The Steel Guitar Forum

Can anybody help me find a good drum programme compatable with Sonar 2.

I use Acoustica Beatcraft. After I create what I want, I then render it to a wav file, which I import into my software.

Depends on your price range.

EZDrummer is probably the easiest and it sounds pretty good. Comes with a nice standard drum kit and you can swap out a few of the drums. Like if you don't like the snare, you can change to a different snare. You also have a mixer that lets you change the volume and pan settings for individual drums.

Native Instruments Battery 3 is probably the king of drum sampling but it's quite a bit more involved. It can still be simple to use and you can easily create your own drum kits from your own samples. You have tuning options for each piece (which are put in cells). Each cell has tuning, digital editing, compression, EQ, etc. You can probably get it on eBay for under $200.

If your price range is free, then there are a few you can download. I think a couple of the FXPansion ones are free and pretty good too. They're kind of like Battery but with fewer features.

Also, on the Computer Music cover DVD, there's the CM Studio software. One of the vst instruments is a drum machine and the DVD usually has a few decent sounding drum samples. Or course, this will not sound as good as something like Battery, which will have mutisampled instruments. For example, the snare drum may be sampled at 50 different velocities. You know, the snare drum sounds differently from one hit to the next, depending on how hard each his is.

Furthermore, you already have drums in Sonar. Seems like the Roland Virtual Sound Canvas was included in Sonar 2. It will have some decent sounding drum kits. Again not as good as Batter, EZDrummer, BFD, and the likes, but certainly better than nothing.

And as a last resort, you could download some free soundfonts of drums. I think the BlueJay kit is a free download and it seems like that one is mutisampled. All you'd need then is a soundfont player. If I remember correctly, Sonar 2 came with VSampler. VSampler will play sf2 files. If there's no soundfont players in Sonar2 (I don't remember for sure) you could always download a free one. SFZ comes to mind.

Shew... Didn't mean to rant but surely you can get some drums up and running now. Feel free to email me if you need more help.

If you are running Sonar 2, you should have Session Drummer listed on the Midi Drop down menu.
I used to use it a lot when I ran Sonar, though you will have to check the Help file, because I can't for the life of me remember how to set it up.
It's set of drum patterns, listed by style and number of bars, so you select say Country Rock, then add a 7 bar pattern, a Snare/hat fil, a second 7 bar pattern (same or different) followed by another fill---- and so on until you've got the whole song planned out.
Then you hit play and there's your drum line!
You could well have Battery (Batterie is French for a Drum Kit) in which case you will have some good drum samples for Session Drummer to play.

Cheers
Dave

Just to avoid confusion, Session Drummer only creates the MIDI. You still need a sampler of some kind to actually play and hear the sounds. You'll still need Battery, EZDrummer, BFD, etc.

By the way, EZDrummer comes with its own MIDI patterns and you can audition them from withing EZDrummer. If you like the pattern you hear, you can drag and drop it into your Sonar drum track. EZDrummer also has a humanize button. This will "humanize" your drum tracks. For example, if you put in your MIDI drum patterns by hand, they can sound robotic since every note is played at the same velocity and at exactly the right time. Human drummers don't play like that. The "humanize" button will add small variations in the timing and velocities of the notes - making it more human sounding.

ACID is easy to build a song structurw with loops, then exprt to SONAR via wave file..

Drum Core 2 is a pretty nice program ....Jim

I like ezdrummer alot.
Im not good at programming, and im the worlds worst drummer so I like the drag and drop midi files of ezdrummer. All the drums are pre-processed for me so i dont have to compress or EQ..I dig that too. They sound great straight outta the box.
heres the demos for ezdrummer:
http://www.toontrack.com/product_demos.asp

I hear good things about Jamstix, superior, and BFD also but havent tried em.

Of course, you can process them individually if you want to.

Update to Sonar6 (free update to Sonar6.2). It comes with SessionDrummer2, great sounding sample based drum set with lots of midi parts you can import, even breaks, endings, etc.

Toontrack's "Vintage Rock" kit for EZdrummer is awsome. From what i've heard, their forthcoming "Nashville" expansion, with Harry Stinson's drums and midi grooves is going to be something extra too.
http://www.toontrack.com/ezx.asp#nashville

From what i've heard, their forthcoming "Nashville" expansion, with Harry Stinson's drums and midi grooves is going to be something extra too.

COOL!!!!

Thanks for all the very helpful replies. Looks like EZ drummer with the Nashville add on.

I use ACID with Drums on Demand. Excellent drums if you are a looper. Kinda costly to buy all the different styles but these are pro recorded drums allready mastered and the whole nine yards.