Would Battery 3 be a good purchase for "real" drums??

[Amberience]

I know Battery is one of the best for synthetic drums, but is it as good for acoustic stuff?

Anyone use it with Jamstix also, does it perform as well as something like EZ Drummer, BFD, or DFHS ???

[bluedad]

of course. I've got a Yamaha kit that I use quite often.
don't have jamstix, so haven't tried it.

[Pouckypluysch]

If you want to be able to put in your own samples, Battery is a very good way to go. To illustrate: I've made demo's for a guitar player that was going to play on a cd project I'm working on. I sent him some tracks on which I played drums live, next to some on which I programmed the drum part with Battery, using samples of my own drumkit. He couldn't tell the difference.

In fact, he knows I can program drums quite convincingly as if they were played live. He gave me compliments that the tracks sounded very much 'live'. I took that as a compliment for having played the 'real' tracks very tight.

[Amberience]

Well I wont be loading my own samples. I want to have a couple of kits ready made and use those. Which is why I'm leaning more to DFHS.

[Lunch Money]

Also looking very interesting: DrumCore

I really think EZ Drummer looks keen; the only downside from what the reviews say, is that it has a fairly limited number of different "kits" as it were. Mind you, Jamstix is in a similar boat. I think that as long as it's a good-sounding, versatile kit, and is expandable (both those products are), then they're still good choices.

Greg

[emdot_ambient]

Battery3 comes with a huge number of kits making up over 12 GB and 23,000 samples.

Its acoustic kits are huge, high quality and cover a large array of playing styles.

In addition, some of the new features make the kits sound even more live, including things like drum articulations (flam, drag, roll, buzz, three stroke ruff, speed roll, muted, alternate and release stroke), echo and humanization, randomization (so different samples are played each time you hit the same MIDI note) . . . and it comes with both digital reverb and convolution reverb, making the physical presence of the drums customizable and highly realistic.

Also really interesting is that once you've set up a cell in Battery (a collection of samples and FX triggered from one MIDI note or range of notes), you can save that cell by itself and later import it into new kits. You can also have a MIDI sequence running, click on a cell (for example a snare), and then use a browser to audition different samples while the sequencer is running. So, auditioning a lot of different snares or kicks would be no problem.

I've only started to scratch the surface on using Battery3, but it's a constantly amazing program. I don't have Jamstix, but from what I've read they seem they'd make good companion programs.

Highly recommended.

[Pouckypluysch]

Hmm... Seems even more useful to me. I still use Battery2 at this moment, for I don't have the cash to upgrade Komplete 3 yet.

[Sascha Franck]

I got Battery 3 a few days ago, and apart from a few things I seem to like slightly less than in the older versions (most of them might be OS related though, as I just switched to a Macbook as my main machine) I have to say it's brilliant. They really put some work in the included kits, they're some of the best I heard so far, and you can modify them in all thinkable (and unthinkable) ways. There's even some sort of humanizer on board, which I just tested on a mouse-painted hihat (so all velocities are the same) and the results are freaking excellent. The same goes for the new Articulation option, finally an easy way to incorporate flams and whatever.

So, yes, it's very nice for natural sounding drums. And of course it's still tweaker's heaven, even more so than older versions.

IMO the most worthwhile update of any NI product ever.
And people knowing me will also know that I hardly come up with such statements.