Superior 3 from Toontrack announced today

[mhschmieder]

Having said all of that, my approach to virtual drums is obviously more spot-mic oriented as a result of the compromises I make; whereas when I record live drums, almost everything else is low in the mix compared to the mono overhead Crown PZM30D Pressure Zone Microphone, which is amazingly detailed, timbrally balanced, three-dimensional (in ALL directions!), and dynamic.

The first thing I do with any drum library is see if there are any PXM30D channels, as well as Coles 4038 ribbon mics (mono, or stereo pair in Blumlein).

[FMiguelez]

Thank you for your detailed answers, Mark. I'm really enjoying the read!

Also, I must admit that, after re-reading your exchange with Waxman in the first page, I feel a bit of a pang of guilt for not being as thorough with my drums as you guys!
I haven't spent much time tuning drums or selecting and matching my preferred kits. I rarely, if ever, have the time to do this due to stupid deadlines.

What do you look for when matching/tuning your drums? Do you usually adjust say, decay parameters so they "fit" to the tempo of the piece better, for instance?
When you say you tune your drums, do yo mostly mean the toms, or the whole kit? I'm not sure I'd even know when a kit needs to be tuned? Tuned relative to what?
Do toms sound better approaching minor thirds relative to each other?

I've only used tuning the bass drum for electronic styles, so it matches the tonic (or even dominant) of the piece, but that's about it. And that does make all the difference in the world!

[mhschmieder]

Well, I hadn't gotten to the point of tuning to the song, but might have, if I was sticking with BFD3 (which I don't yet know, for the pop album, where tuning to the song might prove critical).

I wanted my starting point for personal presets to be musically useful and a better basis than BFD defaults though. I have yet to encounter a Superior kit whose tuning seemed "wrong" to me.

If you've ever bought congas or drums, you'll know that they are tuned down, just as are most guitars. This is to avoid breakage during shipment between different environments, but also because no assumptions are made about preferences at the buyers' end.

BFD kits (even some third parties) sound to me like untuned drums that have just been taken out of the box. But perhaps they simply felt that's the best starting point -- and I disagree strongly, because if you start at the bottom, and the average tuning is above that, then most custom tunings will start to exhibit some weirdness and even phasiness as you're applying synthesizer parameters to recorded samples, or pitch manipulation software.

There's no right or wrong; metalheads often like a looser and boomier low-down sound, even on snare drum (and often disengage the snare wires). But I like a tight kit with very strong articulation and dynamics, so I tend to tune to where that is the impression I am getting from the kit -- and it will be different based on drum size anyway, which varies by kit.

So it's not an analytical thing; I use my ears. And I listen to each kit piece in isolation, with the kit, and against some music, and know I'm "done" when all of the drum articulations are cutting through consistently.

Top kit is trickier as "tuning" cymbals CAN be done but is more likely to exhibit anomalies, so I stopped doing it and focused on switching the sound source instead.

Oh, and in case you didn't know, you could have ten of the exact same model of Zildjian cymbal, same size and thickness, and yet have markedly different pitch centres between them. It's amazing! I'm still not sure I fully understand why. But it's the truth. So I use my ears more than measured dimensions, to choose top kit pieces. The hi-hat might even sound lower than the crash! Cymbals are as complex as pipe organs, in their variations.

Due to how BFD kits (including most third parties) were recorded, I also had to spend eons dialing out the resonance of each kit piece, to avoid build-up of "bump" frequencies that would muddy the mix. I couldn't apply a formula; I had to do it case-by-case and use my ears. EXTREMELY time-consuming.

Superior sort-of has an equivalent feature now, but it isn't needed for the most part, as the recording process was handled so much better. And I don't tune Superior kit pieces AT ALL, because their process isn't as transparent as fxpansion's and I couldn't live with the stark unnaturalness of the result.

I'm really enjoying how easy it is to quickly find a Superior kit that works best for the song. It helps that their mapping is GM-compatible and augments it; whereas fxpansion threw out their old GM-compatible mapping in BFD3, forcing me to do time-consuming MIDI editing before I could even start auditioning kits (this is for pre-recorded MIDI vs. live triggering of new parts).

What I do, is some quick comparisons of kits that are markedly different in pitch, timbre, and sustain, as well as material, which takes less than ten minutes, then I know the general needs of the song and can audition a few relevant kits and then make choices about substituting individual kit pieces or not.

With BFD3, that was never an option, as I found 100% of the presets 100% unusable. So I'd have to use my own template to load individual kit pieces one at a time, to put together kits worth auditioning and comparing. And their kit piece browser in BFD3 was a HUGE step backwards from BFD2, as they eliminated the visual browser from the process, and the names are inconsistent and often not very obvious what they are, as well as issues in general with always starting from top-of-list (vs. where the current choice is in the list) and mouse acceleration and the like making it hard to be confident one has noted all relevant choices.

It's really helpful to have visuals at every stage, such as a non-generic kit outlay that immediately shows you what choices you made in an overview vs. when clicking piece-by-piece and reading text off to the side. BFD2 was like that as I recall; BFD3 is not. I'm EXTREMELY familiar with the history of drums, so maybe this isn't as useful to those who aren't. But why penalize people for knowledge they have vs. enabling that knowledge to be useful; especially as novices become more knowledgeable over time anyway?

[mhschmieder]

Oh, about the tuning and I think a few other parameters in SD3, I should have mentioned that there's a "PROCESS" button that essentially resamples and re-saves vs. applying real-time algorithms, and thus gives better results, but it is those results that I was comparing to BFD3 vs. the unprocessed real-time "audition run" of various tuning and resonance tweaks.

My guess is that the fxpansion team, being synth-oriented people overall, have more background in developing transparent algorithms for such stuff. But like I said, I don't feel the need for it anyway in SD3 as the drum heads are all made taut enough to have good harmonic structure and resonance rejection. They probably also did stuff like apply Moon Gel, which I don't think fxpansion did.

[mikehalloran]

Although SD3 kits and drums sound good right out of the box, I always tweak tuning and never use the stock patterns.

The reason has little to do with aesthetics—although, as a drummer in my youth, I do enjoy the process—and everything to do with the listening apps that the PROs worldwide use to identify music as it’s played on the internet. Nearly all radio and TV stations stream nowadays plus YouTube etc.

For example, BMI uses Shazaam (and had to sell it in 2012 when it made money and threatened their nonprofit status), now owned by Apple. ASCAP and SESAC developed their own apps but never made them public. Anyway, all PROs use something to ID works so that they can pay their members.

Using stock kits and loops confuses these apps. They use the first 20 seconds or so to recognize your work and, when they get confused, your tunes can be ID’d as another’s. I once tried to ID a tune being played by a DJ on a web site and gave up after Shazaam gave me 50 different results (ok, it was useless after 2 but I got curious). I still don’t know what loop was being used (and don’t care) but you get the point..

Loops, stock patterns and kits are ok for working out ideas but, if you like them, others are using them, too. When it comes time to record, “roll your own”. Fortunately, the tools in a good app like SD3 makes this easy to do.

[mhschmieder]

Wow, that's really useful information, Mike.

So maybe I should do some minor tuning of the kits before final renditions after all.

By "patterns", are you referring to MIDI loops? I don't use those; I grow my own. I will occasionally pull in something from Twiddly.BITS because those were played by top players like Bill Bruford and cover every genre on the planet as well as having been recorded using rare and sophisticated MIDI controllers of all types. But it's just to get more human-like hi-hats and occasionally some interesting fills. And everything is HEAVILY edited afterwards anyway.