--- In exs-users@yahoogroups.com, "des5080" <des5080@y...> wrote:
> Anyway, I *think* I've found a workaround which looks like it's going to work.
Ok it seems to work :)
There is an improvement which I will try in a moment but I'm glad to have finally achieved
what I wanted, which is a realistic, playable, controllable live sampled kit from pads.
I have a V-Drum kit but it's own sounds are largely fairly rubbish, and I wanted to use the
kit to play decent drum libraries - it sounds and *feels* so much better.
For now I'm using Wizoo Mixtended Drums which I really like, although I will probably
adapt a DKFH solution as well.
The sample kits contain three EXS files for each full kit - direct samples, overhead
samples, and room samples. For now I'm ignoring the room samples, there's enough
reverb in a live room anyway and this technique can be expanded fairly simply to include
those as well if you need to.
What I want to do is when I play the kick, an EXS plays the dry kick on audio instrument 1,
and the overhead samples on ai 2. The snares comes up on three and four, the toms on
five and six, hats, cymbals, rides etc etc.
You can quickly blend the direct and overhead levels for each drum group by the setting
the levels of each dry and overhead channel.
Each pair of direct/overhead channels goes to its own submix bus, so you can quickly alter
the overal individual sections by adjusting the bus faders (pull the snare up, drop the
cymbal levels down etc), then the whole lot goes to the main output or wherever else you
want it.
if you want to you can use plugins to compress the snares or eq toms etc, but you'll need
to be carefull which plugs you use to avoid introducing latency.
Now, this is fairly simple to set up. You *can* do it using just two instances of the EXS and
route the individual drum groups to multiple output channels, but I chose to have
individual EXS instances per group of sounds for one important reason - you can tweak
the envelopes to quickly dampen the toms or snare, shorten cymbals etc, and tweak the
polyphony settings accordingly to minimise processor overhead. It just gives you more
control and doesn't really take much more overhead.
As far as the environment goes, basically I use a mapped drum instrument to remap the
incoming notes from the V-Drum brain into the correct EXS notes, using the mapped
instruments ability to send to different output cables to ultimately determine which exs
instance each note goes to. So for exampe, hit the snare, the note gets transformed by the
mapped instrument and output on cable 2, which then gets sent to the dry snare EXS
instance and the overhead snare EXS instance.
At first I was going to modify each EXS instrument to remove the unused samples (so for
the kick instance, we only load the kick samples) but this isn't necessary, as Logic pools all
the samples and only loads them once anyway.
Ok, works great. Now the last hurdle - that pesky hihat!
I split the closed and open hats onto separate EXS instances, and using a couple of
transformers route the hihat control pedal only to the open hat EXS, and set up the matrix
to do a relative volume modulation based on the pedal. When the pedal is up, the closed
hat multi zone sample plays at full volume. Close the pedal and the volume gets reduced
to nothing. (I tried this using the ENV2 Decay setting first, but this doesn't update through
the note, only for the next note-on).
So in effect, there are no mute groups used at all. You play the open hat polyphonically,
and when you close the pedal to play the next closed hat, the open hat stops (well, can't
be heard :).
The next thing to try is to use the sample select to either fade between more open hat
samples down to nothing, and probably also to modulate the decay setting to give more
individual control of open hat lengths.
But so far, it works great, is *way* more playable than standard internal V-Drums kits and
the overhead mics add a much needed degree of realism and ambience.
In short it gives you a similar degree of control as things like BFD or DKFHS, but with the
power to customise it for your own needs.
Lastly, if you want to have multiple kits and be able to switch them from the V-Drum
brain, you could create custom instruments containing all the sounds you need, and
switch presets on the brain to send different note numbers to trigger the different sounds,
again mapped by the mapped instrument at the heart.
Apologies for the long post... Now I'm gonna go play me some drums!
Thanks for everyone who helped out earlier.
