[Matias Lehtoranta]

Agreed, a list of tunings and a context window showing the drum’s tuning in realtime would be useful. It’d be good as a learning tool as well because it draws your attention to the fact that drums are a tuned instrument, and drum tuning is part of the source tone of a mix. I’m not saying drums have to be tuned a certain way, just that it’s good to be aware of what something is tuned to when it sounds good.

[Matias Lehtoranta]

Are you using only the stereo output from SD? No mixing in your DAW? Are you hitting the drums hard? Some presets use velocity gates, where high velocity values produce significant boosts in level and more layers are fired within a stack. You’ll miss out on that until you produce high enough midi velocity. This way of designing presets might not be present in all SDXs, or it might be done to a different degree.

I’m curious – what presets had the toms 10 dB louder?

However, assuming there’s no bug or user error going on:

I would argue that there should be sensible baseline volume balance across all SDXs. The production process, rooms, mics or gear itself shouldn’t (and honestly, will not) cause the player to feel like toms are 10 dB too loud. These are presets they mixed a certain way after the sample tracking was done.

What’s not certain is whether the presets were meant to sound balanced on their own, like a drummer would expect. Or if they were made to fit some potential mix where other instruments are eating tons of frequency spectrum. I’d like to believe it’s the former, but that’s not what the OP was experiencing here.

[Matias Lehtoranta]

This is a good question and I’d like to hear a definitive answer as well.

I’m fairly experienced with SD2 and 3 but as far as I can see, there is no way to disable individual samples within an articulation’s sample pool, nor is there a way to select which one is played when round robin is disabled. I would love to have both options.

[Matias Lehtoranta]

Just a follow up in case anyone happens to need this information:

This does work in Superior Drummer 2, so it’s likely a bit of an oversight in SD3. But in SD3 you can also kinda achieve this by setting the cymbal Choke/Mute Settings to Note Off mode, and then writing your MIDI notes accordingly. Of course it won’t help if you’re trying to play an e-kit, but then you can probably utilize the Aftertouch mode instead.

[Matias Lehtoranta]

Related question: I’m trying to create a setup with two rides, one on each side. Problem is, even though I can route their close mic sounds through two separate mixer channels and pan those channels L and R, the bleed sound from both rides will still be R on the ambience channels. As far as I know there is no way to pan instruments independently within the ambience channels, correct me if I’m wrong. So to build this double ride setup, do I have to just leave ambience (and OH) sound out from the rides?

[Author]

Replies