Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Your opinion of best jazz drum track software

11-19-19

I would like to ask all their opinion of what they think the best drum track softwares are. Please take the following into consideration.

• Jazz drums
• Specifically, jazz brushes
• Availability of tutorials to be able to learn how to use the software from square one.

I work within ProTools 2019 on a Windows 10 PC.

Thanks for any help!
Dan

I use Superior Drummer 3 https://www.toontrack.com/product/superior-drummer-3/ haven't found a need for anything else. Its really good.

I use a combination of IK Multimedia MODO Drums and Sampleson Brushify.

I'll use brishify until Modo Drum will support brushes. I use Modo Drum for the low installation footprint as it doesn't use as much diskspace. Tutorials of both are available on YouTube, especially of Modo Drum.

In the past, I used Native Instruments Abbey Road Vintage Drummer and 60s Drummer as well.

I use SD3 too. I also use the 2 roots expansion sounds for jazz; the sticks expansion and the mallets and brushes expansion, each has some midi groove sets included but I didn't find these grooves particularly useful but there's a couple of other midi groove packs you can get that I find more useful, maybe I'm doing different jazz to most others as I still feel I often struggle to find the groove I want. But I think there's a new groove set for bigband which might be useful too. I wish I was a drummer and could just play my own backing tracks.

The drum samples I think are excellent with enough velocity samples I can't notice the change and can get what to me as a non drummer seems like the full expressive (velocity) range when playing from drum pads. I love the brushes set, but not sure how to get swirls working right, but if I remember right some of the grooves in the brushes set manage to get the swirls okay. The song creator I think works really well.

If you want Latin there is a latin percussion expansion set from their EZD line which is compatible with SD. The EZD line is much smaller sample sizes so not quite as good as SD, but still very good.

I wish they'd do a proper SD latin expansion perhaps combining both kit and latin percussion instruments and a much more comprehensive latin groove set so you can get all styles; bossa, samba, cha cha cha, rumba, samba, tango etc for either kit, latin percussion or both.

The bit I don't quite get is that the grooves aren't necessarily specific to a drum kit/expansion set, I'm not a drummer but imagine there's lots of subtle things you can do which the range of samples allows you to do, but if the groove is played and recorded on one drum kit I don't understand how it transfers well to a different kit, e.g. a bossa groove may sound better on the original set but not sound right on one of the jazz sets, a reggae groove often seems to sound useless on anything other than the reggae drum set (I have the EZD reggae expansion).

However, I imagine my concerns probably also apply to any other option and I'm not aware of a better option for me yet.

Addictive Drums 2 also has great drums available for jazz and brushes. Also there are excellent jazz grooves available quite affordably from Groove Monkee which would offer more midi grooves for any drum vst program. Band in a Box also offers excellent jazz drums available through their RealDrums and RealTracks although these output a stereo wave file of the mixed drum sound rather than separate tracks for each of the the drum instruments. Yes Superior Drummer 3 is also great but for jazz brushes I think I prefer Addictive Drums 2. You would have to purchase the jazz drums/brushes add on. Band in a Box is the quickest method of producing great sounding jazz drums but again you would have to purchase the software version which includes all the relevant RealDrums.