I am a total novice. Sorry if the topic has been covered 100 times… . I will be starting finger drumming next week. I am now setting it up in my studio… I have a question… …Recommended by this group I bought the Maschine Mikro. Ok., they have the best pads… Can you please explain to me why do I need Addictive Drums if Maschine already comes with lots of drum kits?.
Why Addictive drums is better for finger drumming ?. Thank you. Best Regards from Barcelona.
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That is because Maschine devices come with more “sample based, hiphop, electronic music” type of kits. There are no kits available that actually sound like a drumkit.
That doesn’t have to be a problem. It depends on what type of music you want to make / play. Personally Iike the response a drumkit simulator like Addictive Drums 2 gives me. It picks a different set of samples for soft hits and loud hits. A literal recording of a drummer hitting for example a snare hard or soft. They also do this thing where they round robin the samples. That means if you hit a snare multple times in a row those will be different samples. Almost identical but not 100%. That creates this illusion of a real recorded drumkit.
None of the maschine kits will do that for you. But it’s probably still a lot of fun to play with those kits as well. It just wont sound like acoustic drums, but something else.
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Bon dia, Andreu!
I have bought Maschine Mikro mk3 as well, so I’ve been through the same process. So far, I have tried the free versions of Addictive Drums 2 and Steven Slate Audio. I think both are good, although probably AD2 sounds better (personal opinion). I decided not to go for the paid version as I was planning to get some NI Komplete bundle, which I did this week, including Abbey Road 60s.
If you ever plan to get a Komplete bundle, you get some pretty good acoustic drums there. As Robert explained, you can set it up so the drum sound is slightly different each time you hit (some variation in pitch, tone, etc), which makes the drum sound more realistic and less “electronic”, as no two consecutive sounds sound exactly the same.
If you don’t plan to get a Komplete package, I would play with the free kits and wait for some AD 2 offers (like Black Friday, etc).
Fins aviat!
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Hello Eduard. Thank you… Good info. I appreciate your feedback.
I can see you are Catalan, but where do you live? .I am in Barcelona… Maybe we can meet one day and talk about all this and music production.
I am in Sant Gervasi and you?
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Hi Andreu,
I’m from València but I’m living in Sweden at the moment (although I lived in Raval & Gòtic for about a decade). But feel free to ask anything you want or we can have a chat over whatsapp/skype someday.
Adéu!
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Yes… Eduard…
My whatsapp is +34619561011.
Send me a message and we could agree on a day to talk…
Thanks.
Andreu
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I have been trough a similar thought process and started out by practicing with the abbey road samples that came in the Komplete Select bundle that came with my Maschine MK3. They have been OK as starting kits, but now I am at a point where I want some really great sounding drums to play whole songs with max grooviness. 
I have been looking into the Full Komplete Abbey Road kits and found that they might require some tweaking to sound optimal. Found this video about them. Revisiting Abbey Road & Studio Drummer - YouTube
I have also been trying out different demo kits where available. So far I do like the sound of Addictive Drums 2, and feel like the dynamics in their kits make it easier to play great sounding accents and ghost nodes. Waiting for a sale, and trying to figure out which of their kits to get.
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The ADPaks are on sale this weekend. I don’t really know which ones to prioritize either…
I would for sure get the Black Oyster, Fairfax 1 and Funk kits.
After that, I can recommend (in this order) Session Percussion, Reel Machines (if you like drum machines sounds) Both the Jazz kits, Vintage Dry, Blue Oyster and United Pop.
Any particular reasons for those? Like, is it about what style of music you want to play, or versatility? They have a bunch of metal and grunge and indie and so on for example.
Ah yes, I think maybe if you specifically want to play Metal or some other Heavy music, you might also want to look into those specific kits.
The reason I recommended the kits above is because I’ve found myself being able to get all the sounds I wanted out of those kits. Especially, Fairfax, Black Oyster and Funk. Together they’ve got all the sounds I need. And then those other kits are the ones I think are the most fun to use besides that. They’re not neccessary though.
One more thing: I can also recommend the Vintage Dry kit. For that 70s vibe!
I’m curious about the Modern jazz brushes kit. Has anybody tried it?
In real life, jazz players use often brushes in a circular movement on the snare, instead of hitting it. Do you know if you can do that with this kit?
The kit I use in this video (I do a little jam in the intro and outro) is the jazz brushes kit, except for the ride. That’s the ride played with sticks!
If you like how this sounds, the Jazz brushes kit is a good one for you!
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Maybe somebody mentioned this already - total novice here (well maybe yesterday i was a total novice - now almost a total novice). But I was initially put off AD2 due to the price (having spent a lot on Ableton / Maschine etc…recently).
But there is an infinite time AD2 demo that covers most of what you need to just start. It only has Kick Snare HiHat and Cymbal. With the different options for Snare and Hihat then you can cover everything thats in the QFG 4by4 set up except the Toms. However, there are options for FX still available, so maybe it’s possible to also take the Kick and FX modify it separately to get something passable for Toms at least for starting out. In the mean time i’ve put Snare-Sticks as a placeholder.
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I have tried the free versions of AD2 and Steven Slate Audio and I’m playing currently with NI Abbey Road 60s. In my experience, it seems that AD2 is the best of them, nice sounds and very flexible configuration. I’m using Native Instruments because I was going to pay for their Komplete anyway, but if that wasn’t the case and I had to pay for a set of drums, I think I would go for Addictive Drums (probably when a good sale is available). I may even get them even if I have Abbey Road…
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