[daniel.bernhardsson]

Nice! I wrote a simple VST of my own to fix this. Shouldn’t be necessary though. I hope there will be an update to the midi engine soon, also to be able to use the standalone.

[daniel.bernhardsson]

Hi,

I installed SD3 yesterday and I’m really impressed by the sound quality. After tweaking the audio buffer size and adjusting velocity curves I feel that most drums have a very natural feel and sound great. But the weak point is the hi-hat in my opinion and I must say that I expected more from this. I have the same problem as many others, the non-smooth jumps between different hi-hat samples sound unrealistic.

So let me first tell you about my workaround and then I have some proposals for future updates.

What I’ve done is simply to create a hybrid kit and use my Roland hi-hat together with SD3 samples for all other drums. I created a kit in TD-11 where I turned all pads off except for the hi-hat. In SD3, I turned the hi-hat level all the way down. That works with a dry kit but with roomy presets, the hi-hat will lack reverb. One option is to match with some reverb in the Roland module but instead I’ve setup a project in my DAW (Cubase) that adds the same reverb to both kits. I’ve turned off the ambience in SD3 and I send both SD3 and the audio input from Roland to the same FX channel in Cubase. It would be really nice to have an audio input in the SD3 mixer though and process both kits there to make it even more consistent with other effects such as compressors and distortion. However, I’m very happy with the results since I’m getting the realistic hi-hat that I’m used to playing together with all the nice new samples of the other drums!

I think that some simple changes regarding how and when the different hi-hat samples are played could make a big difference. Adding some crossfading between the samples as suggested by others could be an improvement but I’m not sure that will go all the way. Since the tails of samples with different openness sound so different in many cases, with different resonant frequencies, I think it is difficult to fade between them in a realistic way. When I listen to my TD-11 hi-hat, it doesn’t sound like it is fading between different levels of openness. If I strike the hi-hat fully opened and then press the pedal slowly to the next position, the same open sample rings out anyway. I have to press the pedal below a threshold to close it. No matter the pedal position when I’m striking the hi-hat, that sample will ring out fully unless I close the hi-hat to a certain degree. This is not completely realistic, but I’ve gotten used to it and in my opinion, that sound better than jumping between different levels of openness after the hit.

Another workaround that I’ve been thinking about is to disable some articulations and reuse one open hi-hat sample for several open positions. Then you would need to adjust the envelope curves for them individually to let the more opened positions have longer sustain. Perhaps it would sound better to jump between the different articulations if they are based on the same sample. I’m not sure if this is possible to set up though.

To tweak it further, if the hi-hat is being hit hard in the closed position and then quickly opens, in that case I would like to have a crossfade to the open hi-hat sample and get some of that open sound but not at all as loud as it currently is. A large part of the energy is lost before the hi-hat is opened so that sound will be quite weak on a real hi-hat. And maybe a reduction in volume together with a crossfade when the jump between samples occur could also be a solution to try out.

The bottom line is that it would be great to have a setting to turn off the transition between different hi-hat samples based on pedal movement after the hit and let all samples ring out instead. Unless you close the pedal below a certain threshold of course.

Best regards,

Daniel

Reply To: Non-smooth transition between hi-hat samples version: 3.2.1
Operating system: Windows 10

[Author]

Replies