Drums, Drums, and yet more Drums in DP

[Saintmatthew]

I'm using a Premier APK 7pc. converted to electronic w/ mesh heads and ddrum red-shot triggers with a couple add on-electronic pads and cymbals to boot,.....3 overhead mics for acoustic cymbals, connected to a DM Pro with MIDI out to a DM5 and an Akai s2000. Of course, I realize this is a bit of a specialized setup.....

[wonder]

I"m not a drummer, so my problem is i need loops. i'm mainly use it for demo stuff. of course if i'm cutting masters, i'll use a real live, breathing drummer.

[spinnaker]

Check out

East West Quantum Leap Storm Drum

Very Cool

[visiblecow]

BFD is a great big hairy, dangling pair of the dogs thingies...It's very good and if you get the 8bit kit and XFL refills your laughing. The XFL pack has the best brushed kits i've heard. Superb. That's my two euros on the issue...It's all subjective though innit...

[wonder]

i looked everywhere but couldnt find the official site for EASTWEST. any help?

[wonder]

My friend is a session guy in L.A. (drummer) and this was his 2 cents...

BFD is more like a sampler, has some loops, and good sounding acoustic drum samples. Stylus RMX is a groove module, tons of sounds, tons of loops, you can do everything to it, change individual sounds, put cool effects on everything, pin point, replace, has a built in mixer so you can build your own loops etc. etc .etc. I LOVE IT, very powerful program!!!! You can also take the drum sounds and create your own drum groove within your sequencer, DP that is. I am very impressed with it's performance. I don't have BFD, but know a lot of people that have it, they love it, but I think Stylus RMX is more powerful and just kick ass!!

[James Steele]

DFH Superior by Toontrack has the best acoustic drum kits.
not so easy to use but the sound is so real!!

I just bought DFHS yesterday and I'm blown away. Of course, I'm easy to please since my previous drums were coming from an Alesis DM5. Also, with this version I didn't have to mess with rewire... it just works. It's an Audio Unit and with DP 4.61 I have individual outputs. This is cool because I can mix DFHS like a real kit and have control over individual close mics and overheads. I can also process individual sounds in realtime with effects plugs. The current kit I'm working with was based on their DW kit with some changes. Also I gated the kick and snare close mics and then removed the snare from the overhead pair and put a Plate plug-in on it.

Any way, I'm really liking it and I found it online for $242 and Guitar Center matched the price for me.

[Rusty Shackleford]

James, does it put a lot of strain on the CPU to have one kit loaded? Thanks.

[James Steele]

James, does it put a lot of strain on the CPU to have one kit loaded? Thanks.

You know, the CPU strain is relative. I'm lucky to have just bought a Dual G5 2.3ghz. It was a refurb from Apple and it still has PCI slots so I could use my existing hardware. (I'm sure MOTU will eventually make a PCIe card, but I need to work NOW). I moved up from a 6 year old G4/350 Sawtooth that had been processor upgraded to a G4 1.4 gHz. The machine was getting flaky and it was finally time to retire it. I never installed DFHS on it so don't know how bad that would have been.

Right now I'm working on a rock tune and I probably only have 4 or 5 audio tracks (at the moment... more coming), the DFHS DW kit loaded and individual drums routed to auxes for control. I have a gate on the kick and gate on the snare, a delay on guitar and an instance of Plate reverb on the snare as well. This is not a large project to say the least. I tend to do rock songs, so I don't get into lots and lots of tracks like many of the TV and film guys, but it's nice to have a computer that's working on "idle" instead of maxed.

My CPU meter is hovering around 8% or so during playback of this project. I'm new at DFHS, this is my 2nd day of working with it. I'm also using it in 24bit mode. They have an option button that plays back in 16bit which saves on processor load.

There's also another interesting option that will reduce processor load. There's an on-the-fly decompression-scheme that will allow the drumkit samples to take up a smaller RAM footprint, but processing power is used to decompress the sounds as they are needed. When you first load a kit in this mode, you have to play your sequence through once triggering all the sounds you intend to use, because you can get glitches on the first instance of a compressed sample that hasn't been used previously. If you bounce to disk, that doesn't matter... it just effects realtime playback. That's the mode I'm using now. In this mode, the DW kit I'm using is taking up around 190MB of RAM.

You can also turn off this compression. When I did this, the DW kit went from occupying 190MB of RAM to well over 900MB. However, the processor load dropped noticeably. I have 2.5GB of RAM in my machine, but I felt I had more processor than RAM to spare, so I don't use it at the moment.

One other caveat to all of this... my buffer was set to 1024. I have not yet tried to input drums. (I use a keyboard, as I am not a drummer). For me I can get by reducing it to 256, and I'm sure reducing it to that would increase my processor hit. One option might be to keep a hardware drum module like a D4 or DM5 and use it for inputing drum parts from a keyboard and when you have something you like or close, route the MIDI track to DFHS, that way you could leave your buffer higher since there's no latency on a hardware instrument. This method would work best if you loaded DFHS note-mapped to General MIDI. Toontrack recommends not doing this because their note-mapping includes lots of expressive variations of sounds. Because I'm just putting down simple parts to help me flesh out an arrangement, and will be having a real drummer play and improve on it, I don't mind using the General MIDI mapping as these parts are for pre-production and not for an actual final mix.

[jonotron]

Reason has a great drumkit refill (sold seperately) with mixable mic positions etc. It's got a kit that sounds just like John Robinson's! Sha-mon!

[markmazur]

Assuming that you have a good selection of drum sounds - what controller are you using for the drummer? V-Drums? Triggers on a real drum set? How do you set it up for tracking? (Do you trigger a hardware sound module for the sounds? Does V-Drums have MIDI pass-thru?)

I'm a keyboard player and only program the simple repetitive drumming parts. I hire a real drummer who brings his kit in for jazz-style sessions, but my studio acoustics are lacking for recording a good rock drum sound. So I'd like to get the proper controller so he could do the playing in the studio but the sounds would come (after the MIDI tracking) from a good library.

Anyone with experience doing this and some suggestions?

[denne]

I use dfhs and C&V both by Toontrack. I play the samples live on my TD3 for monitoring while recording the midistream. This puts some load on your CPU, cause you have to lower the buffersize, but it works. The other thing is using DP's good ole drumeditor, works great too with dfhs.

[Tim]

I'm making great drum tracks with BFD. I do all parts manually, but it does come with lots of beats that can be triggered with one note like a loop sample, or dragged into DP as a MIDI file.

I don't know about the others of this type, but BFD is not so easy on the processor. It works fine in my G5 2.5DP, but my old Dual 1GHZ G4 barely cuts it.

I've got the XFL expander pack, and plan to get the new Deluxe as well (so it's easy to spend some dough on this).

Stylus is great for pre programed stereo loop stuff. It's quick and easy to use, and has a wide variety of styles to choose from (and cool fx). I use Stylus all of the time, but gotta have BFD for the rock stuff.

Get both!