drum samples, guitar samples, bass samples

Well, it looks like my next CD will be done entirely by myself since my band is sort of coming apart at the seams (after 12 years!)

I have EZ Drummer and of course Session Drummer, but I'm looking for something with even better sounds. Suggestions?

What about great bass samples? Guitar?

Can anyone recommend?

thank you.

Great BASS samples:
EastWest Quantum Leap Hardcore Bass XP - http://www.soundsonline.com/Quantum-Leap-Hardcore-Bass-XP-pr-EW-156.html

Junski

BFD is good for realistic-sounding drums. I've played around with Steinberg's virtual bassist a bit and it seemed pretty cool-- the controls were more useful and versatile than similar products I've seen.

I have never in my life heard a really convincing distorted electric guitar sound come from anything other than a real guitar. I've heard some pretty good results with clean-tone from Musiclab software, but unless you exclusively stick to big, open, sustained power chords, sampled electric guitar just seems to sound flat, 2-dimensional, fake.

Cheers.

BFD:

http://www.fxpansion.com/index.php?page=1

according to fxpansion, BFD is big, and it's drums, and they haven't decided what the "F" stands for. It is a huge, resource-consuming multilayered sample library.

The idea with BFD is something like this: When you trigger a snare hit, BFD plays back the sample from the snare mic(s) PLUS samples of snare recorded through the OH mics, PLUS samples of snare bleed through all the other kit-piece mics, PLUS samples of snare recorded through the room mics, etc and ouputs all these virtual mics to different tracks that you can send to your host (eg Sonar) or mix internally through BFD. So you end up with the actual tracks as though you had recorded a real drum kit in the room, and you can control the amount of room sound, and the distance of the mics from the kit-pieces, and so on and so on. Anytime you trigger a drum in BFD, it's actually playing back like 20 different velocity-layered samples. For every drum.

BFD takes up a lot more system resources than a typical drum machine, but it provides a very realistic simulation of working with real tracks of a real drum kit recorded in a real room. And it's definitely big-- it comes on two DVDs and takes up like 10 gigs of HD space (you'll want a fast, dedicated hard drive).

Cheers.

something a little less resource intensive than BFD but that I think still sounds pretty darn realistic is Reason Drum Kits

and I agree with Yep - I haven't found much in the way of realistic guitar sounds. Reason has a couple of sampled acoustic guitars that sound pretty good if you're doing finger picking type stuff, and if you really want to finagle it (another find F word, Larry) you can get some good chords. There's a couple of others that are the same way, but you want to, for example, lay down a lead guitar riff, I haven't found anything worth a darn... I just think its too hard to get the nuances of a live performer from MIDI data... or maybe I'm just too lazy....

ORIGINAL: yep

BFD:

http://www.fxpansion.com/index.php?page=1

according to fxpansion, BFD is big, and it's drums, and they haven't decided what the "F" stands for. It is a huge, resource-consuming multilayered sample library.

The idea with BFD is something like this: When you trigger a snare hit, BFD plays back the sample from the snare mic(s) PLUS samples of snare recorded through the OH mics, PLUS samples of snare bleed through all the other kit-piece mics, PLUS samples of snare recorded through the room mics, etc and ouputs all these virtual mics to different tracks that you can send to your host (eg Sonar) or mix internally through BFD. So you end up with the actual tracks as though you had recorded a real drum kit in the room, and you can control the amount of room sound, and the distance of the mics from the kit-pieces, and so on and so on. Anytime you trigger a drum in BFD, it's actually playing back like 20 different velocity-layered samples. For every drum.

BFD takes up a lot more system resources than a typical drum machine, but it provides a very realistic simulation of working with real tracks of a real drum kit recorded in a real room. And it's definitely big-- it comes on two DVDs and takes up like 10 gigs of HD space (you'll want a fast, dedicated hard drive).

Cheers.

drumkit from hell superior (DFHS) is like BFD but bigger (35GB) and in my opinion, better sounding. it does all of the mic bleed stuff and all the samples are unprocessed 24bit/44.1khz. you can export to individual mic tracks and bleed tracks if desired (i don't) which i imagine you can also do in BFD... but DFHS is expensive at $300. i think BFD is $250. oh and there's also a stereo ambiance track which usually needs to be time-aligned (just like real drums! ). the cpu load isn't actually that bad.

being realistic sounding they need some processing to cut through a heavy mix but pretty much the same as you'd have to do with a real kit i suppose...

however it is a bit of a bear to set up in sonar. there is a sonar demo which is available from the toontrack site that works (their sonar template doesn't, or i'm ****ed, one of the two) and can be saved as a template, but then you've got to import all your existing songs into a new template. believe me it's faster than setting up DFHS in each project, there's like 7 tracks and 12 busses to set up or something ridiculous like that.

DFHS is really geared toward power users, definitely not something quick and dirty until you get used to it.

### OLD THREAD ALERT ###
 

Definitely old thread. I can't be sure because I wasn't using MIDI back in 07 but I'm assuming certain things have become a long way in that relatively short time as far as realism. Some of the bass stuff out there, if used correctly is indistinguishable from a live player. Drums have been pretty easy for some time but I'm assuming the BFD mentioned here was the original and I can only guess that BFD2 was a massive improvement on that and now BFD3 is out.
 
Guitar though I think is the still a long way off. I've heard some pretty amazing MIDI rhythm stuff for strummed or plucked chords but as soon as you start in with any leads or even think about doing a bend it all goes to crud. Seems even using a MIDI guitar for bends or other nuances ends up with that really lame synthesized sound. You certainly couldn't play MIDI blues guitar. Ugh... just the thought makes me shudder. lol
 
All good news for us axe wielders. We haven't yet been successfully replaced by machines which I guess makes up for the fact the industry has always been over saturated with guitar players. :-D

Heheh. ;-)

You can try this soundfont: https://app.box.com/shared/5kojv3x0ko