Wow, IK has really upped their game with Amplitube 5 Max. There’s a ton more bass amps; there’s seven different SVT models alone. 16 total bass amps. Dozens of guitar amps of course. And over 100 modeled stomp boxes. Not even going to try to count the cabs.
Not bad for $99/99euro.
Well I grabbed the 50% off BFriday deal on Neural DSP Darkglass Ultra.
Between that and the 3.50 update to Helix I won’t be short of toys to play with for quite some time. 
The Ultra plugin is one of the best distortion and tonal plugins you can buy. Parallax is pretty cool but between the two there’s no comparison IMO; having both a VMT and B7K Ultra in one plugin, with an excellent cabsim, is awesome.
Fully agree with Howard. I have both plugins and I think the Ultra is best.
Ended up buying Amplitube 5 Max. What a snag for that $99.
Came really close to getting the NeuralDSP Soldano plugin though. Wow.
Anyone that would like to try a more extreme metal-focused set of amp models should consider STL AmpHub as well. It’s powered by Ignite Amps, and I really like their stuff a lot. It’s just not as flexible as Amplitube.
I had some JamPoints so it cost me even less 
I already had a not quite legal copy of 5 max but was still using 4 because I have all my stuff set up in 4 and didn’t want to bother with learning the new interface. Guess I have to learn it now 
I really thought I was going to make it through the sales without buying anything 
Not sure if EZDrummer has gone on sale yet but I just noticed BFD is on sale for an amazing price:
Also the free giveaway right now is a really good plugin from Melda, MReverbMB.
Thanks for the tip! Looks good too. I’m kinda holding everything off until end of the week 
So, this might be a stupid question: how does one actually program what the drums play with such a plugin?? What’s the input interface? Physical triggers from pads? MIDI keyboard? A MIDI matrix in a DAW? Or, can you use, e.g., loops or the “drummers” in GarageBand and use them with the sounds provided by BFD?
This is a nice example how a midi track works. 
Not stupid questions at all! The answer to most of those is “yes!”, as they are all possible. You can physically play in the beats with a MIDI controller (which can be a drum pad, a keyboard, a set of pads on a keyboard, anything really). You can enter them with any MIDI sequencer, including the MIDI editor in a DAW (which is my usual method). And they all come with canned loops and some are a bit more than that, like the “drummers” in GB.
One increasingly popular method is to trigger the drums in the plugin via mikes on a real drum set. That way you get two tracks, the recorded drummer and the drums in the plugin, which you then mix. It turns out that quite often, the drum samples just sound better than the recorded drums. It’s hard to mic drums well, so a mix of both works nicely. Listen to the before and afters here:
Some plugins have midi libraries of beats that you can assemble. I often notate the drum part in Gutar Pro then export the midi to the drum plugin. You can program the drum part with anything that lets you create a midi track: keyboard, midi/pad controller, edrums…
I literally just enter them in the DAW MIDI editor. It’s a very nice sequencer interface.
I’ve been using this kind of an interface for a reeeeeally long time though, so I am used to it.
Most songs have drum tracks of repeating measures with maybe a half dozen variations. So, you just enter those and then cut and paste to fill out the track. Then add the fills.
Then you just humanize the track (one keypress in most DAWs) and it sounds fine.
Usually takes me about 45mins-1h to track the drums in a song.
Thanks, @howard and @sshoihet - so, I was on the right track 
So, when using drum pads (“e-drums”), I would probably first need to quantize my (MIDI) input, clean up any errors/inconsistencies manually and then humanize it all!?!
Yes, I noticed that LogicPro has a way of MIDI-fying e.g., the (analog) kick track and then use the information to have the kick played back using a sampled sound instead of the recorded real drum. Amazing what is possible these days…
Last question: the advantage of packages like BFD or EZdrummer is then in the quality and variety of the samples!?! I.e., they would have several samples of the same cymbal, just hit in different ways or different locations (rim, bell, …)?? Is that what makes people want to buy and work with them (as opposed to what Logic, Abelton etc already have included)?
I wouldn’t say you have to do that. You could just leave the MIDI unquantized if you are satisfied with it. And since it is MIDI you can easily correct minor issues by hand too.
Yes, in general. Plus they provide for easy swapping of kits, lots of level and EQ options, programmed patterns and fills, and other features.
The one I use (Stephen Slate Drums) is for the quality and variety of the samples and mic placement, and control of individual mic levels.
There’s also other drum plugins that model, say, ‘80s Roland drum machines like the TR-808 or 909.
That’s so meta
Some surprisingly good ones, even.
Surprisingly good 
Really excellent breakdown by Venus Theory. Timely for Black Friday sales.
I agree 100% with his takes on Phase Plant, V Collection and Ozone. I’d give the same take for Neutron.
The drums in logic are pretty good if you have access to them. For a full Ableton plan you can download better drums too.
Still not as rich as the drum plugins that were mentioned, but they will do the trick. It seems I am out of luck with a discount on Ezdrummer.
