1

[Tom]

Brad wrote:

Impressive, certainly not short on selection.

Hah, thanks. It’s hard to stop buying SDXs…  So I have the trial version of Gig Performer and have started trying to set it up for SD3. I’m curious how you did it? First thing I notice is that I don’t see a way to dock the SD3 window inside of GP, it is always floating. I suppose that could work but I’m hoping not to have to manage windows and alt-tab live on stage between songs. And would you setup your SD3 presets as different buttons on a panel in a rackspace? If so, how do you assign each button to an SD3 preset?

Reply To: Changing presets mid set for live music version: 3.4.3
Operating system: Windows 11

DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s w/WT-10s, RME Fireface UCX interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio headphone amp, Porter & Davies throne, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 w/State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, and Stories.

[Tom]

This is my SD3 preset selection screen in Cantabile. I have a hot key on my laptop that I hit to pull this up, and clicking on one loads it. The top eight kits are preloaded, then the rest are sorted by quieter/smaller to louder/bigger sounding kits, with weird specialty stuff at the bottom, and each color is a different SDX. SoundWorks by DW also in here.

I probably have too many presets, but I had all the Roland flagship modules (TD-10 through TD-50X) that had a limit, so it’s nice to break through that barrier and have a really large pallet.

DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s w/WT-10s, RME Fireface UCX interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio headphone amp, Porter & Davies throne, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 w/State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, and Stories.

• This post was modified 20 hours, 6 minutes ago by Tom.

1

Thanked by: Brad

[Tom]

Brad wrote:

Yes, I tested GigPerformer out while I was trying to determine why Cantabile won’t do the same thing. Must some bit that GigPerformer sets that Cantabile doesn’t, that triggers SD3 to run.

Interesting, I had tried out GigPerformer when I was testing out many VST hosts, I’ll give it a go again. One thing I like about Cantabile is that the host itself can mostly disappear and you are just looking at SD3 in one window, and there is a screen that shows all available presets color coded and organized which makes it easy to switch between them.

DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s w/WT-10s, RME Fireface UCX interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio headphone amp, Porter & Davies throne, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 w/State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, and Stories.

• This post was modified 20 hours, 28 minutes ago by Tom.

[Tom]

Brad wrote:

Tom wrote:

Brad wrote:

Hi Tom, You worked out the issue with Cantabile not preloading kits then, great!

Unfortunately no. When Cantabile is started it says it is preloading, but you have to load the presets yourself before they are. Not sure why. So before my first set at a gig I just step through the kits I want in memory and then switching between them the rest of the night is instant.

That’s too bad and my experience while trying to debug the problem ended with the same result. I thought maybe Cantabile had figured out how to trigger SD3 to load on startup.

Reply To: Changing presets mid set for live music version: 3.4.3
Operating system: macOS Tahoe (26)

• This post was modified 1 day, 20 hours ago by Brad.

This is what Brad, the developer of Cantabile, said when I asked him about why the SD3 presets don’t preload: “The main problem with the samples not being loaded is because It seems that the plugin doesn’t load samples when the plugin itself is loaded and rather delays until the plugin is started. Cantabile doesn’t start plugins until the song is activated – so even though the plugin is loaded, because it hasn’t been started, the plugin hasn’t loaded the samples yet.”

DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s w/WT-10s, RME Fireface UCX interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio headphone amp, Porter & Davies throne, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 w/State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, and Stories.

• This post was modified 1 day, 9 hours ago by Tom.

[Tom]

Brad wrote:

That’s too bad and my experience while trying to debug the problem ended with the same result. I thought maybe Cantabile had developed a fix for it sine then.

Yes. I suspect it may be something SD3 is doing? I believe other large VSTs preload just fine in Cantabile. And SD3 has some odd behavior when it comes to loading presets I think.

DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s w/WT-10s, RME Fireface UCX interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio headphone amp, Porter & Davies throne, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 w/State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, and Stories.

[Tom]

Brad wrote:

Hi Tom, You worked out the issue with Cantabile not preloading kits then, great!

Unfortunately no. When Cantabile is started it says it is preloading, but you have to load the presets yourself before they are. Not sure why. So before my first set at a gig I just step through the kits I want in memory and then switching between them the rest of the night is instant.

DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s w/WT-10s, RME Fireface UCX interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio headphone amp, Porter & Davies throne, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 w/State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, and Stories.

[Tom]

I load all 8 presets into memory, think it uses about 40GB of RAM or so, each kit with no layer limits. I was lucky to have bought 96GB of RAM back when it was much cheaper than now. Tho I guess for Macs you can’t upgrade RAM.

DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s w/WT-10s, RME Fireface UCX interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio headphone amp, Porter & Davies throne, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 w/State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, and Stories.

• This post was modified 5 days, 14 hours ago by Tom.

1

Thanked by: Brad

[Tom]

Yes, I have about 165 total SD3 drumset and one DW SoundWorks presets – probably too many but I love it! – and each is it’s own instance. Eight of them that I use for gigs I have set to preload into memory so they are immediately available, and the others load normally taking a little time. I forgot that it was Windows only, but yes there are many VST hosts out there for mac and pc both. And you can get pretty far with not tons of RAM, particularly if you don’t mind dialing down how many layers are loaded into each instrument.

DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s w/WT-10s, RME Fireface UCX interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio headphone amp, Porter & Davies throne, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 w/State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, and Stories.

• This post was modified 5 days, 15 hours ago by Tom.

1

Thanked by: Scott Eshleman

[Tom]

I use Cantabile as a VST host and have my gig drum presets preloaded so that I can switch between them live with no delay. I have forward/back preset hot keys marked on my laptop keyboard so I can see and hit them quick and easy, but you could also use midi.

DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s w/WT-10s, RME Fireface UCX interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio headphone amp, Porter & Davies throne, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 w/State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, and Stories.

• The post has been modified 2 times, last modified 5 days, 16 hours ago by Tom.

2

Thanked by: Brad and Scott Eshleman

[Tom]

Yes, I’m assuming you’re using more than one kit, and yep if you wanna keep things simple, just leave it standalone fer sure. I guess SD3 seems like a lot for one kit, heh.

DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s w/WT-10s, RME Fireface UCX interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio headphone amp, Porter & Davies throne, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 w/State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, and Stories.

[Tom]

If you are only playing live drums and not wanting to record or need features of a DAW, I think a VST host like Cantabile – there are many available – is great. A VST host allows you to do many things you can’t do in standalone SD3. For example, I have Cantabile configured so that I hit one dedicated key on my laptop and it shows all of my drum presets across all libraries so that I can click one and it loads. I don’t have to navigate several menus to load an SD3 preset. And I have some of these kits pre-loaded so that switching between them is instantaneous without the load time.

DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s w/WT-10s, RME Fireface UCX interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio headphone amp, Porter & Davies throne, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 w/State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, and Stories.

• This post was modified 2 weeks, 2 days ago by Tom.

[Tom]

Thanks Shen, yes I meant to say Hitmaker not Stories.

DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s w/WT-10s, RME Fireface UCX interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio headphone amp, Porter & Davies throne, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 w/State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, and Stories.

[Tom]

bpjacobsen wrote:

definitely liking Stories better than state of the Art. got more of that raw rock sound I look for. some nice snares in there.

I agree, Stories is great – also for a more specific sound and maybe less generally useful then some other SDXs. It’s a lot of bright, punchy, higher pitched, and cracky drums – Phil Collins sounding stuff since it’s the same engineer. Genesis is one of my favorite bands so I love it, though I don’t cover their songs much. And, it’s awesome that basically all of the old drum machines/modules like the SP-1200, Linn drum, Simmons, Roland TR-808, etc are included. Again, not always needed, but perfect for the right song.

DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s w/WT-10s, RME Fireface UCX interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio headphone amp, Porter & Davies throne, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 w/State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, and Stories.

[Tom]

Byron K wrote:

Is Decades SDX any good?

For me I didn’t find as many usable/keepable kits in Decades. It’s a bit more jazz/dry/ringing kick drum type of stuff. Not bad tho.

DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s w/WT-10s, RME Fireface UCX interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio headphone amp, Porter & Davies throne, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 w/State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, and Stories.

1

Thanked by: Byron K

[Tom]

Cheaper to order the triple pack from https://www.thomannmusic.com btw. And I bought several individual choose your own SDX on Reverb for $119 each, but don’t see those available anymore – keep an eye out. But yah, I really like Legacy of Rock and Fields of Rock, and use D&D not as much since they are mostly so huge. And I would steer away from the older ones for edrums since they got better over time with articulations – sort them by latest release and stick towards the top.

DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s w/WT-10s, RME Fireface UCX interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio headphone amp, Porter & Davies throne, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 w/State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, and Stories.

[Author]

Replies