Drum Strategy for Non-Drummer?

Hey friends, I'm not a drummer nor am I very good at sequencing them. I feel this is holding me back and I'd like to know what strategies you recommend to quickly/easily bump my productions up a notch. What drums VSTi do you think is best and why? (looking for realistic rock, acoustic, singer-songwriter type stuff). Where can I get huge libraries of prewritten drum loops that make it a bit easy to "mix and match" drum parts to parts of my song? Are there pure MIDI libraries available, or are these typically sold as addons to your favorite drums VSTi? Are these libraries robust enough that I'm likely to find loops/sequences to my taste, or are these all too generic to sound very good? Do you recommend any youtube channels or other tutorials to help me start learning how to sequence my drum parts from scratch? Would that even be advisable with limited free time? Thanks for any advice. I'm just finally realizing all my hand-drawn drum parts have SUCKEDDDDdddddddd

Hi, i have komplete 11 and it's amazing. I use a lot Drumlab for electronic music but the abbey road drums, all the series, are amazing and have a huge amount of midi files. And it sounds spectacular. My favourite is 80' s drummer. Native instruments make great drums, listen the demos!!. I always play drums live and quantise 50% with great results .

For composing drum parts, I really like Jamstix (). Their holiday sale runs through December 31. Jamstix has a steep learning curve, but once you get to know how to use it, it is very flexible in terms of being able to customize how the drummer "thinks" and grooves. There are many options, from having Jamstix compose everything, to giving it a basic kick/snare beat and letting it fill in all the other parts. And if you have a drum VSTi that you want to use instead of the internal Jamstix sounds, it is easy to send the MIDI from Jamstix to the other drum VSTi.

Superior Drummer is very good, and there are tons of midi expansion packs. Look up workflow videos on youtube and see if its "tap to find" workflow agrees with you. The thing about buying midi packs from one developer and using them for another developer's drum kit is that the velocity layers might be different, so things might not sound quite right out of the box. The timings and the drum hits will be right, but you might have to adjust the velocities a bit to get things to sound right for your VI drums.

I cannot recommend this site enough - it's a pure gem and, no, I'm not associated or anything. I'd steer you towards the User Soups section especially, since there you will find many loops made for subscribers songs in all styles and tempos. I recently downloaded a whole bunch of these and just dragged them into projects just waiting to be started. This guy is really a treasure and worthy of your virtual footfall.

Not sure if it's been mentioned yet, but Drums On Demand has audio loops. I've used them and they are good for getting something quickly together. As you get more sophisticated, you can graduate to midi drum patterns and loops but the good thing about audio loops is that the sound is sometimes "mix ready".

I'll 2nd the Jamstix recommendation !! It is a complex piece of software, a bit like reaper, very deep if you want to go there but also very simple for basic operation. The ability to choose a drumming style, a drummer, input the song arrangement and have a complete track within minutes is the key for me. And the fact that it is infinitely editable from there, both within jamstix or from the midi editor ( after export ) makes it hard to beat imho. Cheers

I've been very happy with Slate Drums 5.5 paid version, and the free version is great (and good enough for most genres). The paid version you get expanded tones of each instrument and some extra loops. Nice mix ready sound without being too over processed and lot's of velocity room and response. Cheap, good value, compared to others.

I've been very happy with Toontrack drum products from EZ Drummer to Superior Drummer 3.

I see great recommendations here. If you have some spare time take a look at Melda's MDrummer (with new library).