Topic: Velocity range of kits

Participant

TLDR; The default zero velocity-setting does not seem to be the optimum value to reflect the timbre of a drummer who is playing ‘with intent and feeling’, and each kit seems to have a different min/max range of ‘soft to loud’ timbres.

I’m relatively new to this stuff, and also have limited kits to test this on. As I understand ‘drum sampling’, the drummer plays each piece of the kit at several velocities, which captures several timbres of each drum.

Reducing the midi slider in EZD2, I would expect the overall volume to change without affecting the timbre of the instruments, and that’s what seems to happen. Whereas if I select all the patterns in the ‘song track’ timeline, then chose ‘edit play style’ and reduce the velocity pot, I would have expected it to sound like a drummer trying to play the kit softly/quietly. Which happens, to a certain extent…

I find that, depending on the kit, I have to set the velocity between 20 to 60 to get the timbre of a drummer who is ‘playing with intent’ (ie. the zero velocity setting reflects a drummer who is backing-off a bit).

Increasing the velocity to between 45 and 90 obtains the impression that they are belting the skins. In other words, on some kits the maximum timbre is triggered at 45, and on some kits it is triggered at 90.

If I want to give the impression that the drummer has backed right off, and is playing as quietly as possible, then it only sounds realistic at around -10 to -40, again depending on the kit; some kits have the quietest timbre triggered at -10, and other kits a bit lower.

Beyond those max/min limits of velocity it sounds like ‘adjusting the overall volume’, because the timbre doesn’t change.

That’s fine. I play the drums a little bit myself, and understand that there are realistically only about three or four levels of velocity which noticeably change timbre. What threw me is that I thought the different sound packs would be ‘normalised’, so that zero would be the middle timbre of all the kits and represent the timbre of a drummer playing with average, normal strength for the genre. Whereas -120 would trigger the quietest sample and +120 would be the loudest sample. But it seems like there is an absence of this kind of consistency.

The upshot of this is that the user should probably test the velocity-range of each kit they use, and set the velocity for their song bearing in mind that the default zero setting might be on the lacklustre side (from my experience of limited kits), and might get a more energetic feel by pushing the velocity for the whole kit up (sometimes by quite a bit). They might also get more natural dynamics by not pushing beyond the min/max timbres.

Can someone who knows more about sampling clarify if am I talking any sense? Would this have repercussions when substituting drums/cymbals from other kits? For example, if I added a bass and snare from another kit, it seems like it would it be necessary to adjust their velocities individually when I pushed or pulled the dynamics of the whole kit, in order to get the best results? And the more you customise a kit, the more you’d have to take the individual velocity ranges into account? Or am I just unnecessarily complicating things?

Thanks.

EZdrummer version: 2.1.8
Operating system: Windows 10

Velocity range of kits

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