As good as it get?

[Elegantdrum]

Hello all,

This is my first post here as I was just shipped a Mega Drum. The purpose of this post is to seek help in getting very last ounce out of the system. My goal is to make an E-Kit sound and feel as close to the real thing as possible.

My attempt at this has been expensive and I allowed scope creep of adding in a recording studio.
None of my questions, requests, or thoughts is cost driven. No expense spared within reason.

Here is the basic story:
About 7 years ago, I set out to make a good E-kit. With breaks, leaps in scope to entire recording studio in a box, and microphones for my acoustic kit here I am hoping the Megadrum is the last piece I add before I start really composing music. For the last 4 years BFD and Sonar have only been used as a sound bank for a TD-20….then a TD-30. The cost of a TD-30 was worth it to lose about 2 ms from the trigger delay.

Equipment list that applies to E-drumming:
Triggers:
Hart Pro chrome drum triggers with mesh heads: 8”,10”,12”,13”,13”: One gets used as the snare.
Roland: (4) CY-15R, KD-120, VH12
Pintech 3 way ride, 18”
Trick Kick triggers mounted on the pedals.

Trigger brains:
TD-30, TMC-6, soon Megadrum 56 w/ position

Computer:
PC audio labs 6 core 12 gig 2.83 Ghz. SS os drive, 1TB for samples, 1 TB for work
Sound card: SSL MX4 card and Alpha link, upgraded by Black lion.
Midi card: Pair of Edirol UM-3ex

Software:
Sonar Platinum
BFD3 w/ tons of sound
Lexicon PCM
SSL EQ and Compression on MX4

Outboard:
TC-M5000 4 channels
(2) Distressor
Fatso-Jr



Controllers:
Softube Console-1
Mackie MCU w/ 2 extenders & C4
Roland/Sonar V-700C

Semi related stuff:
DW 1998 kit 4 toms. Good set of cymbals
Lots of Mic’s and preamps
Two massive keyboards (Kronos 88 and Yamaha Sy 99)

Everything but the mics and DW kit is within reach from the drum throne

Now that you get a picture of what I have going on, here is the good stuff:

The audio system is downright snappy. Sonar reports 1.7ms round trip audio running at 96K. BFD3 is running well at 64 bit on a 64 bit machine.

Here are my limiting factors:
1. Trigger sensing time + time to send MIDI
2. Ability to separate rim level from head level
3. Ability to get RIM, HEAD, and Bell from CY-15R
4. The high hat tracks like crap, the “cloppers” VH-12 are better with the silver finish and newer trigger vs the black VH-11’s but still not that good.

And I desire to pull off a few tricks:
1. I want a mono to stereo kick sound. Let me explain.
a. The KD-120 is a good single kick trigger at low levels.
b. The Trick triggers on the pedals are good dual triggers at mid to high levels
c. I want to blend the two triggers in three for four stages. At low levels just the KD-120 is used in mono. At mid to high levels, the Trick triggers are used in stereo. At mid-low level, the level is taken from the tricks right and left. The right is averaged with the KD-120. The stereo spread will be a function of the level (perhaps 2 zones/slopes). That would be a very cool effect if say, playing soft to loud fast double base.

2. I want various level of rim for any given level of head, and worded a different way, various levels of head for any given level of rim. I did accomplish this at one time with a TD-20 like this----
a. I have tried using separate rim triggers, but the cross talk makes this not reliable, once I found a single trigger method, I stopped trying two triggers.
b. The sounds inside a TD-20 and 30 do have a measure of the rim relative to the head being used within the brain and is applied to internal sounds. However, there is no MIDI standard for this, and as a result, no information about how far the switch point of rem/head is past the switch point is available via MIDI.
c. No sample creators want to create matrix samples with varying level of rim for each head hit. That would take the sample creation times to a new level and cost. Also for sound quality reasons, mixing two sounds together, one for rim and one for head actually sounds more like a real drum if you can get it going right.
d. Here was my procedure to get it done at one time on a TD-20
i. Plug a headphone splitter into Aux 1
ii. Plug a switching type trigger mesh head drum into the headphone splitter
iii. Plug the stereo end of an insert cable (1 end stereo, other end is 2 mono) into the other side of the splitter.
iv. Plug one of the mono ends into the snare input (forget if its tip or sleeve). The other mono end is not used.
v. Turn the sound of the head off for Aux 1, set the sound to a picalo metal snare using only the rim sounds.
vi. Turn the sound of the rim off for the snare. Set the sound to a maple wood snare using only the head sound.
vii. The result was the level of the rim and the carryover of the rim sound was isolated and different than that of the head. The end result was the best snare I ever had using sounds in the TD-20. I could get a level 64 head strike with either a bunch or not too much rim mixed in. no crosstalk issues, I set the sensitivity at 3 (very low), and would play around with Log1 and Exp1 curves and levels.

3. Another difficult part is the correct feeling of dynamics. Typically, because of how the trigger maps to the sounds, we desire most hits in the 50 to 90 range in terms of the desired “sound” but above that, real drums have a X2 and X3 button called a heavy hitter. The triggers don’t offer the dynamic range of real drums. At least with the roland line I always wanted a trigger sensitivity of 2.5. I had to pick between 2 and 3. Too much or too little. Because of the sounds themselves, I would go for the 3 where the trigger hit 127 when I was still at 90. The good part of that setup is the low level dynamics are awesome for playing some jazz style. The bad part is losing the feeling of ….oh man, am I playing too loud? That feeling needs to be there for the drums to feel right, that you can actually get too loud and have to rely on a compressor to tame it down…..oh right, like real drums.

4. For the hats, I’m considering using only the trigger portion of the VH-12, and either switching out the pedal to a controller only that will track faster, or adding the KAT system and pedal and kicks to solve my kick drum issues, hat tracking speed issues, and snare dynamic range/rim issues.
5. For the Cy-15R’s. I was able to make 4 of them 3 way’s. 1 in the TD-30 as a ride, and 3 using all the inputs of a TMC-6. With the TMC-6 it works easy. Just send note numbers. This simple interface also has the lowest latency of any I have used so far (Mega drum next). I’m hoping I can find out how to use the CR-15R as a 3 way for 4 cymbals on the megadrum.
a. One thing that helped the balance and reliability of the CY-15R was insert a sheet of Mylar under the rubber. The main thing that did was snug up the rubber to the plastic and as a result, more snug to the trigger. This is less of a problem with the Silver Roland stuff because the coating retains its surface tension better than the black rubber did. The one drawback was a louder(Acoustically, not trigger) but more accurate(trigger) ride when you use it that way

6. One MAJOR thing missing from the Roland stuff was any kind of control over the position sensing. You had to tune the drum for the positioning, not the other way around. For the snare, the Hart cylinders didn’t work. I had to switch out all the hart drums to Roland cones for that to work. Other brands of hardware can’t provide the right position sensing information to Roland brains.

What tips and tricks yall got for me? Any cool ways to get the last ounce out of the Megadrum interface and the triggers I’m using?

The first thing I look forward too is the graph of trigger and the graph of sound response both up at the same on the computer. I should be able to tweek the levels much better.

[airflamesred]

Welcome.

[Elegantdrum]

Just checking in, letting people know I'm looking for reply's with any helpful hints on the tricks I'm trying to pull.

[airflamesred]

MD will do all the things the Roland modules do and then some.
Are those 'laser' triggers velocity sensitive?

[Elegantdrum]

yes The trick laser trigger are Vel sensitive. However, I'm using the trigger also with a mesh head drum. The mesh head does not stop the beater fast enough to trigger very low level hits. At mid to high level the triggers work great. If you are a metal drummer, they are perfect. If you a jazz guy, they will suck.