KVR Audio

kinwie · Post by **kinwie** » Mon Mar 09, 2015 10:41 am

muslimpunk wrote:
pljones wrote:Hi hat mute groups: my rule of thumb is never to have a more open group mute a more closed group (not a problem here yet). Closed and pedal mute open and open mutes nothing, if that's all you have.
Some samplers only have choke groups (like tx16wx or shortcircuit) so its not possible to have uni-directional muting. In any case, does it make any kind of difference. If anything it makes it more natural to have all hats in a single mute group where playing one kinda hat articluation automatically mutes all others.

Or maybe I'm missing something ?

I'm aware that samplers behave/sounds differently for the mute/choke group. In old rgc sfz (also sfz+) and Samplelord, using [group=1 & off-by=1] won't cut itself while in sforzando, that setting will cut itself. So we should use for example [group=1 & off_by=2]. I've asked about this in Aria forum sometime ago. I think Poise also behave like sforzando. I also remember Reason had its nn-xt updated for this mute/choke group voicing in version 4.

Seems nice (and large) drums samples there. will check it out later. Thanks muslimpunk!

pljones · Post by **pljones** » Mon Mar 09, 2015 5:44 pm

I just don't think it sounds as natural, to be honest - but it's more down to taste, I guess. Basically, once a cymbal has been hit, it's resonating. Hitting it again doesn't stop that resonance, it modulates it. Whether that modulation is best captured by letting the old sample play on or cutting it (either hard or with a decay time) is down to how you want to model it. I don't like cutting hard, doing the decay time "right" is... difficult... so I take the third option

. (The only time I use an envelope on any percussion sample is when it needs muting behaviour - otherwise they always play out in full. The "gated" Gorilla kit being an example of "muting behaviour"...)

Burzukh_Studios · Post by **Burzukh_Studios** » Mon Mar 09, 2015 6:02 pm

pljones wrote:I just don't think it sounds as natural, to be honest - but it's more down to taste, I guess. Basically, once a cymbal has been hit, it's resonating. Hitting it again doesn't stop that resonance, it modulates it. Whether that modulation is best captured by letting the old sample play on or cutting it (either hard or with a decay time) is down to how you want to model it. I don't like cutting hard, doing the decay time "right" is... difficult... so I take the third option . (The only time I use an envelope on any percussion sample is when it needs muting behaviour - otherwise they always play out in full. The "gated" Gorilla kit being an example of "muting behaviour"...)

I actually was inspired by the media shtick of well-known company regarding the new buzzword "flow note technology" to try and model this cymbal behaviour of successive hits based resonance but since I'm limited to tx16wx and sfz and very little time, its not gone very far. But im sure its doable.

DSmolken · Post by **DSmolken** » Mon Mar 09, 2015 7:11 pm

Well, I got one big mute group for all hi-hats for the time being, so I'll leave it like that for now and finish mapping the other pieces of the kit. Using silence to create separate mute groups and then apply some of them to more keys than others is very clever, though, I have to say. Snares and toms are done now, so just cymbals left. I miiiiiiiight finish this evening and upload the SFZ files somewhere for testing, though I haven't actually looked at how many cymbal samples there are.

Two more questions.

There's no open snare in the stereo samples - that's only in the multi-mics, right? So I can just leave it out of the SFZ mapping?

In the pics on the site I see two kick drums. Are all the available samples from the bigger one?

Burzukh_Studios · Post by **Burzukh_Studios** » Mon Mar 09, 2015 7:39 pm

Excellent Work dude !! Very fast job !
Let me know when you want to share it officially (or if you want me to test it ) ! Tod is the real master with testing drums wrt things like dynamic response etc and I would love to have him play it before sharing on the site.

Regarding your queries :

- Yes you right, so you can leave that snare out for now.

- And yes its that big kick drum. I'm removing the other description from the site right now (oops) . The one sampled and pictured is the 1968 Kick Drum (14"x22" Shell: Maple/Poplar/Mahogany Finish).

DSmolken · Post by **DSmolken** » Mon Mar 09, 2015 8:54 pm

I got the basic mapping done. It follows the same note mappings as Kontakt minus the open snare. All hi-hat sounds in one mute group, toms with 2-second release time, cymbals with 3 seconds, kick, snare and hi-hat with 0.001 second. All that can be tweaked and improved, but I'll let some actual drummers test them and tell me what to change. Once that's done you can release it, and we'll get the drums mirrored on the Karoryfer page also.

Maybe I'll also do a less realistic mapping with no round robins, mute groups or release tails, for stuff like drum and bass or hip-hop.

Download SFZ files here, drop them all in the main SM Drums folder which contains the SMDrum Stereo (Samples) and SMD Cymbals Stereo (Samples) folders that I got by extracting the ZIP files and open the smdrums_main.sfz file - the paths should then work.

http://we.tl/osxj9s6R7T

I'll write a bit about how I used sfzed and Notepad to get this done. Mapping 3000 samples in 2 days in my spare time is pretty quick.

Burzukh_Studios · Post by **Burzukh_Studios** » Tue Mar 10, 2015 5:12 am

Im looking forward to testing this out today...

Dude you are faster than Excel

Burzukh_Studios · Post by **Burzukh_Studios** » Tue Mar 10, 2015 5:47 am

Ok initial testing run with playing the kit pieces went good.

A loaded GM mapped midi groove has some issues, as some of the drum components end up abruptly without a full release...but i will check in detail and confirm later.

DSmolken · Post by **DSmolken** » Tue Mar 10, 2015 7:56 am

Cool, so it basically works! Like I said I have no clue about release times, so I only set them for the cymbals and toms where I was able to find an existing SFZ mapping (might be one of Peter's?) that I copied the values from. I'm sure release times are going to need to be tweaked. Do you have any suggestions for good default times to try? What did you use in Kontakt?

Here's the workflow I used for the mappings.

Have a file called smdrums_main.sfz open in Notepad, FL Studio running in the background, and this file loaded into Sforzando.

For each element, open a new file in sfzed and load all the samples for one round robin. Enable opcodes: lovel/hivel, lorand/hirand, pitch_keycenter, and amp_veltrack. Though I realized later I could have skipped the last two and just set pitch_keytrack=0 and amp_veltrack=0 globally in the main file.

Set hikey, lokey and pitch_keycenter to the note to be used, hirand to the appropriate value to the number of round robins (0.125 for 8 RRs), amp_veltrack to 0 and apply those to all regions. Fill hivel manually for each velocity layer, then go through lovel and set it to the hivel of the previous velocity layer plus one. Save this file - it's the basic settings for one round robin.

Now open the sfz file I just saved in Notepad twice. In the second file, set lorand and hirand values for the next round robin and search/replace RR1 with RR2. Copy the contents of this whole file and paste into the first Notepad. In the second file again, set lorand and hirand then search/replace RR2 with RR3. Paste into the first file again, repeat until I have all the round robins. At that point, save the first file with _rr added to the name.

Edit smdrums_main.sfz and add a line to #include the _rr.sfz file I just created, and save. Switch to FL Studio and check if the new element works OK - a few times I screwed up the dynamics (forgot to set lovel or veltrack) or round robins (forgot to update the values for one).

Repeat until all the drum elements are in place. If I already have a similar element with the exact same number of velocity layers and round robins I don't make a new file, I just edit the similar one and search/replace the note values and path names to make it work for the new element. This saved me quite a bit of time with the toms and cymbals.

pljones · Post by **pljones** » Tue Mar 10, 2015 5:10 pm

You could save more of that with using #defines in Sforzando - set up the #defines and #includes and Sforzando will do all that substitution for you

. It's also easier to see you've defined coherent ranges as you're doing stuff like #define lowrand 0 / #define hirand 0.5 / #include layer.sfz then #define lowrand 0.5 / #define hirand 1 / #include layer.sfz -- you can see the ranges more clearly than having to have multiple copies of nearly identical files open. (I can't remember but you might need each set of defines and includes in its own file, that's then included from a "higher level" file... which does rather negate the simplification...)

Burzukh_Studios · Post by **Burzukh_Studios** » Tue Mar 10, 2015 6:24 pm

I thought i knew sfz but apparently i dont know jack shit. You guys are on another level !

DSmolken · Post by **DSmolken** » Tue Mar 10, 2015 7:41 pm

I've never done anything with #defines before, actually, but now seems like a good time to start. That way I can try different release times and only have to change them in one place.

DSmolken · Post by **DSmolken** » Wed Mar 11, 2015 9:58 pm

OK, redid release times and hi-hat off group with #define statements. Now everything has a release, though except for the open hats, toms and cymbals they're pretty short. I used the "open" release time for the loose hi-hat, too, not sure if that should really count as open or closed. But it's much easier to tweak everything now, if you want longer or shorter tails just change the values in smdrums_main.sfz and retest. The new mappings are at: http://we.tl/wg8xBtjuMl

I also did an smdrums_main_dnb.sfz with very short release times and no hi-hat muting, for drum and bass and hip-hop grooves where you don't want those aspects of realism but you still want round robins and velocity layers. Sounds nice with some of the MIDI grooves which come with FL Studio.

Should I also do subset mappings like hats only, snares only etc. for convenience when doing multiple instances to send to multiple channels?

Hopefully we can get these finalized and released in a few days.

Yeager · Post by **Yeager** » Wed Mar 11, 2015 10:58 pm

DSmolken wrote: if you want longer or shorter tails just change the values in smdrums_main.sfz and retest.

Couldn't this be mapped to a cc controller in the Controller part of sforzando UI like f.i. the CR-909.
You could also add different pan/tune options per tom/snare/hat on there.
I tried to read how they did it in the free sounds, but it gave me a headache

Burzukh_Studios · Post by **Burzukh_Studios** » Thu Mar 12, 2015 3:04 am

Thanks DSmolken !

I'll give these a spin today and get back to you...

One question : is it possible to give something its full sample tail / release time or does the release have to be defined in numerical terms only ? What I am trying to ask is that if sfz allows you skip the ADSR completely and just play the sample all the way thru ?

New Drum Samples Website : SM Drums