In that case, if you do, you might like EZDrummer, Addictive Drums, SSD5, several others. But realize these are musical instrument plugins and wonāt be the same as jamming along to your drum machine. You can make them do the same thing, but only in the DAW. these are for making music with more than using as practice tools.
That said, I do use mine as a practice tool. But I never play away from my computer.
Yeah, why not use @gcancellaās grooveful applet instead!? Awesome for grooving along and exploring rhythm and how to shadow a drum groove etc. 
Heās doing a really good job with that. His UI is also very similar to how you program drums in a MIDI editor, kind of an old-school version of it. Very similar to how you do it on drum machines too.
My last teacher in my production class (Marty Walsh, former LA session guitarist), has actually gone a slightly different route. I need to look when I get home, but he goes more the sample route. He finds the pieces and builds out the kit that way. In Logic, Iāve used the built in drummer pluginā¦you can get your lines built out, then convert to MIDI to tweak as desired. I am, looking at other options, especially for Ableton work flows. Yea, Iām more of a multi-DAWistā¦depending on what I am doing.
@PamPurrs no such things as stupid questions, just stupid people 
Ask awayā¦
Thatās actually how I use SSD5 - mostly for its samples. I select preset kits to get the sounds coherent across the kit, but do all the drum programming myself directly in MIDI. I donāt use any of the canned or generated drum patterns.
Iāve done this for a really long time (I was doing this back in the '80s 
) so itās just the easiest way for me to work with drum software, drum machine or VST.
BUT. I do love the other features of the plugins, namely the mixing and drum busses being built in the plugin itself.
If I were going to go the route your teacher did fully and buy other sample packs, I would probably use something like Trigger 2, use it with MIDI instead of overdubbing a live track, and then buy drum sample packs for it. Or one of the other drum sample playing VSTiās.
There are no stupid questions, only stupid people who ask questions 
Never start off by telling people your questions are stupid because if theyāre stupid then why would anyone want to waste time answering them? 
If you havenāt looked already, you can probably find some Reaper config files where people have already set up some midi mappings. You might not like the whole thing but it can be a good starting point or it might give you some ideas for potential uses.
EZDrummer2 is great for making backing tracks, the sounds arenāt great out of the box but once you throw some kind of EQ on them they sound much better. Iām lazy so i usually just throw some EZmix2 on there and done
I usually do my drums in Guitar Pro, export the midi, import into EZDrummer and then tweak it a bit if required. For practice you can just throw some midi together in EZDrummer and create a loop. For finger drumming Ableton Live is really good, you can quickly throw together some beats to jam to.
Except for the stupid joystick on the Akai MPK Mini MK2 
yeah Korg does that too sometimes, ugh
Thanks for that template thingy, but it makes no sense to me whatsoever lol.
Okay then, I wonāt ask any more questions.
Youāre not supposed to read the keymap
The thread has instructions on how to load the keymap. However if I were you I would just use MIDI Learn in a project when I wanted to use the sliders and so on.
or not. no one is saying you need to do this.
@PamPurrs I just realized why you are struggling with the MIDI unitā¦you need to put rounds on it
Works much better with rounds
I disagree. Pepsi is the answer.
Sorry for being stupid again and asking a question, butā¦
I figured out how to train a couple of the sliders to do certain things in the Piano One app, but when I started a new project, they no longer worked. Does this mean you have to go through the whole process again every time you start a new project?
Depends on the app. Most DAWs (including Reaper) can save configurations with either the project or the app, including MIDI mappings. No idea about standalone apps, I donāt use them often. It would vary by app.
I thought you used those all the time? Am I mistaken?
Hereās an example of one way to do it in Reaper (there are other ways, including the thread @sshoihet posted).
No, I use plugins in DAWs. I almost never use standalone apps.
