Refer to my post above. If you want studio quality drum sounds with all of the things you say vdrums lack you need to go the VST route as I described, using the vdrum head unit to simply generate the Midi information. There is no modelling using this method. The sounds are actual studio recorded samples of real drums and cymbals.
Addictive Drums has room and overhead mics and most of the other adjustments a kit in the studio would have. The snare has top and bottom mics that can be mixed as well as the ability to adjust the amount of snare buzz across the entire kit. The bass has front and batter head mics that can be mixed. Too many features to name and without the need to own a ton of drum and recording gear. No need for a studio really as it's all done using a near silent kit and a computer.
Thats cool, I know it has a lot of advantages and I really like the character it has for certain music but fundamentally there are things I NEED when recording real drums that VST's don't come close too.
Room mics on individual samples are all very well, but to get a real drum sound working for a lot of styles you need the room mics to contain a complete picture of the kit so that when you are compressing them you can use the attack and release to make the whole kit breathe with the song. Thats a huge part of all acoustic drums sounds on big records. Similar with eq, you bring out the snare on the overheads and it pulls up the attack of the kick as well, it all helps to make a really coherant drum sound.
Add to that the weird mics that really add flare to a recording, one in the toilet next door, one in the corridor, one in the rafters on omni, one figure8 facing accross the room (not towards the kit), a pair on the floor. These are all ambiences to consider from track to track, and on VST's the choice is normally just 'Room' (for individual drums) and thats it. Thats not enough as I'll often move the rooms around a lot to get a great sound.
Similarily, with close mics, I want to be able to mic the shell with one of 3 or 4 different mics, I want to be able to mic the kick front, batter AND subkick or re20 in the hole. I want to tune the skin on the batter loose top and bottom to loose the slap and bring out the crazy character of the drum, I want to re-skin with a deader skin, add a fatter snare etc etc. I want to move the overheads up and down, have them snare aligned on one song, and a more balanced stereo on the next. Then add another OH like a coles in the next song to get a bit more depth to the kit. Then move the USnr mic more away from the snares, or add a midkit mic, or top and bottom mic the toms one song then not for the next etc. All normal stuff when recording for an album, I use all these techniques on every session! Having a killer sampled sound from a great record is not going to help, thats the sound they wanted for THAT record, not mine!
Similarily, listen to the variation on a snare on a big drum sound, each hit different, every velocity gets the snare to respond in a different way. Just recording multi layers of velocity is not enough because what if in THIS song the drummer naturally shifts his snare hand a little off center for the bridge where he hits the ride? To fully model it, even with samples, you'd need to record a sample for each position for a drum to be hit, then a probability it will be a hit in that position for each section of a song. It won't sound too natural if the snare or toms doesn't move slightly around! Thats a more minor point, as some (good) drummers will stay very consistent, but most are not and thats a character we are used to hearing.
I'm all for these plugs, I am still toying with getting one, and a lot of my favourite artists use sampled and triggered drums extensively and it sounds amazing. But it sounds like triggered drums! Sometimes (most of the time) thats not what you need for the song.
i understand that a lot of this is big studio stuff, but people have been learning these techniques for years and using them to make great home recordings with 4 mics and a soundcard. With the basic principles under wraps a little recording setup can get great real drum sounds.
Soundreplacer and similar fall into the same category, the work and often do a good job, sometimes even save a badly recorded track, but they do not compete with the original, and I'll often soundreplace VERY thouroughly only to decide that the original was better, despite its flaws!
