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[bpjacobsen]

So another strange thing I noticed. After I finished saving user instruments to update the rest of my recreation mix presets, I noticed that even if I don’t place the toms back into the folder that I had created, they still work. So how are those user instruments able to work if I didn’t even put them back into the folder? They are stored on a different drive in a backup folder, not in any SD3 directory. Wondering if they get hard coded somehow into the project once you add them?

[bpjacobsen]

Andrew Payne wrote:

You can route a cymbal to its own user mic channel and I do this all the time. I usually use the main OH channel routed to the new user channel also route the cymbal into another OH channel (if it exists) and if another OH doesn’t exist in that kit piece I route an ambient mid channel (or similar) to the OH. I then pan the user mic channel for the cymbal accordingly and decrease OH bleed if the pan doesn’t come out strongly enough. I have never had any issues with phasing. Happy to show the setup if that helps ? I do this for all my cymbals and I normally have more than 10. cheers, Andrew

Reply To: Is there a way to adjust panning on user saved instruments independently? version: 3.3.7
Operating system: Windows 10

Yes, please do share screenshots of setup for an example. While I have managed with status quo, always looking to learn another way. Thanks!

[bpjacobsen]

drumjack52 wrote:

To answer question 1 panning is one of those things that is not controllable from the drums tab. There’s all kinds of controls but panning is not one of them. The answer to question 2 might be akin to what you had to do in the renaming situation and look at the file for the saved as instrument and see if there’s something there that relates to panning. Problem is we don’t know for certain where the panning gets it’s parameters from – is it hard coded in the mixer or the instrument itself. I just tried changing the kick drum which is centered in the mixer for a floor tom and it’s still centered so by that I’m thinking the panning is hard coded in the mixer. Is that really it? Not sure. But it sure explains what you’re seeing. To me that would mean that the instrument save as ignores any panning by design. Sucks doesn’t it?

• This post was modified 8 months ago by drumjack52.
  Reason: spelling correction

It seems to vary. Some instruments are in their own channel on the mixer and can be adjusted. I have also noticed that cymbal options have varying panning built in. So if a cymbal loads with the wrong pan, I have to go in and replace with one that is set to the opposite. Seems like the cymbals have hard coded panning in them as there is no separate channel per cymbal like there is with the toms. weird.

[bpjacobsen]

drumjack52 wrote:

bpjacobsen wrote:

Well, hopefully this thread will at least help someone out if anyone else saves a lot of user instruments. For me, I just find it to be so much easier to save a tom as a user instrument so I don’t have to mess with all the presets as much. However, I’m about to start a new thread posing another question around this, so stay tune tracked. LOL

Let us know here what that thread is.

https://www.toontrack.com/forums/topic/is-there-a-way-to-adjust-panning-on-a-saved-instruments-independently/

1

Thanked by: drumjack52

[bpjacobsen]

Well, hopefully this thread will at least help someone out if anyone else saves a lot of user instruments. For me, I just find it to be so much easier to save a tom as a user instrument so I don’t have to mess with all the presets as much. However, I’m about to start a new thread posing another question around this, so stay tune tracked. LOL

[bpjacobsen]

drumjack52 wrote:

Based on your guess of 125 I’m thinking a power of 2 is involved. If so I’d take a leap and say it’s 127 – go over that to 128 and things go bonkers. Is it possible to save to more than 1 location/folder?

You can save them in folders but not in a completely separate directory. I believe you can only set one path. I did confirm though that once you are done, and put the moved user instruments back, they still work fine. It’s just that once you hit that threshold, it stops saving them correctly. very strange.

• This post was modified 8 months, 1 week ago by bpjacobsen.

[bpjacobsen]

drumjack52 wrote:

One way to find out if it’s the number of instruments is to take a few out (say maybe half) and see how things works. That would give you an idea that it’s the number of instruments saved. Then add some back in and repeat. I mentioned the renaming thing wondering if that was part of the issue. Did you have this current problem before going through your renaming process? Messing with one part of the file might have screwed up something unintended.

Another thing to try – can you fix the issue with one preset and if so does it reoccur with that now fixed preset?

Need to do some more testing, but so far, it is indeed the number of user instruments. I removed about 15-20 out of 130 to another drive, then was able to save a tom as another user instrument and use it. I also confirmed when I put all the others back, that tom still works, but I still need to go back and test to see if the other ones still work. Hopefully it is just a matter of temporarily moving some to another drive until I’m done but this looks like a bug nonetheless. Hopefully I can figure out what the threshold is but I’m thinking based on when this started, it’s around 125 or so

[bpjacobsen]

drumjack52 wrote:

I’m a little confused – is the second picture what comes up in the kit when you go to load it instead of the regular looking rack tom in pics 3 and 4? Or what? That exclamation point is what I’ve seen in other programs when a graphic file is missing or the program has lost the path to the file you want. I wonder if this is related somehow to the issue you had with renaming user pieces?

No, nothing to do with renaming. Here is a breakdown of the process and issue:

1. I want to copy one of the drum presets in a project so I right click on one of the pearl masterworks toms – user instruments – save as
2. I save it as Tom – whatever
3. Now I go to add that instrument under user instruments which shows the name correctly as I saved it
4. The graphic shows one of my other instrument presets and that is what loaded (in this case, one of my jam block instruments)

The first time this happened, I saved a tom, but it loaded a kick.

The problem with just loading the toms etc from the library instead of saving as, is that the presets don’t match the sound of the others and it takes a ton more work to try and match them up via the mixer. Even if I use mic routing to set them to one of the proper presets, it does not usually match. Saving as makes it way easier to make the sounds consistent. I’m starting to wonder if there is a limit to how many user instruments can be saved? I would hope not. While I have a fair amount, it’s not really that many. Didn’t note the number of files but it’s prob under 100, maybe a little over 100 if that.

Also, the exclamation on the graphic is because there is no midi map on it by default. That goes away once I assign a midi note to it. Some instruments default a note and some do not.

• The post has been modified 2 times, last modified 8 months, 1 week ago by bpjacobsen.

[bpjacobsen]

All is working as desired now after updating the files. I had put a backup of the original files in a folder within the user instruments directory and found that it does still list them all in the user instrument list along with the updated ones. So I put them on a different drive and now I can just see my updated ones. Yay! So much better having all Toms and Snares etc grouped together in the list. Thanks Again John for that tip. And Thanks Jack for all of  your input as well. Always appreciated.

2

Thanked by: John and drumjack52

[bpjacobsen]

bpjacobsen wrote:

John wrote:

Hi,

I can’t speak for what’s in development but this should be on the wish list of things.
Jack is right about the User Instrument name being saved inside the text file that stipulates the properties for the User Instrument.
You can right-click an Instrument and go to Manage in Finder/Explorer to jump directly to the User Instrument presets and if you have e.g. a Kick that you originally named ‘Kick_1’, then want to name it ‘Awesome Kick’, you open the text file and enter/paste the name you wish it to display in SD3 between the very first quotation marks in the beginning of the text file.
It’s at least a work around.
BTW, don’t forget you can organise your User Instrument Presets in folders. SD3 will not display the folders when you use the ‘Add Instrument’ drop-down in the top left but if you know you’re going to add a certain Instrument in a certain slot, it can be helpful, like in my attached screen shot.

BR,
John

Thanks for this info. Very helpful.

If I put the user instruments into folders now, will it cause the existing assigned instruments to stop working? Or does that just simply give you categories to pull from when going to user instruments? Don’t want to put them into folders now if it will mess up what I have in the slots now. Thanks

[bpjacobsen]

Oh, definitely, I always make a copy of files I am editing, juuuuust in case. lol But so far, this is working beautifully. very easy workaround. didn’t even think about opening the file with notepad. thanks again!

[bpjacobsen]

John wrote:

Hi,

I can’t speak for what’s in development but this should be on the wish list of things.
Jack is right about the User Instrument name being saved inside the text file that stipulates the properties for the User Instrument.
You can right-click an Instrument and go to Manage in Finder/Explorer to jump directly to the User Instrument presets and if you have e.g. a Kick that you originally named ‘Kick_1’, then want to name it ‘Awesome Kick’, you open the text file and enter/paste the name you wish it to display in SD3 between the very first quotation marks in the beginning of the text file.
It’s at least a work around.
BTW, don’t forget you can organise your User Instrument Presets in folders. SD3 will not display the folders when you use the ‘Add Instrument’ drop-down in the top left but if you know you’re going to add a certain Instrument in a certain slot, it can be helpful, like in my attached screen shot.

BR,
John

Thanks for this info. Very helpful.

[bpjacobsen]

wish I had thought to name them in a more organized fashion in the first place. Very frustrating and utterly disappointing for something so basic to not work as any human would expect given the cost of SD3. Oh well, live and learn. hopefully the next release will fix this along with all the other quirks people have been screaming about. Thanks!

[bpjacobsen]

drumjack52 wrote:

Not knowing the exact programming SD3 has but I’d take a WAG and say it’s something in the metadata of the preset. You can change the preset name in the folder but the metadata in the preset itself that denotes the preset name to SD3 doesn’t change. Haven’t done serious programming in a while but that’s what I guessing is happening.

OK, so the whole idea of deleting a cache folder is bogus? I don’t have any programming knowledge so it’s hard for me to conceptualize this whole caveat. LOL So does this mean if I really want to get this updated, I have to go and re-do all of my saved instruments? Like re-save as diff name? Ugh! that is cruddy.

[bpjacobsen]

drumjack52 wrote:

I agree it makes no sense but it is what is is and we can’t rename things and have SD3 see those renames as one types it. BTW there are NO screenshots in your reply. But it’s still the same thing as the other thread. To be specific when you right click you’re not saving an instrument per se but a preset.

The screenshots were attached in the initial post. So you are saying that if I right click on say, a tom from the preset and click user instruments – save as and save it as DW Tom for example, which shows in the user instrument folder and in the user instrument list, if I change that in the folder to Tom – DW, there is no way for SD3 to update that name to display what I changed it to? Again, I’m aware that instrument 1 and 2 and so forth cannot be changed. But this is not about that piece. It’s about the fact that I changed the instrument name in the folder and it still plays fine, but the instrument list does not reflect the updated name. For something as expensive as SD3, it seems absurd that it can’t display the names of my saved preset instruments the same as what they are in the folder. It just does not compute. So then the question is, where is that name stored that SD3 is displaying? Based on my search in google, AI is saying I should be able to delete the cache folder for SD3 to get the names to re-load from the folder into a new cache  basically, yet I cannot find one. So I’m at a loss. I just can’t comprehend this. So now I have a folder with names of instruments that don’t match what shows in SD3. Absolutely ridiculous.

• This post was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by bpjacobsen.

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