It's clear to me I'm not going to get my studio built for another year, and it's depressing as hell.  A perfectly good 7 piece drum kit, all mic'd up with a perfectly good mixer ready to go...but no room to record them in.  I'm not going to sit around and do nothing, musically, so I'm going to have to use my electronic kit performances and upgrade the terrible soundfont I have been using for forever...
 
I see you guys talking about Superior Drummer, Session Drummer and etc...but I never really hear what I'd consider a modern, even djent, metal drum sound from anyone to know if they're what I need or not.  Looking for something with a tight snare, higher pitched but less "snares" in the sound, like a Danny Carey or Tomas Haake snare.  A kick drum with punch and depth, toms that sound like drums but have that deep thundery finish.  Cymbals and hats should be clean, not washy.  
 
Where in the world am I going to get that sound without mic'ing and eq'ing a real kit?  
 
Any help would be appreciated.  I realize there aren't a lot of metal fans running around here, but I'm confident you guys know what I'm going for here.  Thanks, in advance.
 
 
 
 

In both Superior Drummer & Session Drummer the drums are pre-treated, so you're limited to an extent as to how you can further treat the sound to get what you want.
 
Addictive Drums 2 on the other hand is just raw samples with the AD2 engine applying its effects afterwards.
 
Assuming they've sampled the drums of your choice, you should be able to get the sound you want by either altering the effects within AD2 itself, or routing the output to individual busses and using whatever 3rd party plugins you want.
 

There are quite a few ways to tackle this, and there are samples all over. The ones that are pre-treated you may find frustrating, so raw samples into an FX chain may be the best route, but the sample player is another choice. With something like AD2, you can tailor both inside and outside the plugin, but AD2 won't let you import samples. Session Drummer, third-party players, or even Matrix View can be used to trigger samples, but you may find a preferred work flow just playing around.
 
Big thing (since this can be a lot of work) is to save your "kit" as a track template as you build it up. There is no "quick and dirty" solution to tailoring a kit (some third-party stuff is rather close though), and you will want to be able to recall it for future use after doing all of that work (you can put the kit into a folder and save the entire folder as a track template).

Thanks fellas.  I see what you mean about pre-treated samples vs raw samples.  I was looking at Superior Drummer 3 and was incredibly impressed with the interface filtering and sound shaping qualities, including tuning up and tuning down individual drums, that's pretty cool.  Seems like you could really cobble together a fairly unique kit.  But...wow, 400 bucks.  Ouch.  I can't spend that much.  
 
AD2 is looking really good.  I have some videos stacked up in Youtube on AD2 I'm going to go through today and see what kind of samples they have, see what's possible.  AD2 XLN is looking really interesting.
 
Mettelus, saving the "kit" is a pretty big deal.  I won't lie, I've been working with MIDI for a couple of decades now, and I still struggle to understand all the routing and mapping, and what those words even mean sometimes.  It's a love-hate relationship. The track template seems like the way to go, once all that work is done.  Is that supported in Sonar X1?  I can't get Cakewalk by Bandlab as I have no internet connection from that computer and never will.  
 
Anyway, thanks for the replies, I'm going to go check this out now.  

If you're considering using your own samples, be extra careful to read the "small print" on any drums VSTi that claims to support them.
 
There's two features that most drum vsti's have using their internal samples:
1. They use samples that are sampled at different velocities (i.e. multisamples), so you get a realistic timbre change depending on how hard you hit the drum.
2. They use several different multisamples of the above, and choose them either in a round-robin or random way. In other words they'll sample each drum say 2 or 3 times at each velocity, so if you play the same drum at the same velocity twice, you'll actually get two slightly different samples.
 
None of the drum vsti's I've seen support the above for IMPORTED samples. They just support one sample at one velocity setting. I've not done an extensive test of all the available drum vsti's though.
 
So if you are using samples of your own kit, going the soundfont (or sfz, or Kontakt) is actually not a bad idea.
 
But anyway, it's just something to bear in mind.

Oof, was going to mention X3 or better in my post. IIRC, track templates were introduced in X3. Project templates are an alternative, but you cannot insert them, only start from them in X1.

CbB just needs the connection to activate, and you can download and transfer the file over, but is tricky (a few threads discuss this). Even tethering a cell to the computer would be worth the effort to put CbB on the machine IMHO. X1d is still carrying issues that got fixed/improved with X3e onward.

AD2 is pretty capable, and you can disable the internal effects to hear the raw samples. It is amazing how much you can manipulate an acoustic drum even with just the AD2 engine.

You don't need track templates to save kits, since all drum samplers offer a way to do that through presets. Track templates are only needed when you have complex routing, e.g. individual MIDI and/or audio tracks for each kit piece or group of pieces.
 
Even without integrated DAW support for templates, you can still get pretty fancy with your audio routing entirely within Superior Drummer, because it includes a full-featured mixer. It also comes with a bunch of presets, although I can't address them because I've never actually used them. When I took a look at them, they seemed to be overly effected and designed to make a drum solo sound good rather than to fit into a mix.
 
 

Voda,
I've got BFD3, and it has a LOT of adjustability. You have controls for pitch, snare amount, drum bleed, separate mic controls for top head and bottom head, etc, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. I'm using the Sonic Reality Vinny Appice kit right now, and am really happy with it.

mettelus
CbB just needs the connection to activate, and you can download and transfer the file over, but is tricky (a few threads discuss this). Even tethering a cell to the computer would be worth the effort to put CbB on the machine IMHO. X1d is still carrying issues that got fixed/improved with X3e onward.

Thank you, mettelus.  I'm going to search for those threads and see if I can do that.  I would really like CbB.  
 

bitflipper
You don't need track templates to save kits, since all drum samplers offer a way to do that through presets. Track templates are only needed when you have complex routing, e.g. individual MIDI and/or audio tracks for each kit piece or group of pieces.
 
 

I am on the fence about this.  In the past, I used to write or play my electronic kit into a single MIDI drum track. Spend hours playing with velocities and such.  20 years of that and that's what burned me out to the point I stopped even recording, dreading the drum production work. 
 
Seems like if I route pieces and groups of pieces to various tracks, then I could use my Bluejay Soundfont for toms, kick, hi-hats, some cymbals and rides...and then be able to use samples from some other source for the snare, maybe more cymbals and rides...and it wouldn't matter where the sample source was, I'd always end up with the same essential set of tracks with compression and EQ.  
 
Or is there a better way to approach this?
 
 

Leadfoot
Voda,
I've got BFD3, and it has a LOT of adjustability. You have controls for pitch, snare amount, drum bleed, separate mic controls for top head and bottom head, etc, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. I'm using the Sonic Reality Vinny Appice kit right now, and am really happy with it.

Hey thanks for the tip Lead...but that's as expensive as Superior Drummer 3, I think.  It's worth it, but I have no money for that.  All my money is going into the house we're building.  I love the top head, bottom head option as I have a thing for the top mic'd snare sound.  It would be interesting to hear a snare sound with the bottom head mic muted.  That's how I like mine when I'm mic'd up.