I’d continue to persevere with the MIDI keyboard man. I mean, there are drumpads maybe…we have a set here but I never got on with them. If you’re finding it hard to play the whole kit at once maybe just do it in layers. I’ve been using the keyboard for drums for years and years now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7E34WFw4HE

It’s still not perfect – there are certain fills I can’t do without a real kit (or overdubbing) and there are certain things I *keep* doing, because of the way I play.

But the best thing you can do is just keep practicing. Keyboard drumming really is a technique of its own but once you get it, it’ll make life a LOT easier!!

One other thing I should add, is that if you’re finding the results robotic or clunky, you might want to investigate whether Reaper has a “random quantize” function. I use it in Cubase 5 a lot these days. It just introduces variances in timing by a defined number of ‘ticks’. The only downside is that it’s applied directly to the data, so editing after you’ve humanized can be a pain. If TT could develop a MIDI plugin, or a function within S2/EZD to loosen up or ‘sloppify’ incoming MIDI data on playback…that’d be most awesome!