Six years after the successful releases of the Red Zeppelin and Black Pearl AVL Drumkit libraries and LV2 Plugins I have once again partnered with x42 Plugins resident genius Robin Gareus (aka @x42) to bring out brand new ‘Blonde Bop’ Drumkits in various library formats including Robin’s excellent LV2 Plugin. This new kit is a natural maple 4pc. TAMA Club Jam Bop Kit. Although small in stature this little kit kicks ass and has been sampled in two versions; a regular stick version and a super-phat version played with Promark Hot Rods! For all the details please set aside some time to watch the release Video, download links at the bottom of the post!
Let me say 3 things: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
I’m using the AVL drumkits myself in 90% of my songs, and I very much appreciate having another flavour.
Times and again I was thinking about extending it myself, because it probably is a tailored engine plus soundfonts, but looking at the source code, I came to the conclusion that this is currently beyond my capabilities.
And hearing the demo I think it is very good for a dense mix.
EDIT: Just tried it in my current song project, I think it really hits the nail. I like it.
This is true for the multi-output variant, but the stereo version is equivalent to loading the .sf2 into fluidsynth, installing and selecting a custom MIDI-name file, etc.
Back in 2016, just after the original kit was released, the (now defunc) libremusicproduction website had instructions how to use the AVL Drumkits with Ardour. It was a 10 (!) step setup process.
This seemed ridiculously complicated. It should just be a single step: Create MIDI track with the drum-synth.
This lead to the LV2 plugin. Simplicity is a major factor. The goal is not to replace drumgizmo, or various commercial drum samplers, but to make it as simple and fast as possible to lay down some amazing sounding MIDI drums.
It is really so useful and simple. Using the multi-output version all the time. One midi, 2 flavours of drum kits, without changing anything in Ardour, except the plugin. And now I have 4 flavours!
Folks, try it out!
Also to you: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Thanks Peter, very glad to hear you are getting good use out of them!
As mentioned in the Video, work is ongoing adding a hand percussion set, it will depend largely on my schedule and Robin’s but hopefully in the next few weeks…
Thanks so much for this. I would like to play the plugin with my tabletop drum kit. Where can I see a list of the midi note of each drum so I can map the pads to the plugin?
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PS. Ardour comes with a plugin (really a Lua Script) “AVL Drumkit MIDI Map”.
This can be used to map MIDI messages from a physical pad-kit and re-assign them to corresponding AVL hits. You can load it on the MIDI track before the AVL LV2 plugin. Remember to save a preset, so you can use it in other sessions as well.
What a happy day. Thank you sincerely both Robin and of course Glen. Kudos x1000.
I’ve been dreaming of a virtual set with rute stick hits (not too long…), and so how nice that a cool messir from up north just went and did it. For free, even. I sure wanted to donate thru the Bandshed site, but alsa… erm, alas, I found jack
Glen seems to be hiding it for some reason, but you find a donate link embedded in this page: MXDE-EFL Build – bandshed.net
And Robin hides his as well, which you can find on one of the button graphics on, for example, x42 Digital Peak Limiter
Or the direct links seem to be:
Glen/AVL: Donate
Robin/x42: Donate
Hi
Ive just installed the AVL Drumkit debian binaries form Bandshed and my vst2 plugins are gone from ardour
I used the thunar debian package installer, on MX 21 AVLinux Ardour 6.9
Please help
Many thanks
Try to re-run a Plugin scan in Ardour’s -->Edit–>Preferences—>Plugins then re-open the session and see if they reappear. Post back and we can proceed further if needed…
Upgrading the Drumkits should have no effect on any VST Plugins, they are LV2 binaries that install to /usr/lib/lv2/ which is an unrelated directory…
Hi Glen
The plugins are all the ones trhat came with AVLinux. The only other
plugins I have installed are invada studio lv2 from debian repo and didnt
have any problems following that
Ive rescanned all the plugins. The VST2s are still not showing. Please see
the following scrennshots:
In the plugin-manager, can you sort the list by Type and check if there are any other airwindows plugins, or search for tapefat in the manager (not the selector) and see if there is an error message when you select the plugin.
AV Linux comes with the complete airwindows pre-installed. There should be many more than 2 showing up…
Oh… I think I know what’s happened! Is this an older version of AV Linux? My guess is that older versions had a huge package called ‘avl-mxe-extra-plugins-dist’ that was a catch-all package for Plugins not within Debian and from other non-repo sources. I finally had to do something about how huge that collection was getting so I had to split them into many individual Plugin Packages and the installation of the individualized avl drumkits probably triggered a conflict and uninstalled the previous collection which included airwindows.
It was mentioned in the last AVL release announcement that this had been done… Anyway you can find airwindows and many others individually Packaged here now…
Hmmm, I’m sorry to hear that. In order to not mess things up with failed installs I needed to make the individual Packages conflict with the previous mega-package. It was unfortunately a decision that required a big change and to be honest when I updated the Drumkits Package I didn’t fully consider what might happen…
In any case this is the way forward with Plugin updates and with future ISO’s it will be the individual Packages linked above. The bonus will be you can pick and choose what you really want and not have to deal with possibly hundreds of Plugins you may not have wanted in the first place…
Thankls Glen
I reinstalled airwindows from the bandshed repo, rescanned and they have
reappeared.
Would anything else have been caused by the changes you said?
I have always kept my MX21AVL up to date with the updates installer. Is
that the correct way to do it, or am I missing something?
I was waiting for the new version 22? you mentioned recently before moving
on to Ardour 7
