Several people have asked about multi-channel Real Drums. I am working with a VST that may interest some of you until the real thing comes along.

All of the following is my opinion based on my live performance and recording experience.

When we hear a human drummer, we don't just hear the stick or beater hit each drum. We hear a combination of that with the room. I think this is true of any other instrument. For example, you don't really know what a guitar sounds like at the speaker. You know what it sounds like at 8 to 10 feet.

The other thing about a drum kit is that we hear the drums together. Just as we hear parts of an orchestra together.

I have used midi drums a lot in the past and I liked them. But I don't think they sound realistic, and one of the reasons is each drum is close up instead of in combination with each other and the room.

The alternative is to use a drummer, Real Drums or a VST. Drums are a pain to record. Real Drums aren't multi-channel yet although this forum has had some great tips on getting individual sounds at the end of the RD waveform and slicing/dicing.

So I have been using a couple of VST's for drums. One of them is Westwood Drums. It comes with its own mixer which breaks the drums into Kick, Snare, Cymbals, Toms, Overhead and Room. The Room sound has enough volume to use by itself. You can add in the Overhead and the Kick and Snare to your taste. Same with the Cymbals and Toms.

My guess is there are a lot of drum VST's that take this approach. Westwood is nice because it is only $35. The drums sound good for many styles of music (hip-hop or metal not included).

As most of you have figured out by my questions, I have limited experience with computer recording. I'm not trying to be an expert here. I just thought this might help some folks.

2b

My secret or not so secret drum effect is the CLA Drum VST from waves:

https://www.waves.com/plugins/cla-drums

It can add a lot of realism to individual drums as well as complete kits.

Yep. My fav for most of the RD's we use is "Room - Beef" out of many, many presets. And if you are doubling the snare, etc., there are many great presets for the individual components. Also it allows you quickly adjust the, mercifully, very few parameters. I'm sure there are a lot of good competitors but the whole CLA series is IMHO outstanding.

Bud

There was a forum thread here but I can't find it now on creating a pop song using only MIDI. I found one really useful tip in the video where they use convolution reverb with IR settings to give actual room sounding reverb on the drums and some other instruments. I've played around with it a little and it seems to really help.

Also when it comes to MIDI based instruments what you get really depends on the samples or sound packs used. You can find some really good quality sounding instruments now online. Some may cost a bit of money but I guess you get what you pay for.

I have the Westwood drums VST as well but I haven't used it yet.

Most of the time I use realdrums and I mostly use CLA Drums to process them.

Sometimes I need something that realdrums can't provide, in which case I use EZDrummer2 to build the drum track.
I have the option to split the drums out to separate tracks, but I get great results by treating it more like a realdrum track. I can change the pan, sound, and volume of each individual drum within EZDrummer2.
I still use CLA Drums to process them, but I also add a send to a separate drum reverb bus because I don't like the reverb that comes with EZDrummer2. Before the reverb I use EQ (I use the one built into Neutron2), so that it mostly the cymbals and snare that get the reverb treatment, bass drum is mostly left alone.

Works for me anyway

Thanks to all for the ideas.

2b