You have a real production formula down for this genre and you excel at it, the vocalist is tremendous and the guitars are pretty much perfect, a great mix and your Bass soundfont is very convincing…
Cards on the table I’m not a metal guy nor any connoisseur of the genre but in general and on this recording the drums don’t do it for me, the snare has a big timbreless thud and no presence, and the kick drum is conspicuously quiet and leaving too much of the groove to the bass alone. I know Drumgizmo owns the Linux metal drum market but I don’t think Crocel is the right kit for this song although there are a lot of styles it suits perfectly… {unrelated rant approaching} I don’t know what secret mountain lair the metal drum sound committee (MDSC) met in in the late 70’s and said “John Bonham created the fattest heaviest most deliciously thunderous drum sound known to man… now for our emerging ‘Heavy Metal’ genre lets do the complete opposite of that, and while we’re at it let’s scoop all of the midrange out of the guitar sounds… we will spawn the heaviest music genre known to man but we’ll remove all of the mass from it… this is brilliant!!” {unrelated rant complete}
My choice for the CrocellKit is purely based on pragmatism.
When I started my music production journey, I eventually stumbled over DrumGizmo. Initially I played around with The Aasimonster and the MuldjordKit. Both of them sounded way better than anything we could possibly achieve by recording the real drummer of my band (and I’m not even talking about all the logistics - mostly we are missing a good room, good microphones and a proper audio interface to capture all of this).
For reasons I can’t remember anymore, The Aasimonster won the “shoot-out” for my Time Capsule album. Later, when I started Scorched Earth, I stumbled upon The CrocellKit and was even more impressed by it. That’s why I stick with it since then.
Now that I have much more experience than back in my early days, I probably will give the MuldjordKit another try at some time (e.g. for the next future side-project which won’t be part of an album…)
I get the logic, not sure if another Linux kit (no, not AVL-Drumkits, not good for metal) or a sample set in the LSP sampler would be a good alternative. In this song I’d be interested to see what simply triggering a replacement snare sample could do…? I’m not down on Drumgizmo in general, it’s phenomenal, different songs need different sounds…
I was using the original Dio version of the song as reference, and pretty early I gave up on trying to achieve a similar snare sound, because … the original is just sooo awesome and out-of-reach.
Recently I also was thinking about playing around with augmenting (or even replacing) the original kick/snare tracks with some “awesome” samples. Just didn’t have the motivation yet to go down this rabbit hole (I barely came out from the “play around with NAM” hole a while ago )
By the way, The Aasimonster even provides a “trigger” track for the snare and an additional kick track from an Alesis DM5. On the other hand, I’m not sure if using those really has any benefit, because you have the MIDI track of the drums anyway so (in theory) you could just feed the kick/snare events to any arbitrary synth you find usable and add it’s output to the mix…
Today we had (again) our “music production using free software” workshop at this year’s “Grazer Linuxtage” event.
We used the previously released version of “Holy Diver” as baseline (drums, bass, and rhythm guitars) and did a kind of “live” (re-)recording of the vocals and guitar solo during the workshop, with just few takes each. Means: compared to the previously released version, it has some rough edges. Anyway, after two hours of quick mixing at home, here’s the result:
I just discovered Ugritone last week and can confirm they have a native linux download! There was NO MENTION of linux anywhere on their website, nor on system requirements; but I was ASSURED that once you purchased a drum VST that the download link would present a version for linux…and indeed it DOES!
This genre may not be your preference, but it certainly is MINE. And I get what you’re saying…I’ve used the AVL drumkits…the Black Pearl and the Red Zeppelin…and both were fine offerings, but didn’t suit my preferences. I’ve tried some of the DrumGizmo kits (Crocell?), but still wasn’t satisfied. They do a good job, and I love that they’re native to Linux…but I wasn’t THRILLED with the results.
I haven’t finished tinkering with Ugritone yet, and certainly don’t have it “dialed in” yet, but I have great hopes for the finished product. Ugritone’s VST is closer to EZD3 than AVL or DG, but not as “polished” or “processed” as EZD3. I think (I hope?!) it’s the “sweet spot” I’m looking for. But I digress…back to your comment…
Ugritone does indeed have several linux-native drum VSTs…no need for Wine, Carla, Yabridge, or any of those gyrations. It’s not freeware (price or OSS), so if that’s one of your criteria, it’s not a good choice. I don’t mind paying $$ to support those who support Linux, so I’m okay with that. In Ugritone’s defense, they have NUMEROUS drum VSTs, some for as little as $5-$10. I think I paid $50 for Total Studio Drums (which sounded the best to MY ears) and got a MIDI pack with it. And they have a money-back guarantee…no questions asked. So it’s about as risk-free as it gets, FWIW.
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