Would be great to add a global tuning parameter

[etheory]

Hi there! New Superior Drummer 3 user here. I’ve had...

Hi there! New Superior Drummer 3 user here.

I’ve had SD3 for a few days, and am already loving the results.

My goal is to use it to recreate some classic breaks for DnB and Neurofunk (see attached) and then use them as if I was using the original samples, but with more control, and more possibilities.

For that purpose, so far, it’s great. I also understand that for people using it for standard drumming things, my request makes no sense. But hear me out….

What would really help, is a global tuning parameter, something that effectively takes everything, the independent tuning per drum, and all the FX EQ’s and shifts them all by the amount that you set. The reason this would be so useful, is to simulate the effects of cutting to vinyl, sampling, then speeding up the results. I can do this currently using the tuning attribute, but in an existing drumkit with some offsets, I have to manually compute those offsets and it gets more complicated than I would like.

For this to work properly, internally it would need to be turned into a multiplier on all the existing frequencies, so it would take the bottom and top tom tuning up or down by the same amount, to simulate a literal squash of stretch of time. Bonus points if it moves the FX EQ’s up or down by the same amount to ensure they all sound the same at the new pitch also.

This would be immensely useful, and allow me to construct pitched-up kits for electronic music without the need to leave the program, sample, and pitch up outside of it.

Open to all thoughts on this, but theoretically it would be relatively straight-forward to implement.

Superior Drummer 3 version: 3.4.2
Operating system: Windows 10

Hi there! New Superior Drummer 3 user here.

I’ve had SD3 for a few days, and am already loving the results.

My goal is to use it to recreate some classic breaks for DnB and Neurofunk (see attached) and then use them as if I was using the original samples, but with more control, and more possibilities.

For that purpose, so far, it’s great. I also understand that for people using it for standard drumming things, my request makes no sense. But hear me out….

What would really help, is a global tuning parameter, something that effectively takes everything, the independent tuning per drum, and all the FX EQ’s and shifts them all by the amount that you set. The reason this would be so useful, is to simulate the effects of cutting to vinyl, sampling, then speeding up the results. I can do this currently using the tuning attribute, but in an existing drumkit with some offsets, I have to manually compute those offsets and it gets more complicated than I would like.

For this to work properly, internally it would need to be turned into a multiplier on all the existing frequencies, so it would take the bottom and top tom tuning up or down by the same amount, to simulate a literal squash of stretch of time. Bonus points if it moves the FX EQ’s up or down by the same amount to ensure they all sound the same at the new pitch also.

This would be immensely useful, and allow me to construct pitched-up kits for electronic music without the need to leave the program, sample, and pitch up outside of it.

Open to all thoughts on this, but theoretically it would be relatively straight-forward to implement.

Superior Drummer 3 version: 3.4.2
Operating system: Windows 10

Topic

[etheory]

Jack and Jord, whilst you both may be extremely talented music producers with many years experience, something I don’t doubt for a second, I don’t think you still understand my request at all. I must just be REALLY bad at explaining simple concepts.

“What I do find humorous is that as soon as we speak from experience he seems to pull out his programming credentials as if it’s going to refute everything.”

• None of the comments you made prior to my comment had anything to do with experience. I wasn’t mentioning my programming experience to try and sound smarter than you in any way, the reason I mentioned it is because Jack made a comment about EQ’ing that is simply wrong, and I know this, because I’ve written hundreds of digital EQ’s in my time, and why my experience was relevant to that answer. If we were discussing recording or live musicians, I cannot speak from experience, but I can for digital processing.

Jack said: “Not that easy to do especially you’d have to account for every eq that SD3 has and as you should know not every eq works the same.”

• This is simply false. Every digital EQ works the same. If you know the theory, you know this. All digital EQ’s are a bunch of input and output coefficients. As such, they can easily have their frequency responses shifted by a constant amount, which is what I was specifically talking about. Even nonlinear filters can be coded to operate with their frequency response shifted up or down. This is the reason I “pull out his programming credentials” – is since I literally could write the code to perform this task myself if I was working at Toontrack. You not being able to understand this doesn’t really change the facts. Your years of experience don’t change this fact either. I also think you are still responding to things I’m not saying, or not understanding the point I’m making.

What I am asking for is a control that basically “speeds up or slows down the concept of time separately from the actual DAW timing”, so that I can simulate a post-recorded “play back the sample faster”, which is a common effect used by basically every electronic music producer ever. I am NOT after a pitch-shift plugin or anything of that nature. I don’t like the way they sound at all. I want to play the samples faster or slower. It would be convenient, and extremely useful, to have such a control directly inside of SD3. This seems like a fairly resonable request. I am sure that the two of you probably have no use for such a feature, and want to use SD3 to make the most realistic drums for acoustic drum production ever, and that’s TOTALLY fine. You simply wouldn’t have to use such a feature. But it both seems like a perfectly reasonable request, and also not a particularly technically difficult request to pull off.

For instance, take this loop from SD3:

This is a loop with all the SD3 instruments at their default pitches.

If I manually go to each instrument and pitch them up to 0:07.0, by shift-clicking all instruments in the SD3 interface, I get the loop:

The issue is, that since a lot of the SDX’s that come with SD3 have the individual instruments with different Tuning settings, it’s not possibly to SIMPLY tune the entire kit up or down, whilst still preserving the relative tuning offsets of each instrument. To do this for all the SDX’s would be extremely fiddly and time consuming, if I did this manually, and if SDX’s are updated, or there are new versions, I’d have to redo this work every time. Also when there are FX on each instrument, specifically EQ, it would be very useful for these to be automatically adjusted from the same single control.

I tried John Rammelt’s suggestion, and it does kinda work. It’s EXTREMELY fiddly to do, and time consuming, but it is an option that I could use if I was willing to go through kits and do this. Where it falls down is when a kit has a MultiFX in it that isn’t editable, and is hidden from the user. In this case the result wouldn’t be possible to do correctly.

I am sorry if nobody understands what I’m asking for, I am kinda at a loss as to how else to explain it so that it makes sense. And don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate your suggestions Jack and Jord, I just also know that what I am asking for is technically possible. Whether anybody else wants such a feature, or if Toontrack would be interested in implementing it, is another.

Thanks.

• The post has been modified 6 times, last modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by etheory.

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