. Doesn't need to be super elegant, just something to help get things started in a reasonably inspirational way that's flexible enough I can decently mold it to fit what I want to do.

Seriously, this is precisely where Logic's Drummer absolutely excels.

 

[Mooselake]

Seriously, this is precisely where Logic's Drummer absolutely excels.

Interesting, thanks for the tip. If I ever decide to make the switch to a Mac I'll have to keep it in mind

 

[Enchilada Jones]

I want to send it a Spotify or Apple Music link and have it perfectly spit out the drum part (in MIDI of course) and match the drum sounds of the song, complete with tempo and time signature changes.

So the next looper in an HX update could have a ‘smart drummer’ component?!? Cool! You are the man DI !!

I’d like a machine learning AI drummer that can learn what I like and that I can shout out changes to in real time…like ‘extra 8 in the bridge!’…or, ‘Make it funky’ and ‘Stop it! You are killing me with the F ing cymbals!!!’

 

[laxu]

I’d like a machine learning AI drummer that can learn what I like and that I can shout out changes to in real time…like ‘extra 8 in the bridge!’…or, ‘Make it funky’ and ‘Stop it! You are killing me with the F ing cymbals!!!’

 

[FuzzyAce]

So the next looper in an HX update could have a ‘smart drummer’ component?!? Cool! You are the man DI !!

I’d like a machine learning AI drummer that can learn what I like and that I can shout out changes to in real time…like ‘extra 8 in the bridge!’…or, ‘Make it funky’ and ‘Stop it! You are killing me with the F ing cymbals!!!’

If AI ever becomes sentient and holds a grudge, they're going to kill our asses.

 

[Sascha Franck]

If AI ever becomes sentient and holds a grudge, they're going to kill our asses.

Skynet will be Kindergarten in comparison.

 

[developdevice]

Reliable and functional audio to midi conversion. SD3 is very close, but there are still limits.

 

[Sascha Franck]

I want to send it a Spotify or Apple Music link and have it perfectly spit out the drum part (in MIDI of course) and match the drum sounds of the song, complete with tempo and time signature changes.

We're actually *this* close already. All the latest stem/track/instrument separation tools are getting incredibly better at an even more incredible pace.
Things such as Melodyne are pretty good at audio-to-MIDI already, with separated tracks it's only a matter of very little time until they become almost perfect. And as far as sound recreation goes - well, Suno can come up with a perfect incarnation of Frank Sinatra already - how hard would it be to let it create the perfect kick? You might probably not be able to actually play those samples from your MIDI input device for a while to come, but you will likely be able to feed whatever "Grohl-A-Lizer" AI any lame GM drumtrack and it'll turn it into the most glorious sounding kit ever.
In fact, technology is all the way there already, just that so far the focus is on different things. But as said, it'll only be a matter of time. Of pretty short time. And I'm not convinced that's a good thing. In fact, I'm convinced it's the polar opposite.

 

[Orvillain]

Bumping this to field for more opinions.

 

[FrankyFire]

1. Linux Support or at least no weird DRM so it runs with yabridge/wine and doesn't bug me (I'm probably alone with this)
2. Good & Tight Sound
3. Decent Performance
4. Creating and tuning my own kits if I want to (I use ML Drums which allows for different Snare tunings)
5. A builtin Mix which allows me to get good sounding drums right out of the gate for quick Demos but the option to route dry channels to FX tracks. Presets help a lot!
6. Some MIDI Grooves would be nice

And the others were talking about using LLMs to have a virtual drummer...this is not a classic drum VST in my book, but a Software I would definitely be down for (if running on Linux). I would probably not use it for mixing, but playing along would be cool with something like that.

 

[HotRats]

I'd like a software that creates grooves & fills based on context/prompts (audio, midi, text). I don't want to say AI but somenthing like what AI can do with pictuers.

Give the software a starting point (importing midi, audio or playing the prompt on an input device), a basic groove idea, and the sofware generates a wide set of midi grooves and fills following that idea, like a real drummer would do.
Or give the software a whole draft midi track (or a section) and the software improves/modify it adding details, groove, dynamics, complexity, whatever you need and ask.

Basically I'd like a software that reacts "like a drummer" to your inputs.

 

[ian_dissonance]

I like programming drums. But “smart” humanization that looks at the whole drum part for accents would be cool.

 

[TheTrueZoltan!]

I would like to keep AI out of my music. Creating MIDI drum tracks is the only aspect where I would actually welcome AI. So yes, I would like to have a virtual AI drummer. Ideally, I would create a simple MIDI part myself with the song structure and a rough idea of how certain beats and fills should sound, and then the AI drummer would work it out on its own.