Addictive Drums or EZDrummer

EZDrummer is fun as a toy with lots of different clothes to dress it up in, but its sounds are not convincing in the least (especially the kick drums.. what in the world are they thinking?). My MIDI goes to Addictive Drums every time.

??? How can they not be convincing when it's a REAL acoustic kick drum?! No convincing needed. They may not be the choice of kick drums you prefer, but they are real kick drums. How you mix and eq them is your choice. I find it interesting you single out the kick drums. To me, it's THE easiest piece to manipulate, eq, or even swap out for something else. For me, I have to hear good snares, all cymbals, and toms to be sold. All of which is a personal preference, of course. But not convincing? I left that behind with drum machines! Also, EZD has the LEAST amount of 'different clothes to dress them up'. It's a pretty no nonsense representation of acoustic kits recorded in a room[s]. AD seems to have far more clothes for the dressing. Dan

I wanted a flexible set up to a whole range of different stuff so I bought AD and I'm not disappointed. It's not a steep learning curve like someone said but you can get in as deep as you like to customise your own kits. I play a lot of genres from jazz and country to rock and the only thing I miss is brushes. If you want to do metal I reckon AD would adapt to it because it can get a lot heavier than I ever use. One of my favourite tricks is to use a custom kit and spend a lot of time getting your drum to sound as you like and do all your programming, if you save that as a kit you have always got a "restore point", then bounce the drums to audio tracks and mute th AD track so you can add further touches like EQ and compression and reverb to audio when mixing, this more closely resembles how it would work with real drums in a studio. :)

Once anyone has read the good and bad points a good thing to do is visit the forums of each product and their User songs section.Then you can hear what people have got out of the systems :) I have to say I lean towards AD for sound manipulation but then Jamstix has once learnt can speed up production with it's easy generation of beats and fills and grooves.Of course you can get Jamstix and host the AD demo in it :D Also to kelp why don't users of the different software post a few snips of stuff they have done with it to show off how they sound. "Face" on my Reverbnation page was done with the AD demo and some toms added off a free drum sample player.

This is not my musical taste but it shows JamStix off on the subtle/Brushes side of things IMHO from their forum links. and nice recording quality methinks.

OK then, here's one of my custum AD kits on a rock number, it's about as heavy as I get, but sounds not dissimilar to your kind of style msly.

I've read this thread with interest. I'm just getting into drum programming. I'm interested in what ppl are saying about things like "comes with the best assortment of grooves", "built-in beats", etc. I'm just wondering, when you all do your programming, are you building your songs from the ground up? Or do you build them by using and modifying existing beats given to you by the program? Also, if anyone could point me to a good tutorial on drum programming, I'd appreciate it! Thanks much to you all for the help.

I've got both Addictive Drums and EZ Drummer. I've only used EZ Drummer so far and I think ToonTrack did a pretty good job with it. It's remarkably easy to drag and drop grooves and fills into Reaper and then edit them to your liking. I think the sound is basically pretty good. To me the cymbals and toms sound fine. The only thing I can see myself altering is making the snare a little deeper and pushing the kick drum more. Other than that the sounds are quite good.