Superior Drummer 3 announcement

[mikehalloran]

Sweetwater is advertising the upgrade for $199.

https://www.sweetwater.com/store/search ... +drummer+3

The core library on SSD is a $199 add-on. You purchase the SD3 license separately. Uh... yea...

I dont think that is the case.$199 is the upgrade
price from a previous version of Superior
Drummer (SD2 for most people). There is
no separate charge for JUST the license with
no content.

The Sweetwater SD3 page is confusing, I'll
say that.

No, it's pretty clear. The license lets you download, of course, just like my copy of SD2. You want the media on an SSD, that's another $199.

[mhschmieder]

I still haven't tried the audio-to-MIDI feature except on some old legacy files from a MOTIF workstation where there were too many "non-traditional" percussion elements (cuica, etc.) or brush work vs. sticks, for the engine to figure out what to do. I'm guessing it's meant more as a drum replacement quickie such as Drumagog, Trigger, etc.?

One of the things I love about Superior 3 is that the defaults are dry, and rational as well, so it saves me a lot of time as I don't HAVE to tweak the defaults just to get to a moderately usable sounds -- whereas in BFD3 I have to waste a lot of time removing all the mic bleed first, for starters.

Some of the updates to S3 have been pretty major events in and of themselves, with lots of new features, at no extra cost. Toontrack is really great when it comes to rewarding company loyalty.

I actually only have one complaint so far, which is that the note mappings seem to only be able to be displayed as note numbers, which I've never been good at memorizing, so I have to keep bringing up the MIDI map window instead, to find which note NAMES are associated with each articulation. There may be a preference, but I haven't found it yet.

Some of the EZX kits seem to have been tweaked to do special stuff in S3, but I may just not have gotten as deep into them before. For instance, in the Latin expansion, the Bongos offer bleed between the Hembra and Macho heads. As a result, I am finally able to do MIDI Bongos as one stereo track vs. separate tracks per head or even per articulation, to get the correct final balance.

[mhschmieder]

I found out how to get a quick overview of the keyboard layout of the note mappings tonight. It's simply in another part of the GUI, and not one that I would expect. The Help Menu lets you browse "About Sound Libraries" and then each one has a unique-to-that-library pop-up menu which ALWAYS includes "MIDI Layout".

This is a time-saver for sure. I might have to print a few of them, but they seem formatted for standard page layout, so they should be legible and well-formatted on paper.

Also, even though I would have preferred they spot-mic the ride cymbal (I use Beyer ribbon mics on ride and hi-hat and pull them WAY down, but only cover the other cymbals via OH's alone), at least I also found out that you can raise an individual kit piece's overall volume (across all of its mics) so that you don't have to raise the ride cymbal via the OH slider in the mixer and thus have unwanted side effects on the blend ratios of snare/toms/etc.

The kit piece volume slider isn't too hard to find, but I am multi-tasking at the moment and don't want to lose my place in the GUI.

Another nice thing is how it defaults to an appropriate kit piece and articulation if it receives MIDI for an unassigned note, and lights it up so that you can see what it's using. This helps when switching kits to one with fewer assigned drums and needing to evaluate the groove (I use that term loosely as I NEVER use loops, so I often have to audition a few sections of a piece to get a good idea of what works). It also helps in incrementally improving a groove beyond the standard GM mappings, which are limited.