well we can have this discussion but we'll simply never agree. personally, i played years of piano, currently play guitar, can play drums, will pad out every part of every beat, and i can count the number of time's i've used quantize on my hands (and half of those quantize uses are because the mpc software defaults to 16th quantize whenever you open a new beat
). my timing is good, and i don't mean robotic good, i mean i put feel into my beats. i slow them down and speed them up, lag notes on purpose, let my fingers muscle memory guide me. i do this because i've got a sound that's my own, no loop or prebaked groove sounds like me.
i don't think loops are a good idea. you sound like everyone else. sure you get a professional sounding result, but usually that's robotic when it's layered with other perfectly times stuff. if you hired the best drummer in the world to play the same song 10 times, he would play it slightly differently every time. they certainly wouldn't play the same set of patterns for different songs, they listen to the rest of the mix, all the other instruments, the chord changes, the structure, and then they think about what combination of rhythms will work to achieve the mood and feeling that is desired.
something that i saw recently that i thought was interesting, and you'd probably be into GNRFAMZT is liquid rhythm:
http://www.wavedna.com/product-information/ this program does some of the stuff i'm talking about as software instead of drumming, it lets you build patterns yourself out of basic rhythmic building blocks. again i'd never use a tool like that, i want to practice rhythms until i'm great at it. i'm going to be doing music the rest of my life so i'm only going to improve, but only if you actually practice making stuff from scratch instead of falling back on loops.
i wouldn't use prebaked loops unless it was to chop them up and then pad them out how i want them. i don't concentrate on structure when i compose, i work improvisationally and i love to bring out errors in performance, messy mixing, noisy stuff, to me that's the flavour of music, imperfection and junk is what i consider aesthetically pleasing, and pre-baked loops will never fit that.
you're going to run into people being negative towards pre-baked loops on this forum, because this is a forum devoted to machines that are meant for and good at programming your own beats. the groove controls are good enough for music royalty for decades, but they were willing to get down and dirty and actually use the controls to customise their stuff, nudge stuff around, get their own feel.
for what you want to do, i don't know why you wouldn't stick to logic as it's much better suited to arranging loops and patterns. if you're not going to be live padding stuff, nudging notes yourself, chopping samples and laying them yourself, i don't know why you would want this software GNRFAMZT, because you could achieve a much much better set up for what you want with an APC or launchpad clip launcher, and then buy loops and packs and go nuts with that set up. for the price of a ren you could get a launchpad, a bunch of loop packs, and then spend one afternoon setting it up to trigger loops all day.
for the in depth groove stuff, i think ableton would be great for you too, but i don't use that side of music software, i use live audio set-ups, loopers, and need hardware controls to speed up my workflow when i'm editing, chopping, setting up programs and sensitive pads to knock out my clunky ass drums.
