What's everyone using for drums?

[Sascha Franck]

I actually like the sound of some of Logic's drum kits a whole lot. What I recommend doing:
- Load a drummer coming closest to what you want/need. Don't use those not using "Drum Kit Designer" as an instrument (reason: the others are using partially uncommon note assignments whereas Drum Kit Designer basically sticks with GM, which is a good thing).
- Let the thing play some patterns and while you're at it, delete all inserts and sends.
- Klick left to the instrument insert showing "Drum Kit", so the library opens with the presets just for DKD (without any insert/send nonsense).

- Check out all the drumsets on the left (in the now opened library).
- All sets allow you to more or less extensively edit them. Standard kits look like this (with the snare selected):

... Producer Kits offer vastly more replacement parts and mix settings straight in the plugin UI:

With these alone you can massively finetune your kits already and IMO they can offer decent results for anything but the truly heavy realm (ok, jazz drumming usually doesn't work, either, but that's something pretty much nobody has covered).

Next step would be to just load DKD as a multi-out instrument, which really couldn't get any easier, you just go to the instrument slot and reload it, all previously changed settings will stay intact.
Then, in your mix window, you just keep clicking the "+" symbol and the individual outs will magically show up.

IMO with all these you can get *very* far.
Yeah, other, dedicated companies possibly have better sounding kit presets straight out of the box, but I actually like the rather blunt and straight ahead sounding DKD sets.

 

[fretworn]

I actually like the sound of some of Logic's drum kits a whole lot. What I recommend doing:
- Load a drummer coming closest to what you want/need. Don't use those not using "Drum Kit Designer" as an instrument (reason: the others are using partially uncommon note assignments wherea's Drum Kit Designer basically sticks with GM, which is a good thing).
- Let the thing play some patterns and while you're at it, delete all inserts and sends.
- Klick left to the instrument insert showing "Drum Kit", so the library opens with the presets just for DKD (without any insert/send nonsense). View attachment 11702
- Check out all the drumsets on the left (in the now opened library).
- All sets allow you to more or less extensively edit them. Standard kits look like this (with the snare selected):
View attachment 11703
... Producer Kits offer vastly more replacement parts and mix settings straight in the plugin UI:
View attachment 11704

With these alone you can massively finetune your kits already and IMO they can offer decent results for anything but the truly heavy realm (ok, jazz drumming usually doesn't work, either, but that's something pretty much nobody has covered).

Next step would be to just load DKD as a multi-out instrument, which really couldn't get any easier, you just go to the instrument slot and reload it, all previously changed settings will stay intact.
Then, in you mix window, you just keep clicking the "+" symbol and the individual outs will magicall show up.
View attachment 11706

IMO with all these you can get *very* far.
Yeah, other, dedicated companies possibly have better sounding kit presets straight out of the box, but I actually like the rather blunt and straight ahead sounding DKD sets.

B’zactly

 

[Sascha Franck]

Another tip for Logic's Drummer:
In english it should say something like "Keep drumset when changing drummers". When trying out kits, this is what you want, so you can have multiple dudes and dudettes playing different things through the same kit that you're just about to carefully curate.

You could of course also keep the settings above, but that'd result in the new drummer playing the same pattern, which is kinda pointless.

In the end, with the drummer folks selection opened on the upper left, the library on the lower left, the plugin window on the upper right and the drum pattern editor on the lower right, your drum sculpting screenset (which you can as well save to a new screenset...) could look kinda like this:

IMO that's a lot more comfortable than anything you could do with most others. Have the local studio rental service deliver new kits in milliseconds and tweak them to your hearts content. Then hire and fire players at will, get your best dicator impersonation out and tell them to shuffle or not to, tell them to not use the toms, tell them to play little or tons of fills, etc. In case they don't deliver, the new drummers are already cueing in the upper left. All on one single screen and while your backing is still running.

 

[TheTrueZoltan!]

I find it quite disappointing that Logic‘s dev team didn‘t really improve the Drummer feature any further after its initial release. More styles, more kits etc. would have been great but unfortunately nothing ever happened.

 

[Alex Kenivel]

I absolutely LOVE the process of setting up drums and microphones, measuring distances, getting phase correct, etc. but time for that is something I never have anymore - neither is having an actual set of drums ready to play. An actual snare is a joy to have over a sampled snare.

My son's Yamaha DTX400k is always available for the family punk jams but for recording I use Addictive Drums 2 (I used the older version on Win before switching to Mac and needed to rebuy). I have their heavier packs but their punk grooves kinda suck so I've written my own library of a few grooves and fills that I modify as needed or I use my little Akai POSmini and finger-drum it in (got pretty good at that through high school on the Casio in band class).

 

[MirrorProfiles]

programmed drums are ideal for working stuff out, picking sounds/tunings etc. Then when you book studio time, you know EXACTLY what you're aiming for, and anything that comes up is just cool spur of the moment creative stuff rather than wondering "is this right?"

 

[Sascha Franck]

I find it quite disappointing that Logic‘s dev team didn‘t really improve the Drummer feature any further after its initial release. More styles, more kits etc. would have been great but unfortunately nothing ever happened.

Gotta disagree, at least partially, as they vastly improved several things.

 

[Orvillain]

Logic Drummer is basically a clever UI for a midi browser. It aint all that really. I think Jamstix is a faaaaaaar better concept, and I think the Toontrack Bandmate feature is a better direction to go in.

IMHO.

 

[bgstudio]

I have been happy with the tone packs from GGD. Kontakt is fine and the player is free which is all you need for GGD.

 

[Sascha Franck]

Logic Drummer is basically a clever UI for a midi browser.

Yes and no. Yes because that's obviously what it is, no because it's really extremely clever - so much it doesn't exactly count as a MIDI browser anymore.
- "Interaction" of kick and snare with a selected track.
- Fill amount percentage, ghost amount percentage, open hat percentage (yeah, yeah, I know, possibly trivial, but still...).
- Laid back or pushing options (see above).
- Options to activate and deactivate kit parts.

But, most important (defenitely while doing layouts): no need to actually fool around with MIDI data and drag things around, Drummer parts are a dedicated "class" and seamlessly integrated into Logics part business, so checking out variations is a LOT easier than with any other competitor.

 

[Orvillain]

Yes and no. Yes because that's obviously what it is, no because it's really extremely clever - so much it doesn't exactly count as a MIDI browser anymore.
- "Interaction" of kick and snare with a selected track.
- Fill amount percentage, ghost amount percentage, open hat percentage (yeah, yeah, I know, possibly trivial, but still...).
- Laid back or pushing options (see above).
- Options to activate and deactivate kit parts.

But, most important (defenitely while doing layouts): no need to actually fool around with MIDI data and drag things around, Drummer parts are a dedicated "class" and seamlessly integrated into Logics part business, so checking out variations is a LOT easier than with any other competitor.

I'm fairly sure that if you dig around in the resources for Logic Drummer, you can see how the hierarchy works, and you can see the midi files on disk.

 

[Sascha Franck]

I'm fairly sure that if you dig around in the resources for Logic Drummer, you can see how the hierarchy works, and you can see the midi files on disk.

Of course. It's as obvious as it gets. And still, there's a lot more added to it due to the UI and the way it selects those very MIDI files - which, in the end, results in something very different from plain MIDI files. Apart from that, must be pretty bizarre numbers of MIDI files, the guys cutting them after they were recorded via triggers (which apparently is what they did) certainly had quite some sorting to do.

 

[Will Chen]

EZ Drummer 3 for me. I don't use the built in MIDI loops, just really like the sound of the kits.