About ten years ago, my band’s drummer and I headed to Melbourne and laid down the drums for our first album.
At the end of tracking, the engineer insisted that we spend 30 minutes recording isolated hits on every drum and cymbal so that we had a backup collection in case I needed them for any fix-ups in the mix. Thought it was a cool idea at the time but didn’t really grasp just how good advice this was.
So turns out, I’ve still got the session stems, and they sound fantastic. I’d like to put them together into a set of samples that are:
Premixed for metal and hard rock
Free and libre
Easy to drop into your session and start using, a la something like the MT Power Kit or Glen and Robin’s AVL Drums
Just wondering how these would be best packaged to provide the most value to people? I’m thinking either as an .sf2 font (plug and play, don’t know about velocity support though), a DrumGizmo kit, or maybe an .sfz set, though the selection of .sfz hosts native for Linux isn’t amazing…
Or @GMaq if you’re open to collaborating and incorporating these into your kit somehow, that’d be cool too
Hi, always great to have more choices of Drum sounds!
The AVL Drumkits LV2 is an SF2 soundfont hosted in an LV2 Plugin so as such it isn’t really open to drag and drop. In my experience SF2 is too difficult to create from scratch so I personally create SFZ’s with a ‘makesfz’ script incorporated as a File Action and then convert from SFZ to SF2 with Polyphone…
That said… You have to be very careful with naming kit pieces in the Soundfont2 format, I believe there is a 16 character limit, if you name and number your velocity layers make sure the character count is below 16… If you avoid Soundfont2 then you don’t have this limitation. A new kid on the block that I really enjoy is drumlabooh, it’s a great multichannel drum sampler, it imports SFZ and Hydrogen kits and it has it’s own format. You might find it of interest…
When I do programming I do it in Hydrogen and this Plugin lets me import and use the exact same kit I programmed with from Hydrogen to Ardour and make it multichannel if I want… I would suggest for a start to take your edited samples and start with an SFZ kit…
Thanks, that’s very helpful information! With that workflow I might even be able to get it into a bunch of different formats. Guess I better get mixing
The last time I tried to import a Hydrogen kit into it it wanted the keymap re-defined one key at a time, I think it’s a great sampler but ‘importing’ a kit was much more convoluted than I expected.
Looks like the kits in the hydrogen-drumkits package don’t carry across the key data but the ones you import using hydrogen’s interface do. I tried BJA Pacific from the package, didn’t do it. Tried it from the online repository, it did. The OP was about creating a kit from scratch though.
Please make the drum kit General Midi compliant so that you can use generic midi drum clips with it. Ardour has a lot of midi drum clips included and I think they all have General Midi mapping for the individual drums.
I have made my custom drum kits with polyphone in Linux. Soundfonts created this way may be used with the built-in ACE fluidsynth plugin in Ardour.
I think I get what you mean. Map out the samples to the standard drum kit MIDI notes, so that mine will patch over and you can still get sounds from another sound bank that mine won’t include like claps, record scratches, counts, shakers etc?
Yes. You won’t have all the drum sounds defined in General Midi (there are lots) but you could map your drums to a general midi compatible way to midi notes.
Nice, that would be very much appreciated, even just the raw sample data especially if the files are named/stored in a consistent way!!
AFAIK the biggest down side with .SF2 format is that it (i believe) doesn’t support round-robin sample selection and several other features that are present in, say SFZ format. Personally i’d also recommend making it into a drumgizmo kit, it’s a powerful drum plugin that exists as LV2 and VST. Also a Renoise instrument would be possible and very much apprecited by me. I could help with either/both if you like
Yes, keen. I will upload the raw stems too, will slice them up as well so they can be used for DrumGizmo. I don’t know if I’ll have time to assemble a kit out of it because it looks much more complicated than putting stuff together in Polyphone, but you’re welcome to try!
Another test, this time in a full metal mix.
I think I need to cut some low-mid freqs in the kick so it’s less muddy and back off the attack in compressor and bring up the bottom mics at lower velocities for the snare, but not far away from a release.
The SF2 font has up to 30 velocity layers for each drum (less for the cymbals), so I guess you could kind of make up for the lack of round-robin or random sample selection by varying the velocity on each hit so it’ll use a different sample each time.
just a small question, i noticed the SF2 has 6 toms, but your screenshots show only 2. Did you pitch shift them to get the missing ones? I used this same trick in drumgizmo just recently =) old tracker trick we were using in the 1990’s to create several toms using one sample playing different notes/frequencies.
Just in case, are you aware of this open source tracker ? It works excellent in Wine on Linux. It also handles other tracker files. Exports MIDI. Has an OPL synth built in and of course sampling editor. VST instruments can be used as well.
Yep, haven’t tried openMPT in decades tho. Around 2004 to 2008 i was helping with the development of Schism Tracker, which is an open-source and portable remake of the classic Impulse Tracker for DOS. These days my main sequencer software i use most is Renoise.
I will upload the raw stems too, will slice them up as well so they can be used for DrumGizmo. I don’t know if I’ll have time to assemble a kit out of it because it looks much more complicated than putting stuff together in Polyphone, but you’re welcome to try!