Bear-Faced Cow
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Bear-Faced CowI know on a Mac you can create a symlink in SD3’s preset folder to point to wherever you’d like and SD3 would never know the difference. Not sure if a shortcut in Windows would work in the same manner.
jord
Bear-Faced CowA Drum Designer map for Logic exists in SD3 in the dropdown. I use it with SD3 with very little issue (only mods i ever need are for future hit instruments).
jord
Bear-Faced CowWhen I’m working with drum parts within SD3, I don’t need to open a DAW. And, considering that I work with more than one DAW, I can use it in any one of them without concern for the drum part. Not to mention that I get a bit more out of the SD3’s editing than I do out of my DAWs as far as drum parts.
jord
Bear-Faced CowConsidering that he mentioned Whitesnake and Bon Jovi, we already know what he’s referring to.
There’s also a video showing how to do this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnpoAURfeBo
jord
Bear-Faced CowWhile I may one day go to the trouble of building a kit in SD from the ground up, part of the appeal of Toontrack products is ease of use. Both EZ and SD are excellent products and very, very easy to get good sounds without having to reinvent the wheel. Which types of sounds is another story.
EZ’s stock rock kits come prepared for heavy 80s rock right out of the box. SD’s stock rock kits come prepared for metal right out of the box. Unless I’m missing something, it completely neglects the 80s rock style I’m looking for, and that EZ has. So, in terms of the pre-built kits, it feels like paying for the flagship product and losing something that the entry level product included.
Admittedly, classic rock is an ancient art form these days. If 90% of your market wants metal, then it makes sense to heavily weight your product to metal. However, since EZ wasn’t so heavily weighted to metal, it was a surprise to me that SD is (something I didn’t discover until I’d spent the money and installed the product).
So far, the only options I see are to use the EZ kits and lose the additional capabilities that I bought SD for, or build a custom kit from scratch instead of using a pre-built stock kit, something I bought Toontrack products in general for.
There isn’t really any dark secret to getting an 80’s Classic Rock sound. Most 80’s drums used either short reverbs with longer ones for special effects, or compressed room ambient channels (or a mixture of both) underneath the drums. Considering the era, adding some tape and a hint of distortion goes a long way. As far as which kits to apply, that might depend on the song. Set up a mix template and try the various kits within it until you find something that works, and then tweak it from there.
jord
Bear-Faced CowGood grief, that’s a ridiculous UI choice. Why is this MORE difficult than it was in SD2??? I should not have to import the track into SD3–the whole point of a plugin is that it plays the track recorded in the DAW.
Sorry, but as a user who frequently programs drums within Logic, it is far easier with SD3 when it comes to internal bouncing. Aside from being able to bring in variations of my programming into multiple tracks within SD3, I find the both the edit play styles and grid editor extremely handy in putting the final touches on a rhythm track. From there, I can choose to bounce the finished track as I please. My overall workflow with other drum software was not that different prior to SD3. They just didn’t have the same tools.
jord
Bear-Faced CowTold you the drums were amazingly recorded. 
The UAD plug-ins still come in handy. I’ve often fed the drums through the Fairchild 670 as well as a Studer A800. The one song I’m working on has the SSL Bus Compressor & ATR-102 plug-ins on the output bus. That helps glue the whole together.
jord
Bear-Faced CowIt maybe also worth noting that there are plenty of good groove packs available from Platinum Samples.
Also, I wouldn’t underestimate the power of the tracker feature within Superior Drummer. I have discovered that it is a great way to obtain grooves from a few of my favorite drummers.
jord
Bear-Faced CowI’ve had a Mackie controller for almost 15 years. I known what it’s like to put my fingers to faders since the late 70s. However, we are only talking about setting the drum levels to their individual bus outputs once. So, it is not such a big deal what you use to adjust it with. You can use your controller to adjust the levels of the bus outputs once they hit your DAW. From there, you can use whatever plug-ins you choose. The only reason I needed to use UAD plug-ins extensively on BFD was mainly due to the fact that their libraries were recorded so bombastically loud that in many cases it sounded a lot like noise. Many of their room ambience channels we’re totally unusable to the point where I had to bring in the Ocean Way plug-in to rescue it along with having to shape the individual kit pieces. This is no longer the case with Superior Drummer’s core library. I think I’ve said many times on their Facebook page that the drums sound as if the sound is flying out of the drums. This to me means being able to use plug-ins where I want them, and not because I have to use them, or feel that I have to use them. I do resort to using some UAD plug-ins at the end, such as a Fairchild 670 and the Studer A800. However, like I said a different thread, the plug-ins in Superior Drummer stand very well on their own merits.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not telling you how to do things, as there’s no right way of doing things. Every drum mix is about as individual as the engineer behind it. I’m just saying from experience from being a 13 year BFD user, that we don’t have to do things the way we did in the past.
jord
Bear-Faced CowHonestly, that sounds more like the old BFD way of doing things. I found it was more of a necessity in BFD to separate the outputs and process in that way, because of their recording. However, I find I don’t need to do that with SD. The way everything is recorded combined with SD’s effects, these days, I can get away with just routing every kit piece to individual buses and either output from there to the DAW, or export them as audio drum stems. Before, I found myself having to work with 40 or so drum tracks. Now, I can work with just 16 or less with no less in quality.
jord
Bear-Faced CowHaving come to SD3 from BFD, I have found the effects in SD far superior (perhaps, pun intended), as well as the overall recording of the Core Library (sounds like music, rather than bombastic noise). I find that I only need to use my UAD plug-ins at the end of the drum mix (one drum mix didn’t even need it… it sounded great with SD’s plug-ins). I’ve gotten some really good results from SD.
jord
Bear-Faced CowSorry for the delay. I was actually playing all week with Reason and SD3. 🙂
Setting the cores to 1 definitely did the trick. It didn’t choke even on my most demanding kit preset. I’m wagering a guess that Reason throttles the amount of resources a VST is allowed to have. However, since it hasn’t presented any real issues between Logic and Reason, I’ll leave it at one for now.
jord
Bear-Faced CowSorry for reviving this. However, I’m wondering what the optimal setting would be in Reason 10 since I have discovered that on my Mac OS X (Sierra) unit, it coughs and sputters with V3.1.1 and more often than not gives a ” Computer Too Slow” message. The system I am using it on is powerful enough (with the audio and sample libraries on separate drives in an external RAID unit) and I never have any Audio Unit issues with Logic.
I do find that if I run the SD3 in Reason without opening up the plug-in window, it will play smoother.
thanx
jord
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