Try this in EZd and it sounds, well, artificial. 1/16SwingB - it's worth reading what Roger Linn has to say about the uselessness of slightly randomising the timing of semi-quaver hi-hats, and how getting realism is all down to swing. And there is none of that somewhat naff "tick tock" sound you get with EZd as it alternates between the 2 different layer samples.Īnd extending this to another bugbear of fast semi-quaver hi hats, in Addictive Drums these sound very convincing programmed at a single velocity (the key is not to have them quantised as semi-quavers - but as e.g. You can have your kick and back-beat snare both at V=105 or whatever throughout the song, and the levels and timbre of the hits is similar but not identical - so it sounds realistic. The snare / kick are for all practical purposes properly centred in both the overheads / room mics: you can build an entire sound just using the OHs if you wanted, or just the room mics, or any combination with the close mics, and it all works as it should do.įurther, the randomisation of the samples also works as it should do. In the end, after it dawned on me that I was really only getting 2 (yes, just 2) usable snare samples every time I bought an EZd expansion, and neither the snare nor the kick would be centred in the overheads / room mic(s), I decided to buy Addictive Drums. What a lot of work! I'm a patient guy, but it shouldn't be this much hassle really, should it? And then I'd get to work trying to get a timbrally and stereo-ly balanced set of overhead and room mics for the kick / snare. And then I'd do a bounce for the snare with "Random" only sample generation for the back-beat and "Everything On" randomisation for the fills, and cut and paste the bounced audio together. In fact, what I ended up doing in view of the overhead / room mic imaging problems and the above issues with the sample engine, was routing my SD channels to multi-outs, and bouncing the audio files for everything one kit item at a time. For Superior Drummer, this is less of an issue because there are more samples per layer - but it's still a problem. And further, snare (and tom) fills sound noticeably "machine-gun-y" because they're only working with those 2 samples in "Random" only mode (which means you have to dig in and edit the midi velocities in your drums fill to force "Random" to select samples from different layers). And the resultant snare sounds "tick tock" as it alternates between those 2 samples. V=105, you're basically getting just 2 snare samples for your money. So if, like me, you're generally working on simple rock / pop music with a back-beat and using a snare centred on e.g.
But there is a cost.Īnd the cost is - for most pre-EZd2 expansions, there are only two (yes, just 2) different samples per velocity layer. This results in less sample variance, so your snare (and kick etc.) sound more consistent. There are 2 ways to fix this: a) compression / distortion or similar "smoothing", or b) switch (in Superior Drummer) to "Random" only sample selection, which means the samples are only selected from the programmed midi layer. The result is that your snare is rather variable in level and timbre, and fades into and out of the mix somewhat - much more so than a real drummer. The trouble is, the sample engine doesn't adjust properly for the different volumes, and even if it did the timbre of these different velocity hits is very different. I'm not sure where the breakpoints are in the sample layers, but working a little bit over V=100 as your central point, you get "hard" hits of maximum velocity as well as softer "gradient" hits.
So, for example, with a back-beat snare programmed at a constant, say, V=105, you'll get V=105 hits but also some louder hits and some softer hits. The way the sample engine works in default mode is that it randomly pulls samples from the programmed midi velocity layer and layers "2 up and 2 down". What this means is it's tough to "build" the sound of the kit from the overheads and/or the room mics.Ģ. When I say "not centred" the dynamic range (peak minus RMS level) can be wildly different as between the left and right hand channels, so a simple tweak of the balance control doesn't work. The kick and snare are generally not centred in either the overheads or the room mics. There are a several major problems with SD and EZd.ġ. I hope this helps other readers - I just spent the best part of a year figuring the below out!
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