Most Realistic Drum Software

[Earlie Schwoyer]

Whatis your idea of Real Sounding drums a Jazz kit, Rock kit, Funk kit, Big Band, all those of different types of drum sounds in how sizes, tuning, amount if any muffling or open. Lots of drum libraries out there to choose from that will get you more than the defaults on a keyboard. Nothing is simple anymore.

Yamaha Motif family have some decent acoustic drum sounds.

Roland's Dynamic Drums SRX-01 expansion board (compatible with XV, Fantom boards) is also good if you don't mind the baked-in reverb in their samples.

Korg boards have historically leaned more towards processed, electronic, dance type of drum sounds.

One caveat: "most natural, realistic" might not mean "best sounding". The great sounding acoustic kits we hear in records are often, if not always, heavily mixed/processed. Learning a bit of mixing techniques (compression, eq, reverb, layering) will go a long way on improving our drum sounds.

Agreed with ProfD. MPC Key 61 will give you the most options for drum sounds. If you don't like the onboard drum sounds, there are seemingly endless choices of sampled drum kits you can download and install. You can use either the keys or the pads to play drums.

NO Drums from a keyboard are so realistic that they would actually fool you unless you are a newbie to music production. That said the Roland DS drums are on par with the other drum sounds in the same price range. And Roland has several expansion packs although those lean towards the dated EDM thing. Don't dismiss the poor Roland DS based on 3rd and 4th hand opinions.

One caveat: "most natural, realistic" might not mean "best sounding". The great sounding acoustic kits we hear in records are often, if not always, heavily mixed/processed. Learning a bit of mixing techniques (compression, eq, reverb, layering) will go a long way on improving our drum sounds.

Or you could do what I did when I started creating music digitally 8 years ago: spend hundreds of dollars on drum samples and VSTs, hoping they'd give me certain kinds of sounds that were the ones I wanted, with no clue about processing or anything else (for example, if I wanted an intense distorted drum kit sound, I'd buy a VST hoping it'd have those sounds instead of, you know, applying a distortion effect to some drum samples I've already had).

? I feel your pain brother (sister). It took me 20 years to realize that the big snares in records I loved (Robert Mutt Lange, Walter Afanasseff etc) had little to do with "natural" or "realistic" drums. It was also eye opening (or, mind-opening) the first time I saw Chris Lord Alge crank his snare's treble up by a whopping 12db.

The amount of spicing/hyping in Pop production/mixing often looks (sounds) crazy when we compare the raw tracks to the finished products. The mix engineer and/or producer very often contribute to a huge part of the sound we hear.

I remember in high school I was in a media production class and we were first asked to do a "scavenger hunt" of different shots to capture with the camera. One of them ended up being a sunset, and that evening had an absolutely beautiful one. I recorded it, happy that all of the elements lined up and I couldn't wait to see the footage. ...And it looked awful.

It was then I started to have the idea that "natural", when it's recorded into a technological medium, doesn't look very "natural" at all, and you have to do a lot of unnatural work on it to have that effect! I think the same applies with music.

Couldn't agree more. A friend was showing off a scenic picture yesterday and emphasized that it was "unprocessed". Little does he know that all smartphones these days apply heavy processing to the JPG files they create.

When someone says "I want natural realistic drums" they usually mean they want a nice drum sample library... at the beginning anyway. I was in a band with a friend who wanted "realistic drums" but couldn't afford the likes of Addictive Drums, Toontracks, etc. The friend did some research and eventually found a used Alesis drum machine - SR-16 I think it was. It was affordable, had decent drum samples for the money, didn't require a computer, etc. Then the friend learned that the band Suicide used a drum machine with distortion pedals, was inspired to try that approach, and was pretty happy with that.

All those three are at the very top! My number one is Drum Session, RDM and DPP. All three but right now Drum Session is rocking my songs big time! Easy to use, to understand, and to get things done in no time! Great update is coming as well, and LINK is on the cooking pot, so, it's just getting better and better. Top notch developer too! Did i mention it is going Universal soon?

@niallobrien said:

Hey all, just wondering what the most realistic drum app for iOS is? I want something that suits heavy rock but isn't already extremely pre-processed as i'd like to handle that myself in Auria Pro.

DrumPerfect Pro. Drum Session is great but the kits are processed. The developer, a great person by the way, is promising a dry kit, which I'm sure will come, but the focus of the app is providing realistic acoustic drums with minimum tinkering. DrumPerfect Pro don't have one of the friendliest interfaces, but it's the closest to the likes of Superior Drummer and BFD we have in iOS (while Drum Session is more like EZDrummer).

Also don't forget that Auria Pro has some wonderful drum kit downloads. I have also used DrumJam to record midi into Auria for playing back the Auria Kits (you may have to download the kits free from the Auria store.

If you dont like programming a piano roll and looking for a drum (midi) controller i should go for DrumJam. You can create drum patterns in minutes which takes you hours programming a piano roll. Its Thumbjam for drum apps and also supports great in-build drum sounds. Supports midi in and out and you can control other drum apps and record the midi into your daw and edit afterwards.

You also have live pads in DrumPerfect Pro as well, @Proto: both a full live set with acellerometer velocity, as well as a single/dual one with positional velocity for programming individual instruments. Of course it doesn't function as a MIDI control for third party apps like DrumJam, but you can easily program really complex drum parts in DrumPerfect Pro without resorting to grids (which I despise) or piano rolls (but I really wish DrumPerfect Pro had a piano roll like Drum Session).

DrumPerfect Pro new update will offer a palette of 16 instantly switchable rooms ( that you can chose from more than 100 presets ), with a dry/wet level send per instrument.

Add to this an already existing option for bleeding instruments ( snare, etc... ) with a 3 levels intensity selection.

I don't know if it is somewhat realistic to expect, at this time, the same level of control/performance from an app ( iPad environment ) versus a much bigger software ( often with massive sound libraries ) on advanced computer/laptop OS .

Besides let's keep in mind that processing power and RAM can vary considerably from one iPad model to another.

This is great news, @Gilbert. in a technical level, the current kits use disk streaming or are loaded in the RAM? because if you use Disk Streaming with the very fast SSDs of current iPads, at least in theory would be possible to load very large libraries... Or not? If you release a 1 GB or bigger library IAP, I'd surely buy it: the iPad is my main workhorse now.

Thanks @Gilbert - of course I understand the limitations of the platform. I'd be happy with a single snare & kick (but preferably) remotely close to some of my Kontakt options such as below, even if they were sold as individual IAPs:

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