I’m sorry, but this is not directly related to Ardour, which I love very much.
So for virtual drums currently I’m using the X42 AVL plugin (Black Pearl, Red Zeppelin) which is really perfect for my needs. One of the things I like are the direct outputs, so I can adjust all voices with all sort of effects etc. So this feature is a must for me.
But sometimes I’d like to use a different drum sound, and I have looked into possible options:
sf2 drum kits: no direct outputs
Hydrogen drum kits: there is a player available (drmr) which I have managed to compile, but: only stereo outputs
drumkv1: issues with libs
some other sample players: only stereo outputs
the only options remaining for me - i think - are:
LSP multi drum sampler w direct out (12,24,48)
DrumGizmo
The issue is: there are no, or not many drum kits available for these two.
For DrumGizmo I only could find these monster kits with Gigabytes, no, I’m not interested in “microphone bleeding” just the direct out. I really do need simple light weight kits here for my smallish computer. Of course multi-layer samples would also be nice.
Both solutions use drum samples plus text/xml files.
Hand creating is a pain (could not get along well with DGedit)
But I noticed that Hydrogen has dozens or more of pre-packaged drum kits, which are basically also tar’ed samples plus XML:
Now I’m thinking of writing a Python script to convert HG to either DrumGizmo or LSP sampler format. My programing skills are kind of lame, so let’s see what I get out of this. It does not have to be perfect, if it does 95 % of the job, the rest can be done by hand.
Has anyone else looked into this?
Other solutions?
For basic/electronic uses I use lsp multisampler*12outs, works fine.
But you will have to give it a certain amount of time at beginning for constructing your drumkit with samples assembly at your taste, once it is done you just have to save the preset(i use lv2 flavour), the preset recall works fine, i ve just created 3 kits like that
Yea, drummers! Always use so much space, both on the scene and in soundlandscape. I guess they are here to stay h h hh
In the readme.pdf in Tchackpoum drumkits for DrumGizmo I found this info, I just copy and paste , since I dont know so much about these issues.
For this DrumGizmo drum kit the samples have been renamed and reorganized, some of the
kit piece samples’ individual channels were adjusted for consistency (volume, transient, time
offset), and a few minor errors were corrected. Also the round robin hits which weren’t as
consistent sounding were omitted. This makes for a much smaller kit that loads quickly in
RAM (up to 1.7 GB in size).
Disk Streaming
I recommend not using the Disk Streaming function of DrumGizmo, since it’s more efficient
on CPU if you load the whole kit to RAM. If you have even 4 GB of RAM, you can probably use
this kit comfortably in your DAW as long as you’re not loading other large sample banks in
other samplers as well. Move this slider all the way to the right (“unlimited”).
Not a direct answer to you question but I’m interested to read your use case… I created the AVL Drumkits for people like you who don’t have tons of RAM because I also could see Drumgizmo had great kits and great ideas but like you for many years I was on older 32bit and 64bit machines with 2-4Gb of RAM and without disk streaming it was not possible to use Drumgizmo at all. @x42 then came to the rescue by extending the AVL kits significantly with the LV2 plugin…
So even though I can’t comment on how to get what you’re after right now with the current AVL Drumkits I will say work is quietly going on improving and re-sampling the AVL kits with the addition of a new TAMA ‘Club Kit’ and a variety of hand percussion also being added. No ETA on this yet but it will improve the AVL kits significantly without increasing the size by too much and will add an additional Kit and some new percussion sounds…
In the meantime I will also add if you want to use a a Sampler like @Sahaathyva has suggested to create your own mix and match custom drumkits the AVL Kits in SFZ format also have all of the drum samples in the zipped SFZ folder: http://www.bandshed.net/sounds/sfz/AVL_Drumkits_1.1-fix.zip
I kinda had this problem too. Tried AVL kits and Drumgizmo but ended up sampling the kit I always use on my Alesis SR18 drum machine. I created a multilayered soundfont with the Polyphone - editor. I load the sf2 onto a-Fluidsynth on Ardour. The sf2 - file is 69 MB Naturally I cannot share this file, but just wanted to give you an idea of another approach.
The a-fluidsynth plugin that comes with Ardour is stereo only.
The fluidsynth engine can output each MIDI channel separately, but the a-* plugin does not offer this. In case of drums that is also not very convenient since you would have to map each hit to a dedicated MIDI channel.
The samples themselves are very nice for rock but the real shine on this is that rhythm composer, I have never owned an EZ Drummer or the likes so having a taste of these kind of features blow me away, to round this up it is very easy to use this composer with other samplers, so I feel it is a perfect match with the drum kits we already have available from drumgizmo and AVL.
So, they say you can get notified when the native Linux version is available, and it says that knowing if people is interested might encourage them to release it earlier. I am interested in a native version, I have tested Windows plugins with Wine in the past, but I think that is not the way to go. So, I have signed here: https://www.powerdrumkit.com/help.php
I managed to make PowerDrumKit work on ubuntu studio with Ardour 5.12 back then using carla bridge.
The pattern you make with rhythm composer is not drag-and-droppable into Ardour, but there’s a trick I figured out
Now I don’t remember everything precisely, but here it is.
When you’re done composing your pattern on the PowerDrumKit GUI, you have to grab the pattern and slightly move it with your mouse as if you were trying to drag and drop into your DAW and then just release it.
After that there’s a .mid file created under your Documents(?) folder containing the pattern you’ve created.
You can import that .mid file into Ardour.
My experiments with a 1 kick + 1 snare “drum kit” (1 sample each) seem to indicate that DrumGizmo uses MIDI velocity to select a sample according to some internal algorithm (which still seems to be under discussion). So it does not scale the volume of my single sample according to velocity.
To me it looks like LSP multi sampler does exactly this, plus has up to 8 samples per voice, which probably is enough for my use cases.
If that’s true LSP would be the choice for me. (Yes, I do know that DrumGizmo really has a different use case than I might be looking for)
Am I missing something?
Anyone with DrumGizmo experience can comment on this?
) like that, from their website:
