Drum sound similarity map

[Tom van der Weide]

I’m a long time Superior Drummer user and I have collected quite a few SDX’s and EZX’s. In total I probably have well over a 100 different drum kits and who knows how many snare drums and so on. If I have a particular sound in mind, it is very difficult and time consuming to find the relevant drum kits / sounds, especially because it takes rather long to load another room (btw, why does it take so long to just load another room??). Therefore, it would be great if there would be a better way to browse and (re)discover drum sounds.

Some ideas how this could be done:

1. Browse drums / cymbals by name and have a text based filter. For example, I select ‘snare drum’ and then I get a list of all the snare drums in all libraries. I can then further narrow them down by filtering. E.g., I enter the filter ‘black beauty’ or ‘yamaha’. This should also allow me to see all the rooms / libraries that have octobans.
2. Browse drums / cymbals by properties. For example, show snare drums with a depth of less than 4 inch and that are steel. Or, show 15 inch hihats.
3. Browse drums / cymbals by ‘characteristics’ (we’d need additional annotations). For example, show ringy snare drums that are tuned high.
4. Similarity Map (similar to EzMix 3) to discover and explore sounds. Select a type of drum / cymbal, e.g., a snare drum, and you can see clusters of snare drum sounds that sound similarly. A bonus feature could be that on the product page of an SDX you don’t own, they could use the similarity map to show you how it would augment your SDX collection 🙂

1 and 2 are already covered in the Search Instruments UI, so especially the similary map would be awesome to have!

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