[etheory]

Thanks all, I really appreciate the advice.

I was hoping that Toontrack would have provided some kind of guidelines for the SDX makers to follow, in order to ensure the product feels like a cohesive whole, and things all work together. They could have had some kind of post-normalization process for volume, but I guess they didn’t.

Thanks again, much appreciated. I think I’ll go through and make my own custom presets with normalized volumes to make switching easier.

[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.

[etheory]

Something like this. I did this by shift selecting all the instruments and shifting them up. But that’s prone to error if you are loading a kit that has relative pitches already. A global control would totally solve that.

• This post was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by etheory.

[etheory]

“No… it wouldn’t. It would create a very disjointed mix between the transients and the ambient channels. Doing this within your DAW would be a lot more cohesive.” – obviously you would “pitch shift” all samples, not just the hits. The ambient channels etc. But I’m not referring to pitch shifting, just playing the samples faster, which would simultaneously increase their pitch. I WANT their envelopes to run quicker. I apologize for using the term “pitch shifting” as I think that’s confused things.

“This is audio, and I’ve been mixing it since the 70’s.” – then you know your suggestion makes no sense. I’ve also been developing audio software for over 30 years as a hobby, I know that what I am describing is possible, because I’ve written software myself that can do it. I can even prove it works if you need. To do what you are suggesting with any level of quality you’d need to bake the output to .wav, then pitch shift that up by playing it faster. I don’t want SD3 to pitch shift and keep the timing the same, I just want it to play the samples faster, accepting that the pitch will increase, because that’s exactly the effect I am after. I think we are talking cross-purposes, or I’m not explaining myself properly.

I want to do the equivalent of “speeding up” a drum kit by playing the samples faster, I don’t want to pitch-shift independent of time (which yes, would work in the DAW, but I don’t want to do that, and I’m not talking about that, so sorry if that’s me not communicating what I’m trying to do properly).

I want to perform the equivalent of a “play this sample faster” operation, by simply uniformly playing ALL of the samples faster (like a sampler), and moving all the FX up to suit. The result would be identical to baking the break to .wav, then playing it faster. I WANT the chipmunk effect, since I’m trying to simulate the DnB/Jungle effect of playing a funk break faster. It’d just be a nice feature to be able to do it within a single interface, since then I can tune everything, keeping any existing relative tuning within the SDX.

• The post has been modified 3 times, last modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by etheory.

[etheory]

I’m a software engineer for the VFX industry and I write 3D rendering software. It would be straight-forward to add a control to pitch all the drums by the same % and adjust all attached FX EQ’s to suit. There would just have to be support from Toontrack to do it. And I just don’t think they understand how incredibly useful such a feature would be. I’m probably yelling at a cloud, but I really think this is worth championing.

“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.” – they literally do all work the same. ALL digital filters are just transfer functions, and those transfer functions can be shifted up and down in frequency using the same technique.

[etheory]

Pitching using SD3 would be significantly better quality than a pitch change plugin after SD3.

[etheory]

Thanks Jord,

But that’s not what I want to do. I don’t want to have to bake out the drumkit to .wav and then pitch shift in the DAW if I can do so within SD3, since if I can do so within SD3 I can tweak things without a large loop.

Such a feature would drastically accelerate my workflow, and from the implementation POV, would be fairly straightforward to do.

[etheory]

Thanks for your reply John.

But this is a LOT more fiddly work compared to it just always being there built in.

If it was built in I could instantly adjust any kit I load immediately.

If I use a macro I need to manually edit every kit/preset, and since you lock some presets with multifx I can’t edit those effects with a macro knob anyway.

Having it inbuilt would be significantly easier and resolve those issues.

I think it would also be a very popular feature with electronic music artists.

Thanks.

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

[etheory]

I want something that deliberately behaves as if you had frozen to audio and sped it up.

So I want the chipmunk effect in case I need it. This matches well to my use-case of simulating old breaks then sampling them and speeding them up.

A global pitch control would do that.

Automatically adjusting the EQ FX’s would be very important, and DAW automation would involve far too much manual setup, whereas a single global control would be much faster.

[Author]

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