Realistic drum sound? Advice given and needed

Question

I am trying to figure out how to get a decent, realistic (ish!) drum sound on the iPad, to use when recording garageband tracks. Let's face it, the smart drums just don't cut it. I have gone through seemingly tons of set-ups and configurations with different apps and so forth, and have sort of settled on a sound which is ok (for now) and is by far the best sound I've achieved so far. Bear in mind that, as a garageband user, I am not investing tons of money into tech - a few pounds per app is all I've spent really. First, I'll describe what I've done in the past, and what I currently do.
I started with the smart drums, of course. Tiresome very quickly, and they were naturally holding back the quality of my recordings by making them sound, basically, rubbish. I find that with drums, they either need to sound decently realistic, or completely electronic (like a drum machine). Anything in-between is nonsense and sounds bad.
I next downloaded the DM1 app and made drum tracks using some of the preset acoustic drum kits. Much much better sound, ability to change individual drum sounds and panning. Still not great though, and very laborious as the track had to be (before ios7 and inter-audio apps were usable with garageband) rendered, emailed to myself, downloaded, converted using file conversion software, loaded into another DAW to allow it to be copied, then pasted into garageband. There was also some latency apparent when exporting the file. Bah!
Eventually I found Easybeats 2. More intuitive, some ok-sounding samples available to use for the different drums. Only 16 bars of drums can be programmed at a time, but that doesn't matter so much as you can easily export the 16 bars into your pasteboard straight from the app, then copy it into garageband (no latency either!). Then just wipe the 16 bars and do the next section. Panning, individual drum control, VELOCITY CONTROL for each hit (finally!).
Still something was missing though. I had yet to find a kick and snare sound which was close to acceptable. DM1 came closest for those two so far, but much worse for cymbals, hi-hats, toms, and had no velocity for each hit (well I think you could select normal or louder for each hit, but nothing more than that - not good enough). Also the snares were a bit weak-sounding. For some time, my solution was to record a drum track on kick and snare only using DM1, load this into garageband, then record a duplicate track in Easybeats 2, again with kick and snare but this time with everything else as well, then load that on another track, and attempt to sync the tracks as closely as possible (sometimes a laborious job considering the latency from DM1), then mix this down to one track. This gave a powerful sound and I was pleased with it for a while, though looking back now, it was awful. Just awful.
When I became dissatisfied with this sound, I came to a crossroads. Was I going to stop this quest for realistic ipad drums, and just buy EZdrummer for my laptop? I would need to upgrade my windows as well. And buy a DAW. An investment of hundreds of pounds! No, I would continue my noble quest! But for this, I would need to enlist the help of my laptop.
What I really needed was a decent kick and snare sound to use in Easybeats 2 (i tried Easybeats 3 but went back to 2. 2 is just better in my opinion). For me, that's 80% of a good drum sound. Average-quality cymbals and hi hats can hide to some extent if the snare and kick are convincing enough. Of course, I'm talking about rough-quality demo tracks - in professional recordings all elements are of course important. I would have to find samples, and save these as a drum kit to be used with Easybeats. But this can't be done using only an ipad. I googled 'acoustic drum samples' on my laptop and on the first page is 'Tom Hicks Samples'. Zip files with tons of samples for every drum you could need, and all free. I don't think you can find better for free online. Still I was not 100% happy with any one sound. I therefore loaded a few sounds into Audacity (free mixing software) and overlayed them, and played with the bass and gain, until I was happy. I then exported these as wavs, created a custom wav kit by sending a compressed file with all of my desired sounds from my laptop directly into Easybeats 2 (you need to plug the ipad into your laptop to enable this), and finally... Finally! My drum kit is completely (for now). The combination of decent sounds and the ability to control the velocity of each hit in Easybeats 2 is, thus far, simply the best method I've discovered for drums on the ipad.
Not being very technically-minded (I prefer just playing and writing music, but know little about tech or computers) the above methods were things I discovered and experimented with gradually, and something as seemingly simple as, say, creating a custom snare sound by overlaying multiple samples into Audacity, then using that sound for every snare hit, is not something which even occurred to me for a long time. There was certainly nothing online that I found to explain or guide me through any of the steps. Most advice amounted simply to 'use DM1', or to not use the ipad at all. Hopefully my advice may prove useful to anyone undertaking a similar quest.
I posted this not just to explain my method, but to ask whether anyone has any input or further advice on creating a good drum sound on the ipad. I am always looking for new ideas, and I am not convinced that I have reached the pinnacle of what the ipad can achieve yet.

Answer 1

I'm definitely going to agree with BeeJay to a point... Logic's drums are not stellar (they're okay, but that's as far as I go), and forget Ultrabeat if you want a little bit a "realism". However, if all you have to work with right now are Logic's kits (and perhaps the Rhythm Section JamPack), go into the EXS and separate the important groups (kick, snare, toms and hi-hats) into their own aux channels and save the the instrument as a multichannel instrument. Work with the separate aux channels by adding in a bit of EQ and/or compression (or do the New York style mix). As well, send the unprocessed signals to a bus containing a drum room reverb and mix them together.
Another thing you may want to consider is the fact in order to sound like a human, don't play it like a robot. Quantize certain parts, but not every part (and it doesn't have to be at 100% - use lower strengths to bring out a bit of humanness). If you don't have one, get a pad input, such as M-Audio's Trigger Finger. Note the a lot of the kits in the EXS and JamPacks have a few articulations for drums that you need to make use of, such as flams, drags and rimshots to do various beats. Listen to various rhythms and fills and watch how drummers do it (plenty of videos on http://www.drummerworld.com). And, when you make a beat, play the beat.
Back to samples: if you find that Logic's kits still aren't cutting it for you, definitely go for something like BFD, DKFH or whatever. I fell in love with BFD and highly recommend it. As to whether it sounds like a drummer for you will depend on how you play it. For me, it definitely sounds like a drummer. :-D
jord