This has come up many times Klaus. As far as I know — and I am more than happy to be corrected on this — you pretty much get what you are given in SD3 as to cymbals, and there’s not a lot you can do about it.

After trying to add cymbals and slot them into different positions, I saw that the panning wasn’t changing in the stereo field, and there was no access to crashes panning controls. At some point I was advised that because of the ‘way the engine works’ or because of the ‘way cymbals were recorded’, there is no swapping around possible at the moment, and I would have to use cymbals as panned by Toontrack in my kits.

So I went through the preset kits and made a note of which cymbals were right, or left, or centre (not many of those as far as I can see!) and tried to find a right and left crash pair that matches well. There are one or two that work well for this, including a Paiste 2002 pair. So all is certainly not lost, and of course the sound (and different articulations within the individual cymbals) is amazing. But my progressive rock drummer dreams of having cymbals all over the kit are on hold for the moment!

Right now I have the two Paiste crashes, one left, one right, two splashes (a Zildjian and a Paiste, both on the left unfortunately), the ride where it usually is for a right-handed drummer and the china on the right. This arrangement does work well, but even though SD3 is great, the cymbals can feel a bit limiting.

Cheers

Rat