Wolfgang
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WolfgangI’ve bought Stories and State of the Art and tested them for a while. Maybe some of you are still interested in this topic:
With Stories I particularly like the Classic Rock, which goes well with a production I’m currently working on. Modern Rock is a kind of all-purpose but I don’t have any use for it yet. Musical Theater is good because of its different playing styles. I still don’t understand why Toontrack doesn’t do this with more kits. Please sample less kits but more playing styles!
My absolute favorite for what I was looking for is the Songwriter Kit. Very detailed and dynamic, very balanced and musical. Perfect for quiet to medium loud pop and folk. The big disadvantage of the kit is the hi-hat. The transitions between closed and open are unfortunately very uneven, the individual stages sound too different. That’s why I replaced it with the 15” Paiste 602 from Hitmaker, for me one of the best hi-hats out of the SDXs I own.
With State of the Art I haven’t used the drier-sounding sets from Studio Iso and the Library yet, but that may still come. My personal highlights are the Craftsman Kit and the Teardrop. The Craftsman is wonderfully versatile, I like that it sounds a bit darker so it fits well into the mix. The Teardrop surprised me as I’m not really a big fan of “vintage”. But it sounds really detailed and differentiated, I’ll definitely be using it soon.
Regarding the playability of the hi-hats, I find those from State of the Art better. With Stories (especially the Songriter Kit) the individual stages sometimes sound so different that there are clearly audible breaks when you open or close them slowly. And yes, I use the setting for E-Drum Optimized. Hopefully Toontrack will improve this with SD4, along with the missing transition between positional sounds of the snare. These are still the two biggest weaknesses of the software for me.
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WolfgangThe hihat articulations from open 0 to open 5 are the different stages of openness. Usually they are all played by the same MIDI note and the stages are controlled by MIDI CC 4. So yes, a controller pedal could be useful. If you need the hihat or ride louder just open the “Level” tab and raise the volume.
WolfgangThat’s exactly how you would play it on the ride. But again have a look at the video: he plays the blast beat with the tip on the bow. I doubt that shank on the bell would give him enough rebound to play that fast.
Of course it’s totally up to you to use the bell shank 🙂 I just wanted to make clear how a drummer would usually play it.
WolfgangOn top of what Jack mentioned, there are other variables such as the producer, their choice in drum tuning,  their recording chain, the setup in the studio, and even the studio itself. It’s no longer a “drums in the room” type of instrument but more of a recorded drums situation. Each library will act differently to your playing more because of how it was captured.
jord
The crucial point is exactly how each library acts with your individual playing. Maybe some time we get demo versions…
WolfgangNot sure if I get you right but let me answer from a drummers perspective:
The closed articulation represents the state of having your food down on the hihat pedal in a relaxed way. Kind if the usual position to play. The tight articulation simulates giving some extra pressure on the pedal. This gives you an extra short decay and alters the overtones, some hihats start kind of ringing when beeing squeezed. So it’s not a extra heavy hit, neither edge, tip/bow or bell.
Playing blast beats in high tempi you usually don’t hit heavy because you use finger technique. Have a look at the video you posted, it shows very clear that he only moves his fingers and takes advantage of the rebound of the cymbals and drums. So turning velocity up to 127 might not be the best way to simulate blast beats. If you need the hihat to be louder try to raise it in the levels tab or in the mixer.
WolfgangAs I said: digital pads on hihat, snare and ride. And no, these pads aren’t comaptible with eDRUMin, I use my eDRUMin 4 to make the crashes 3-way.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate all of your answers! But it’s not about triggering or trigger settings in general, I’ve put quite some time into dialing all this in. There is some experience here with e-drums over the years (decades…), anybody remembering the old TD-7? 🙂
As this is a rather special point maybe the best would be if Toontrack would offer some kind of demoing. Coming from a long time with my acoustic drums I’m probably just very petty.
Wolfgang@thedrumdoctor Would you mind sharing the kit you built based on the core sounds?
WolfgangThanks for answering! Turning up all the bleeds ist usually the first thing I do with every set 🙂
I spent a fair amount of time with dialing in the trigger parameters in the brain and am pretty happy with it. Next I startet with the TD-50X MIDI preset in SD3, tweaked some things like the response of the snare zones and the hihat open/close states. In fact after fiddeling around for some weeks I pretty much came back to the defaults. I tested and tweaked all these things during several recording sessions and three live gigs and I think I came to a state where it works the best it can.
One set I used to play was based on the Fields of Rock Stone set. The 15“ Istanbul hihat has a pretty nice transition from closed to open with kind of naturally differing states in between. In the Stockholm Rock kit the 15“ Paiste hihat feels like it doesn’t give me the same amount of subtleties, like some of the 7 states sound too close to each other.
Sorry, not a native speaker here so I hope I can make my point clear.
edit: using the digital pads on hihat, snare and ride
WolfgangYes, dialing in the trigger parameters in the module should be the first step before going into SD3. And this could take some time and tests, try playing to music a few days to see how the module reacts in real life.
I first used a VH-11 with the TD-17 and it worked quite well but had some inconsistencies with the open/close behaviour. That was why I switched to a FD-9 foot pedal with the VH-11 and the transistion was indeed smoother. If I hadn’t switched to the TD-27 I would have stayed with the controller pedal instead of a moving hi hat.
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Thanked by: wphallWolfgangI can only speak for what I have but the switch to a TD-27 with all the digital pads was a huge step forward coming from a TD-17. Not sure if it’s the best bang for buck as it’s pretty expensive. But it’s definitive the best triggering experience I ever had. Setting it up was easy by using the TD-50X E-Drums preset in SD3.
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Thanked by: wphallWolfgangHi John,
many thanks for your reply! So I’m triggering the sample from Crash 1 and mute it with aftertouch. Not 100% what I wanted but does the trick pretty well.
Best,
Wolfgang
WolfgangYes, soundcards (or better: their driver) can make a difference in performance. Did you install the latest driver for the Octa Capture? There are different driver versions for different OS versions so make sure you use the correct ones: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101921
Have you checked if in SD3 performance settings the number of CPU cores is set to 1? Especially for Logic this is the recommended setting. Plus you could play around with the core settings for Logic itself https://support.apple.com/en-us/101921
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Thanked by: VintagebuaWolfgangHi Paul,
can’t say anything about D&D as I don’t own it. I personally love the big Fealds of Rock kits, the Pure Goth is my goto kit. Together with the Stormtrooper Kit this SDX can sound pretty big and boomy. The Hitmaker was a little bit of a positive surprise. I think the marketing is a little bit misleading here as it’s very versatile and offers much more then just sounds “…RIGHT OUT OF THE GATE!”. Not used it that much but the Storyletter Kit became my standard kit for reahearsals.
You could save different MIDI mappings if you need to reassing the toms. Save them together with your SD3 presets and you have everything remapped per kit.
WolfgangIt’s part of the concept of SDXs to give you the sets as they were set up and recorded. If Eddie Kramer choose only two Toms (like with the Oyster Kit) you get only two Toms within that set. Actually that’s the main reason why I didn’t buy Legacy of Rock. You could add more Toms from other sets with additional instruments but they will always sound different – apart from the fiddly process of getting this to work. If you want to play sets with 4 Toms and 4 Cymbals my advice is to look for other SDXs with bigger drumsets like Fields of Rock, Hitmaker or Death and Darkness. Don’t get too fooled by the names or marketing of the SDXs, with some tweaking and mixing they all offer a quite wide range of sounds.
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Thanked by: Paul AndrewWolfgangAs a drummer I would love to see a SDX with like three standard kits with more variations in sticks. I think we have more than enough sets for every genre, beginning from the 20ies ballroom to any kind of (heavy) rock. But when playing in a band I need to switch between sticks with wires on/off, rods, mallets, with consistency in sound. Would be great to have a vintage set, one from the 80ies and a modern studio/rock set within one SDX for that purpose.
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