What is the best program out there for creating real sounding drum tracks WITHOUT USING LOOPS For example, right now I know how to use fruity looops and creating drum patterns but they ofcourse sound fake. Is there some program out there that is made so I can create drum patterns and have them sound like REAL drums ?? I ask because I used to record my own drum tracks using a drum set but now where I live I cannot play them and I want to still make music with real sounding drum tracks somehow

What I did when I couldnt play my set anymore was went to the local university - grabbed a studio for a day, and recorded each drum noise. Now (if i can find my cd i recorded them onto) I can just mix 'n match as if I was still playing.

I imagine though that would still soud robotic

I figure worse case I can just use loops. .but then you lose the sublety (i can't spell) of a real drummer

I play rock/punk so a drum kit that sounds like a TR808 does not work for me

I might buy vdrums again.. I had them.. sold them to buy a new REAL kit..

Yea, I completely agree. You do lose alot of feeling my way.

Good Luck with whatever you decide to do.

I use FXpansion's BFD. Absolutely fantastic. It comes with 6 different kits, and you can pick and mix elements from each kit (that snare with that cymbal, etc). Each drum and cymbal is individually mic'd, with several velocity layers. Also, you can change tuning of every drum, not to mention things like how much in/out mic on the kick, or how much top/bottom mic on the snare. Also (yes, also) it was recorded using direct, overhead, room and pzm mics, all of which (apart from direct) you can alter the distance and stereo width of the mics, as well as the relative volume of each pair of mics.

Downsides are: space (comes on 2 dvds) and cost, though for what it is it's a snip at GBP £180 (about US $360). It also eats up resources when playing, though you can always make your drum track into an audio file when you've got it souding tasty.

Hope that helps!

Dont forget that timing really helps a lot with "humanizing" an instrument. While drummers are the time keepers, they do not play within milliseconds of accuracy(unless they are the marching illini drumline, bazing)
So, using whatever tool you have you can put a little lassitude in the timing of your samples to get them to sound more "human".

I play my drums live using my Motif ES8 and sometimes I record a drum track over a few differnt takes to build it up into a real sounding drummer.

Takes A LOT of pratice to get it sounding pretty good. but in time.. you can do it.

on another note, check out http://www.ilio.com/sonicreality/idrum/index.html#
This is a drum sample CD I might pick up to add to my samples collection.

I'm all about playing my own music and not hitting a key and having drums play for me. I'm hoping this CD will have a break down of each drum sound so I can play them live.

I'm guessing it has both broke down drums as with pre recorded rifts.

Anywho check it out.

P.S the latest demo song I tossed together has drums played REAL TIME on ONE take/track. "left hand" kick and back up snare, "right hand" hihats, main snare, crashes, and toms.

Chinese like Mp3 demo It's not a good mp3 to show off what you can do using live "played" drums on a keyboard but it's the newest thing I did.

That sounds like what I am looking for. You have any mp3s you made with it? I would be interested in hearing


ill check out the web site now

Quote: Original post by BazTheHat
I use FXpansion's BFD. Absolutely fantastic. It comes with 6 different kits, and you can pick and mix elements from each kit (that snare with that cymbal, etc). Each drum and cymbal is individually mic'd, with several velocity layers. Also, you can change tuning of every drum, not to mention things like how much in/out mic on the kick, or how much top/bottom mic on the snare. Also (yes, also) it was recorded using direct, overhead, room and pzm mics, all of which (apart from direct) you can alter the distance and stereo width of the mics, as well as the relative volume of each pair of mics.

Downsides are: space (comes on 2 dvds) and cost, though for what it is it's a snip at GBP £180 (about US $360). It also eats up resources when playing, though you can always make your drum track into an audio file when you've got it souding tasty.

Hope that helps!

@angrytofu - there's a couple. The one that bests shows off bfd, is just a little sketch I was playing with, nothing amazing. The drums kick in at the 30 second mark. It's using the built in loops and auto fills.

I've also made a song using them, by playing the kick and snare on one track, and hi-hat/cymbals on another, as my keyboard drumming sucks! Both are linked below:

Fun Piece

Walking Down The Street

Hey... Here's some tricks to make any drumloop sound a little tighter in ANY SOFTWARE. It's nothing too advanced and they aren't rules "set in stone", but it's one of the many aproaches that work in alot of situations.

1)Create a good stereo image: You can get somewhat of a "live" feel by using pan controls in your software. Here's a typical stereo image for a drumset:

Kick Drum: Kick drums is positioned in the center of the drumkit, so live your pan control in the center. Also keeping bass in the center makes it more powerful in the mix

Hi-hats: usually on the right, if you're facing them, so pan hi-hats all the way to the right

Snare: is in the center, usually somewhat to the right. You might pan it a little to the right or left, but keep it close to the center.

Cymbals: Pan hard left to counter the hi-hats

Toms: Keep them around the center. Maybe put low tom almoust all the way left, mid tom in the center and high tom a little to the right.

Doing this will make your drumloop sound as it was played on a drumkit (sort of it also depends on many other things, like the quality of your samples, for instance:)


Good EQ'ing and compression helps and can dramatically increasethe quality of yor mix.


As far as the programs go i like fruity loops (version 4 is my favorite). By the way, you can download a free version of FL and it comes with some OK hip-hop and live drum kits. You can import those sounds to any othere program, because they are stored in the program folder as wave files.

I hope this might help someone. Again this is basic stuff, so many of you will know it already, but for those who don't it will make a difference. If someone is interested, i can post more stuff, since I'm in school for audio engineering and taking alot of mixing classes right now, so I'm more thean happy to share whatever they teach me.