Cymbols, Bleed Channels

[william cataline]

I have been loading throught all the presets made by toontracks, for Allaire, like Cruncer Loop, Groovy, X-Kits 5 Toms. I’ve been looking at the way there mixs and what is being used, the way it’s send, side chain, buses, ext.

I get the mixs funcition, is it right,

AMB Close, mic placement was put close to the cyms or kit or both
AMB Mid, mid point on cyms or kit or both
AMB Far, far away on cyms or kit or both

Can i move the mic position, say closer to the ride, off the channels to get more sound.

Topic

[Nathan]

These aren’t modelled, calculated if you like, William. They are real kits played in real rooms by real drummers and all of the mics were sampled for all of the drums, typically thousands of samples for each library.

Although you can mix and match to a degree with X-Drums, these have been recorded in discrete sessions, so you will not have the same mic setup for each session, and you will not have all drums and cymbals in all of the rooms. As such, it is not the same as opening a cupboard and setting the drums up in any room, with any mic configuration. The drums will have different room sounds for different studios and will mix differently according to thise factors and the actual number and method they were miked up with. There are clever routing/x-drum tricks where you can play the close-mic sound of one drum and add that to the ambient sound of another (usu to import snares, using the base kit room sound), which I can help you with when you’re ready, but I think you need some more basic familiarity first.

If you are familiar with a mixing console and basic FX like high-pass filters, EQ, compression and gating, then look through these settings you’ve been playing with and locate the “Overhead” channels along with the ambient mics. See what filters and EQ have been applied in the SD2 mixer FX slots and press “bypass” on a few to see what difference is made. You will find that it is quite common to filter off frequencies below up to about 400Hz in these presets, this gives the drums more frequency range to exist in, and will generally then not be fighting for tonal space with whatever music the drumkits end up being mixed with.

These presets are not necessarily designed to be just used as they are, it is expected that you will tune the EQ in to match your music, adjust the kick and snare punch with the compression, back-off the HPF to allow more tonal room to the cymbals (all hypothetical examples, here). Try bypassing what’s been done on the overheads and room mics and see if it restores the cymbal sounds you’re happier with.

You are right in your interpretation of the Ambient microphone channels; the further away from the kit, the more the proportion of room sound to kit sound you will get, with its characteristic reverberation and colouration. These won’t have a lot of bottom-end by design, as lower frequencies in a reverberent sound can soon contribute to a muddy, unclear mix.

You don’t have to get involved to any depth, but this is a drum engine with more than a nod to the serious drummers and engineers in the business. It has been designed to cater for people who are used to and expect first-class drum sounds made with professional kit, mics and techniques in suitable rooms.

Although Superior Drummer isn’t an “entry-level” drum sampler, it isn’t to say that you can’t use it straight out of the box. In fact the combined presets are wonderful “entry-tickets” to ready-mixed sounds set up by very experienced and sought-after people (Neil Dorfsman, Peter Henderson, Chuck Ainlay, who’s he? -that blew me away) -and you can actually pick through their settings, work out what they do and why, copy or adapt their methods , and tweak to your heart’s content.

Edit: There is a way to bring up the Ride level on a kit by using the x-drum functionality.

Essentially, you disable the Ride and then bring it back as an X-Drum so you can duplicate the OH mics and have only the ride in the second set. You have to reassign MIDI with “Steal Current” and alter the default miking setup with your new X-Ride -I’ll write you some instructions if you want, but you will need to get a little more familiar with SD2 and how it works to get the most out of it -get reading that manual!

Edit2: You’ve deleted half of your post, did you change your mind?

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SD2.3, NYII, C&V, MC, MF, ED, Latin Perc, Twisted, Pop, N1H, Electronic, Classic, Funkmasters, Rock Solid, Blues, Indie-Folk.

[william cataline]

thanks, typing out question about what i need leaves a lot of holes, i have been loaded those kit and do understand they have been recorded in a room you can’t change, but did not know they might have been recorded at different places and different time. I have been go through these kits and looking at the plug-ins, and saving some of these plug-ins as they have been made by the pros for reason, like side chain bus 1/2 with light comp and eq, i have not firured out a good system, im just digging deeper into the engine, as im started a recording project using medal F.

you are rigth some of the loaded kit are great as they are, but as a guitar player, my drum skill and programming, not that good, and it takes to much of the time to do it this way, which ive done for many years, ive got 15 blues done with ez kzkeys and a bass line, sitting on 5 acoustic guitar songs, and looking at created 25 hardcord medal with Medal F. also have ez mix and master, my point is i like the fact to pop things in and go, but i think its a good point to stop and make shure i know as much about the drum engine as i can.

some of the routing = side chaine, bleeding like the one ive been trying to breakdown is the AVA/let it bleed – it uses bleed bus-ing and direct bus-ing, i love look at how they done it, and learing so much, but the reason i got into to this is not to have to slave making music, find a kit, like it, loaded it, go.

i like the idea of starting for a scrach kit and learning from you how to get some of the rout-ing ways, not being a drummer, a don’t know why or the reason i would want to run the snare to a side chaine. im looking for answer to question as to why this is being used and what for, as these thing come about from digging into the engine.

Thanks

[Juicy]

You can also just select the Ride or Crash and then individually bring up its fader in the select window (not Channel fader)
You can also adjust the particular articulation like bring up the Ride Bell only.
Doing this keeps the balance/blend of the other drums in the ambience/Overheads untouched which is fantastic , in some ways it is like bringing the cymbal closer to the mic.

[william cataline]

question, lets say i want to X-drums the kick, snare, and toms, lets say i just want to have as little mic sound to them, as everything is mic-ed, with out the space of the mic as, and put eqs ect.

PLANE
” Although you can mix and match to a degree with X-Drums, these have been recorded in discrete sessions, so you will not have the same mic setup for each session, and you will not have all drums and cymbals in all of the rooms. “

will the kick, snare, and toms, still have bleedable channel in OH, AMB C, M, F, even if i replace it

[Nathan]

…will the kick, snare, and toms, still have bleedable channel in OH, AMB C, M, F, even if i replace it ?

Almost certainly if you are bringing in x-drums from other SDX libraries; I think all SDXs have OH and room mics of some type.

I hope you have gathered by now that with SD2, you set up a kit, send it MIDI, and it gives you “mic signals” in return. Complications would arise if the mic setup for the base kit session and the x-drums’ session(s) were different. Here you would enter the microphone assignment page and see the existing mic channels for the base kit and the extra mic channels from the x-drum.

SD2 will try to match up the mic sets for both sessions automatically (eg OH on base kit and x-drum on same mixer channel, etc), but it may leave any non-obvious mics temporarily “in-limbo” for you to manually assign to “close” mic types (eg a close ambient and a close ambient mono if you so wished), or to a completely new channel in SD2’s mixer. Sometimes you may not wish to go with the automatic choices and will want to set up your own “mic channels”. Worse case, you have all mic signals go to separate new mixer channels, but in SDXs, most can be shared with reasonably common channels -it’s just that some libraries have more mics and/or effect channels.

An OH bleed would only be possible with an x-drum if the OH source from the x-drum kit was mapped to the OH channel for the base kit. Then the (eg) x-snare will show at the bottom of the base kit’s OH bleed fader pop-up. If they weren’t mapped together like this, then you’d have the x-snare bleed in its own OH channel and not in the base kit’s OH channel. The same follows for the ambient mic returns -common channel, common bleeds; separate channels, separate bleeds.

I hope you can follow this, it’s a lot easier to see by trying than by explaining! The same should broadly happen reasonably seamlessly with Kicks, toms and brassware, depending again on how you combined the mic sets.

Just bear in mind that the room sounds from (eg) Allaire and C&V will be somewhat different!!

I hope this is helpful and making sense…

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SD2.3, NYII, C&V, MC, MF, ED, Latin Perc, Twisted, Pop, N1H, Electronic, Classic, Funkmasters, Rock Solid, Blues, Indie-Folk.

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