Logic Pro 8 Drum Plug-ins - advice?

Davo-London

Logician
Can someone narrow the choice of drum beat/groove plug-ins for LOGIC Express? I am a drummer and so I understand that side of things.

Cheers
Davo
 
Hi,
I´m no drummer but I use EZ-Drummer (tootrack.com) Works great with logic pro. It comes as a AU-plugin, so it should work also with Express.
They also have the Superior Drums which seems to be the great brother of EZ-Drummer
Uwe
 
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Hi Davo,

Your question is really quite general - which makes it difficult to offer accurate suggestions. Are you looking more for loops or multisamples? What sort of styles? etc.

Anyway - the grandfather of groove, beatslicing, funky, musical drum plugins has got to be Stylus RMX by Spectrasonics. It's got an open ended architecture where you can bring your own loops in. It's got great on board processing as well as very "musical" controls for altering and randomizing the grooves. It also allows you to work with the individual "slices" inside Logic. And much more :)

I'm a drummer as well and FWIW, can honestly tell you that this plug in is very creatively stimulating.
 
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Setting up drum patterns in Logic

Hi

Basically I want to create drum loops mostly initially because I practice bass through the ibook/Logic. I set up drum grooves and then play along.

The secondary use would be for creating song demos. But the primary use is above. As intuitive as possible too.

Davo
 
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Hi Davo,

Well, if you mainly want to create drum loops, it seems to me like you are looking for some good meat and potatoes multi sample libraries. EZ Drummer is a great suggestion for that. The built in kits in the EXS 24 and Ultrabeat are really good as well. There's plenty to choose from there.

As far as third party stuff - maybe look more along the lines of adding sample libraries to use in EXS 24 and Ultrabeat rather than separate third party plug ins. It might serve you better if you are ultimately looking to sequence up your own loops.

Good luck.
 
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You're right Per, Ultrabeat isn't part of Express. But EXS 24 certainly is and even Express ships with a somewhat decent selection of multisamples.

Davo - You call it up by means of the input field on a Software Instrument track. From within the plug in window, click hold on the dotted black line at the top center part of the interface. You will get a flip menu of all the available sampler instruments.

You know, if you are considering spending a few hundred dollars on a plug in to get better drum samples, you might want to consider spending that money on an upgrade to Logic Pro instead. You'll get Ultrbeat with all it's cool and modern sounding drum and percussion elements, an extended EXS 24 library with more drum sounds; PLUS all the Apple Loop Jam Pack libraries that get bundled with Pro. You'll probably find these very useful if you are looking for quick and dirty ways to get yourself practicing bass along with some loops!
 
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I do lots of great (according to my drummer buddies) MIDI drums and I use BFD2 for this - it sounds so great!

rzzz
 
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Sorry, my bad then. I wasn't certain. I thought I remembered a friend telling me it wasn't in his version of Express. But I don't actually have a version of it here. So, I stand corrected.
 
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You know, if you are considering spending a few hundred dollars on a plug in to get better drum samples, you might want to consider spending that money on an upgrade to Logic Pro instead. You'll get Ultrbeat with all it's cool and modern sounding drum and percussion elements, an extended EXS 24 library with more drum sounds; PLUS all the Apple Loop Jam Pack libraries that get bundled with Pro. You'll probably find these very useful if you are looking for quick and dirty ways to get yourself practicing bass along with some loops!

I would second this. I'm a guitarist, and I very often compose songs by quickly pulling up an Apple Loop from the including Logic Studio Jam Packs, just to get a rough groove going, then writing on guitar. When it's time to record, I either send the song with the scratch loop to a live drummer, or program beats myself in either BFD, UltraBeat, or iDrum. When I use a "prefab" groove and tweak it, it's from Stylus RMX. But I find nothing as immediate as just quickly auditioning an Apple Loop, dragging it in, and enabling looping for the entire song.

Orren
 
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I am very happy with Toontrack's EZ Drummer, especially with some of the EZX expansion kits (I have the Vintage Rock, Funkmasters and Jazz EZXs, which are all outstanding IMHO).

I have also just ordered Submersible Music's Drumcore 2.5 which offers audio and midi loops played by drummers such as Jeff Anthony (Sheryl Crow), John Bishop (Ernie Watts), Tony Braunagel (Bonnie Raitt), Ned Douglas (Dave Stewart), Sly Dunbar (Bob Marley), Michael Shrieve (Santana), Ben Smith (Heart), Matt Sorum (Velvet Revolver), DJ Syze-up (UltraNaté), Alan White (Yes, John Lennon), Zoro (Lenny Kravitz).

There's also Kitcore, which is similar but midi-only, as well as an Apple Loops edition with a selection from their libraries.

You should definitely give their demos a listen. The prices have dropped considerably by now (around 100 US$ on average for the standard version of Drumcore but I have found it for 58 euros or 55 GB pounds at www.thomann.de
 
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I also have a Roland TD6 drum kit. I have just about managed to record a midi stream from the kit into Logic Express but I can't get any sounds from it!

Is there a good resource (website/book) for linking and recording Roland kits to Logic via midi?

Davo
 
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