LOTE Blasts and Fills with Metalheads. Update?

[Scott Nelle]

I’ve seen other users talking about having trouble with MIDI from other EZXs; the snare hits are too quiet. Others have explained that the dynamics will obviously be different than on a much older sample set so you should expect to update your MIDI. That may be, but I’ve noticed that Library of the Extreme: Death and Thrash seems to work fine with metalheads with no tweaking, but Blasts and Fills is unusable without heavy adjustment, which makes it less useful as a song sketching tool than it would be with any other kit that I’ve used.

I’ve attached a zipped mp3 to demonstrate. I took a groove from Blasts and Fills (Straight 4/4 > Old School Blast @ 200BPM > Hats Open > Variation 01) and played it through the default Pop/Rock kit with no processing and no adjustment to velocity. Then (around 4 seconds in) I copied the same loop to another track where it plays through Metalheads default kit, again with no processing or velocity adjustment. What I think you’ll notice is that while the unaltered pop/rock kit doesn’t sound great for this style you can at least tell that you’re hearing a 200bpm blast beat with a strong sounding snare. When it switches to Metalheads the snare virtually disappears from the mix. This isn’t a gravity blast, either–these should be full snare strokes.

I believe the problem is that the velocity curve (the best term I could think of for it) goes up too sharply at the top end. That is to say, the samples seem to go from quiet to slightly less quiet to FULL FORCE at some point.

I have a couple of suggestions for this. I imagine the easiest would be to release an update to blasts and fills that just tweaks all of the snare hits up to be in a usable range for metalheads.

Right now, the Metalheads instrument has good dynamic range, even if more of the velocity spectrum is reserved for soft hits than I think should be. My other suggested fix to solve the problem where Blasts and Fills is too soft to work with Metalheads is this: Add a “blast” switch via software update that gives it more of a death metal production feel, where all of the snare hits are heavily compressed because the producer wanted to get more even sound when the drummer was and was not blasting. It could probably be done without even updating the sample set. Instead, remap velocity to the existing samples so that the current sample triggered at 100 velocity now triggers at 80, the 110 sample triggers around 95, and the 120 sample triggers around 110. Something like that.

Food for thought, anyway.

Edit:  Not sure the embed worked. Here’s a direct link to the MP3. http://files.scottnelle.com/audio/poprock-vs-metalheads.mp3

Topic

[Whitten]

Have you tried changing the audio levels using the EZdrummer mixer?

[Scott Nelle]

I have. I find that bringing up the volume of the snare tracks to the point where most of the hits are audible makes the occasional high-velocity hits overwhelming. While I realize I could route the tracks to multiple outputs and compress the snare, that’s getting away from the ease of use that I mentioned earlier.

The real issue, as I see it, is that these two great products should be a natural fit and they just don’t work well together. Sure, we can all work around that issue, but there may also be steps that Toontrack can take to make it all work more smoothly. I guess that’s what this thread is about. Maybe it’s less of a support request and more of a suggestion box issue. 🙂

[Butter Buns]

turn the velocity knob to the right.

[Scott Nelle]

Thanks for the suggestion, Vince. I’ve found that the velocity on all of the other samples sounds pretty good so I didn’t want to mess with everything–just the snare. Barring any word from toontrack, the velocity knob is probably the quickest way to get Blasts and Fills to be usable with Metalheads.

[Butter Buns]

haha sorry for my condescending tone brochacho. the snare hits are really light in the original library of the extreme so its either turn that velocity knob to the right(assuming your using ezdrummer or ezplayer pro) or you can open your daws midi editor and manually edit the velocity. i end up upping the velocity then editing the midi at a later time for a more natural feel. or you can create your own blasts from scratch using renoise!

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