SD2 Initial Impression, very poor.. help!

[joebalonmusic]

Hey all, I just bought SD2 mainly for tracking demos and practicing with V-Drums and well, let’s say I’m glad I got it on sale.

It’s immediately apparent to my ears that the sounds are pretty heavily processed, most specifically, compressed. I made this purchase under the impression (through researching/comparing popular drum sampler libraries), that SD2 was the way to go for raw unprocessed samples, in fact the desire for an organic quality was the main thing that turned me off Slate and made me choose SD2 over EZ. I’m looking at the SD2 mixer and can’t see any inserts enabled, so I’m assuming what I’m hearing are the “”””raw”””” samples. Am I missing something here? Soloing the top mic on a snare for instance, it’s instantly apparent that there is a considerable amount of compression that was either applied to tape or is being applied by the application (sounds like an LA2A). I’m an experienced engineer and want raw tracks to process my own way in order to achieve whatever desired sound for a given project.

I have read now that people aren’t particularly impressed with the Avatar kit, fair enough, but given what I’m hearing and how I’m feeling about this right now, I’m not about to spend more money on SDX’s if this is what I’m going to get. The GUI is not the greatest, and I knew that before buying, but I really thought the sounds would make it worth sacrificing. Super disappointed. I don’t want or need someone else to mix for me, or to be locked into someone else’s arbitrary compression/EQ.

So seriously. Am I missing something?

Topic

[Olof Westman]

SDXs vary a bit in how raw their sounds are. Most contain sounds that
are what the sound engineer would have put on tape while tracking.
For Avatar that does mean a comparatively high amount of processing.
Have a look at the Metal Foundry SDX instead. Its name implies metal
but that was a dubious marketing move. Its sounds are all raw and can be
used for any genre.

Olof Westman - Toontrack
Coder

[joebalonmusic]

@Olle said:
SDXs vary a bit in how raw their sounds are. Most contain sounds that
are what the sound engineer would have put on tape while tracking.
For Avatar that does mean a comparatively high amount of processing.
Have a look at the Metal Foundry SDX instead. Its name implies metal
but that was a dubious marketing move. Its sounds are all raw and can be
used for any genre.  

Thanks for the response. I’ll have to look into Metal Foundry, the instrument list looks appealing, I am a little hesitant though.

My biggest beef is with snare drum sounds. There’s this nasty attack, like higher velocity strikes were squashed with a compressor set to pretty short attack. The note attack cuts through in a nasty way, and the last thing I want to do is add more compression to fix compression 😛 . I’ve set up a multi-out patch in Logic and have come up with some decent results, but, a lot more time/work involved that I bargained for. So far IMHO the standard Logic kits give this thing a pretty serious run for its money for tone right out of the box.

[Author]

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