Is EZ Drummer Good Enough?

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regardner
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Re: Is EZ Drummer Good Enough?

Post by regardner » Fri Sep 11, 2020 12:24 pm

I do a fair amount of programming of my own drum parts, but real drummers--good ones--play little accents or ghost notes that I would never think of, and often those are the very things that bring a part to life.

For me, taking drum performance MIDI and adapting it to my song is the closest I can get to a real drummer.

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Re: Is EZ Drummer Good Enough?

Post by RickElliott » Fri Mar 11, 2022 12:57 pm

Ted wrote:
Thu Sep 10, 2020 4:30 pm
Good thread and I hope you guys don't mind me piggybacking on it a little with a bit of a tangential issue... Mostly I use Apple's Drummer function in Logic X for all of my rock drumming needs. It's the quickest, most intuitive tool I have for cranking out quick backing drum tracks so I can focus on getting ideas down fast. And to be honest, the tones of the drumsets sound pretty decent to me. I was feeling a bit confined, but only recently learned that one can convert Drummer regions to MIDI regions in Piano Roll and make the drum track do whatever you want-- if you put the time into it.

This year I got a bunch of drum instruments in Komplete 12. I messed around with some of the Abbey Road drums but haven't spent a lot of time with them yet. I was also looking at other third party drum sample solutions like the ones mentioned in this thread. But my question is this: Is there anything out there that functions as easily and as quickly as Logic X Drummer? Are there any other products out there that do the same thing, but better?

I am not a drummer (well not a very good one) and I like to have something that takes care of fills and plays things that a real drummer would play. If I had to sit and program drum fills, I would just be too lazy.

I'm getting to the point where I love what Drummer does, but Apple is too slow in adding new "drummers" and the drummers they have are starting to get a bit stale. More variations of rock drummers would be great but they don't seem to be going in that direction. Is there something else out there that I should look into?

Thanks,

Ted
Another tangent: I use Logic Pro X Drummer for all of my Rock cues. But, you're right. Did you find another good program that's better?

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Re: Is EZ Drummer Good Enough?

Post by Ted » Fri Mar 11, 2022 6:41 pm

RickElliott wrote:
Fri Mar 11, 2022 12:57 pm

Another tangent: I use Logic Pro X Drummer for all of my Rock cues. But, you're right. Did you find another good program that's better?
Hey Rick, I haven't upgraded to Logic's "Catalina" update yet, because there were a lot of issues when it first came out. Now I guess those are solved but I'm still in an earlier version of Logic-- my 2013 Mac can still do a Catalina update, but I'm putting it off because I have some non-music programs that are only in 32-bit and I guess my content will be lost if I go to Catalina, based on how I understand it. So maybe it's possible that the newer Logic versions have more drummers or expansions to the Logic Drummer function? Anybody know? Maybe in the next year I'll think about a new Mac.

I've been playing around with the 1.5 upgrade to IK Multimedia's MODO Drums and the new kits sound great, but so far I haven't attempted to use the MIDI regions from Logic Drummer tracks to trigger the MODO drum sounds-- but this is probably something I'll be doing when I get back to working on music more. I've been taking some time off from working on listings to practice guitar and work on some other non-musical hobbies/interests; I've seen some cool listings pop up lately though, so I think I'll be giving more time to Taxi stuff in the near future. :)

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Re: Is EZ Drummer Good Enough?

Post by RickElliott » Sat Mar 12, 2022 7:15 am

Thanks for answering!
I'm at Big Sur now. There are, indeed, more drummers in Drummer. I've used a lot of VST and Audio Unit drumming programs throughout the years. Drummer is the most versatile I've used. It sounds real to me, but I still ALWAYS get the dreaded "but the drums" critiques on my returns. I actually got: "GREAT guitar and right on the money with the style and mood, but... the drums. You need to invest in better drum samples, don't sound human enough, etc." It's actually driving me crazy because I spend many hours making sure they're right. Frustrating when I get kudos for everything else from the screener. Next submission, I'm going to try as you've said. I'm going to program the drums using Drummer. Then, I'll convert to midi and use another program for the drum samples. If I get another "but... the drums" I'm going to scream. I have watched many YouTube vids on how to make them sound real. I've also paid for tutorials and employ everything I've learned, and still lol

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Re: Is EZ Drummer Good Enough?

Post by Paulie » Thu Mar 17, 2022 6:20 am

EZ Drummer is absolutely fine, it comes down to properly mixing them. I've been using Superior Drummer and it is, um... superior to EZ Drummer. :) MIDI packs are fantastic as well, assuming you find packs in the genres you are producing. You also need to adjust your drum kit selection to match the genre. Tune the snares as needed, adjust the kick, make sure overall balance is correct. Try to route drums to different buses... I have a separate bus for kick, snare, hi hat, cymbals and toms. This really lets you tweak the sound.

Wanted to check out the track on Soundcloud but it looks like you've removed it.
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Re: Is EZ Drummer Good Enough?

Post by Ted » Sat Mar 19, 2022 8:39 am

RickElliott wrote:
Sat Mar 12, 2022 7:15 am
Thanks for answering!
I'm at Big Sur now. There are, indeed, more drummers in Drummer. I've used a lot of VST and Audio Unit drumming programs throughout the years. Drummer is the most versatile I've used. It sounds real to me, but I still ALWAYS get the dreaded "but the drums" critiques on my returns. I actually got: "GREAT guitar and right on the money with the style and mood, but... the drums. You need to invest in better drum samples, don't sound human enough, etc." It's actually driving me crazy because I spend many hours making sure they're right. Frustrating when I get kudos for everything else from the screener. Next submission, I'm going to try as you've said. I'm going to program the drums using Drummer. Then, I'll convert to midi and use another program for the drum samples. If I get another "but... the drums" I'm going to scream. I have watched many YouTube vids on how to make them sound real. I've also paid for tutorials and employ everything I've learned, and still lol
"But the drums".... yep, Rick, same here and it also drives me nuts. I've listened to so many forwarded tracks where it's super obvious to me that the drum parts were done by someone finger-blasting a keyboard and quantizing the results. If not the main parts, then the fills always give it away. I don't think anything else compares to the realism of Logic Drummer when it comes to laying down drum parts that sound like they were played by a real drummer. I've gone deeper and played around with the Producer Kits and that seems to yield better results to my ears. I think MODO drum might get me even closer once I have fully integrated it into my process. I think most of my drum critiques boil down to tone and EQ/mix rather than the musicality of the drum parts-- so keeping the parts but replacing the tones might be the best way to go.

Great to hear that Logic has expanded with more drummers. That is going to push me along to upgrade.

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