Toontrack EZdrummer 3

Been trying a lot of drum machines over the years. I am mainly interested in the classic rock setup of drums, bas, guitar and vocals som products focusing on electronic music is not of interest. Not being a drummer myself I often fall short on getting demoes with a touch of realism to the drum sounds, either because of lack of ability to program or because the sounds are recorded too "perfect" in a studio, whereas my reference is something recorded under less ideal circumstances in a live setting on overhead mics plus a couple of supporting mics with a lot of bleed and phase issues.
So far EZdrummer 3 is the product that has produced the best approcimation to this. Both because it is relatively easy operate but also because the main focus is beats played by actual drummers and then matched to whatever you try to achieve. The Bandmate feature that tries to match an input played on other instruments with beats fitting the part is quite good. It even detected my first atttempt at fooling it with af part in 5/4. On the mix side you can treat the output of EZdrummer af if it were a live recording which also lowers the bar for adopting the product. My general experience is that getting realistic hi hat sounds is always the mail challenge with drum machines. EZdrummer has a lot of variations to the traditional "closed, half-open, open" hi hat sounds. So from that perspective good nuance is achieveable.........but simulating the "chaos" of a live hi hat and sustained cymbal whooooshes will always be the achilles heel of drum machines and though good, EZdrummer is not perfect in this aspect.
And of course be aware that the basic product is just a sales pitch for buying "packs" en masse afterwards.

I mainly use another drum software when using them in production but I wanted to broaden my tools and get EZD3 , and I was not disappointed. Every different drum software has things that the other ones don't have so you never know when you're gonna need a different sound and the one you have may not do what you need. The sounds are great, the GUI is easy to navigate and works great with e-kits. A thing I've always liked about EZD is the ability for non-drummers to find beats easily and that has never been easier than it is now with the addition of the ability to import your guitar, bass, piano etc track, and EZD will make a drum track for you! You can then further customize it and add or take away from what it comes up with. I'm a drummer first, so I don't use it for that feature but it's a great feature to have, along with EZD3's "tap to find" where you can just tap a beat out and it'll show you all the possibilities within the library. So whether you're using this for an e-kit, or to piece together drum tracks for your production, you can't go wrong with EZD3!

I have Superior Drummer 3. Lots of SDX and EZX expansions. However the upgrade to EZDrummer 3 is fabulous. The presets are fantastic and the workflow is really great when one is in composition mode. The new Bandmate and Grid Editor functionality are top notch. Bandmate will search through all of your grooves to find a great match with a short MIDI section or audio recording. It works flawlessly. If you're even thinking of upgrading... just do it! Highly recommended