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.
