I suspect the Toontrack libraries are missing a well done library of short punchy drums

[Romanp]

Yes I think my issue with the toontrack libraries is that to try and get a genuine funk, disco, reggae etc short decay, tight drum sounds we are expected to use amplitude envelopes, gates, transient designers.
Maybe some of my favourite records used gates to get the funky tight snare sounds. But I doubt it.
Having a Clyde Stubblefield kit that sounds nothing like our favourite recordings of him like ‘funky drummer’ is disappointing.
Jabos snare sounds closer.
I haven’t bought Superior Drummer or any Toontrack stuff yet. I’ve been studying the demo audios.
I love the idea of being able to sound like real drums from my Roland TD3KW. I will sometimes supplement a real acoustic hihat.
But from listening to the demos, I reckon there is still a big hole for the best most usable drum sounds for grooves that have shorter dampened snares etc.
Custom and vintage has some dampened snares.
I may be wrong, but I think a library with raw unprocessed but heavily and moderately dampened drums at a three different tunings is missing from the Toontrack sounds.
Go listen to James Browns ‘funky president’ or Johnny Osbournes ‘water pumping’ or most of the famous breakbeats.
All or mostly short punchy drums.
Maybe I am missing some tape saturation that I can add using my reel to reel. Or maybe I can get these sounds with envelopes and gates etc.
Go listen to Barry White and the love unlimited orchestra ‘Midnight an’
Edwin Starr ‘Easin In’
Cebu ‘The commodores’
The Boss by James Brown

They all have a punchy snare with no ringing sound.
Maybe there are some of these sounds already in the Toontrack sound library. But from my listening to all the demos, I reckon they should make a library that gets closer to the short punchy drum sounds than Custom and Vintage does.
Like 12 different snares all dampened and heavily dampened with 2 or 3 tunings. Probably dry would be best or dry with some room mics.

I suspect I also like the analogue distortions on these older recordings.
I wouldn’t object to real tape saturation being used during the recording process. Or perhaps processed through tape after recorded digitally and edited.

I reckon too many of these drums are contemporary pop, rock, metal etc. Ringing snares.

I would love a large library of funky shorter punchy drum kits.

‘who is she’ gladys knight and the pips
Bill Withers ‘kissing my love’

Hasn’t Toontrack totally missed the best drum sounds for dance music like 70s funk, disco, reggae?

And like I said give us a large selection of different punchy drums. Different style kicks and snares etc.

Congratulations Toontrack on your recordings so far.
Roman.

Or do I just need to buy these softwares and learn how to edit sounds?

After this library request we could get a Stax style drum kit.

Topic

[Romanp]

And listen to any Jamaican music from the 70s. But mostly late 70s and early 80s.
Short punchy kicks and snares.

[Juicy]

Tight is awesome but…….
It makes sense for TT to record the Drums Loose as there is not much difference with Dampening or gating a drum,once its in a mix you would be hard pressed to hear a difference also most the ring is virtually non existing in a mix setting and all you’re left with is the transient even if the drum still has ringing un-gated decay.
As you have stated you don’t have the product so on one hand you have a valid observation on the other hand you have no way of understanding how easy it is to get this sound you want from the libraries as they are. Once a drum is recorded very short you cant add any ring so in some ways they are giving us two options by leaving them open.
They are recorded so all people of differing needs can get any sound not just one trick ponies.
I too like short punchy sounds and the JB example is good ,you may find they already have all the sounds plus a whole lot more the way it is done by TT.

I do use the damped snares so i understand “what” the sound is that you like and wish we just get all snares with a dampened version, would be great for end users.

[Romanp]

In my experience and from listeing to demos there is a big difference between a natural snare recording that has a dampened snare compared to the snare sound disappearing very quickly with the use of an amplitude envelope or gate.
Totally different.
A dampened snare will have a natural decay without the ring. A gated or decay snare sounds just like a gated snare. Plus the sound of the attack and everything is different with a dampened snare.
A dampened snare doesn’t disappear into darkness straight away like a gated or decayed snare. It has some natural sound after it. Which softens the sound.
Having a sharply decayed ringing snare, hardens the sound and makes it sound unnatural.

My ears tell me that decayed snares sounds artificial compared to dampened snares.

I also hear a big difference between tuning a sample and tuning a real drum.

I think making gates and amplitude envelopes responsible for making short punchy drums is a huge compromise and a cop out.

Maybe adding a little smallish reverb could soften a decayed snare.
But I would much rather have a library properly done to sound short and punchy.

I feel the biggest genres of music are missing from the Toontrack sounds.

I was thinking last night. Toontrack could get Gabriel Roth to do a couple of drum kits. His daptone productions are the most authentic soul funk drum sound in the present.

Then go to Jamaica and get Prince Jammy to do a kit, ha ha.

Trouble is even our heroes have changed their sound over the years. Funkmasters is a case in point. Clydes kit doesn’t sound like his best recordings. It has too much ring.

I actually feel inspired to make my own drum library with these sounds. I would just need a software sampler that supports ’round robin’ etc.

My only observations are from the videos and audio on toontracks site. So I will have to wait to try it myself. As you say maybe in the mix the ring is less obvious. But all the breakbeats are naked drums and I don’t hear ringing in the snare.

I think we are cutting corners. We’ve got enough metal, country, pop, contemporary natural ringing acoustic drum sounds.

It’s time for some drums that we can actually use. Give us the vintage funk, soul, reggae, disco.

Give us short punchy drums of different flavours and tunings. Don’t use gates, just pillows and wallets and gaffer tape.

I will reserve my final judgments for when I have the product and try out using decaying processing.
Roman.

[Romanp]

Ken Scotts EpiK drums seems to have a short punchy sound.
Billy Cobhams kit is really good.
Addictives ‘Funk’ and ‘Retro’ sound like they could be usable as well.
Roman.

[Romanp]

The Abbey Road 60s and 70s kits have tight options from the demos I listened to.

[Juicy]

So Does a lot of the TT Stuff.
All TT’s demo’s use the wet room sounds and mic’s liberally, that they have painstakingly captured. They simply do not show the dryness of the sounds.This is perhaps a shortfall of the demo’s,but turn the wet room sound down and you would be surprised i think.
I do know what you mean as the sound of dampening on snare is the funk,I used a wallet ,most the time !
Most every sample pack does have specific dampened Kicks and snares by the way.
I have NI’s K8 Ultimate and it is great too. On the 60’70’s no choice for kick or Cymbals and Lucky to get one Snare Alternative so on that level not a good comparison.

The Metal Machine Snares are tight and there is 7 or 8 of them ready to smack thru any mis not just metal.
Personally i couldn’t/wouldn’t pay for a 1200 snare like a Dunnett Titanium or a D Carey Brass monster and only had Tama’s S.Copeland and Pearl’s Free Floating Piccolo Snares for Funky tight sounds when i was still using a real kit.but………
To have the classy,tight oomph of Dunnett Titanium and Carey’s Bell Brass Snares for the price on offer is a No Brainer,these are world class snare drums drummers want for a good reason and they are excellent when you turn the room mic’s off. I am sure you would really like them.

[Scott]

Seems like C&V SDX is the library that will give you that sound.

Scott Sibley - Toontrack
Technical Advisor

[Scott]

I think you’d find the S2 engine to be pretty drum oriented unlike other general samplers that also happen to have drum samples.

For example, the envelope filter isn’t your run of the mill filter…not when used with the Fade slider in the Mixer. Sliding the Fade slider to the right in the OH and room channels will increase the amount of decay for any envelope filter kit pieces so as to sound more natural.

Scott Sibley - Toontrack
Technical Advisor

[Romanp]

I haven’t ever recorded real drums. I am a sampling from records old school 80s early 90s hip hop guy.
I love drums.
Perhaps I am raising a need to better understand what these drum software instruments are capable of.
Perhaps these instruments with all the features and flexibility means that the user actually needs to learn more about drum mixing/processing.
Maybe there is a lot to learn in terms of what can be achieved with editing.
I was just listening to Little Feats song ‘Fool Yourself’. It’s the breakbeat I first heard on A Tribe Called Quests ‘Bonita Applebum’.
Tight non ringing drums.

[Scott]

As I posted above, the C&V SDX has plenty of ‘non ringing drums’.

It is a big reason Chris Whitten wanted to create the library in the first place. It was recorded in a small studio with vintage recording gear and mics for that dryer, 70’s vibe drum sound. The demos on the product page clearly highlight the less roomy, dryer, drum sounds that the library has on offer.

Scott Sibley - Toontrack
Technical Advisor

[Romanp]

Yes, Custom and Vintage will be the first SDX I get. Definitely.
You can hear the short punchy snares even with the music on top.
Excellent sounding library from the demos.

It seems to me you could almost sell individual drums. Although this would go against the ‘same room’ sound philosophy which keeps all the drums related sound wise.

When I listened to the demos of 60s and 70s Abbey road drummer, there are tracks where they alter the mic levels. It changes the drums a lot. Almost like different sounding breakbeats.
I’m just thinking of how different drums sound on records. It is also the mic positions etc Equalisation. Compression etc.

So the way Toontrack has presented the sounds and editing may be the best for options.

I intend to edit the drums in the software, maybe overload a mic pre when tracking them, saturate my revox c270 reel to reel, eq on my ramsa wr8816 mixer, compress or parallel compress with an analogue tube compressor.

And then maybe put other instruments on top, ha ha.

The jamaican reggae snare sound of the late 70s early 80s is usually quite bright. Maybe eqing the Toontrack sounds can get me close.

Being able to add a layer with the x drum feature will allow me to add clicky bass drums or maybe snare snappy attack.

I have read about filtering drums into separate frequency layers. If you had the drums on two faders you could high pass one channel and low pass the other and play with the balance.
I think disco did this.

It would allow control over the click of the bass drum and the thud.

I want to bring separate SD channels out of my soundcard into my analogue mixer.

[Whitten]

Scott is right.
I’ve been influenced by the great sampled drum records – Beck, Portishead, Air, The Roots.
One thing C&V is designed to do is capture some of those sounds.
Small room, close mic’ed, short bass drums and damped snares.

[Mattias]

Go for Custom & Vintage for sure!!

Mattias Eklund - Toontrack
Head Of Sound Design

[Tom]

I hardly use anything but C&V, and I have several other sample collections, not only by TT. Best snare ever is Chris Whitten’s 1920 Black Beauty.

[Jason Hood]

Aint no samples on The Roots Chris, it’s all ?uestlove. That dude uses a kick, floor, piccolo snare, crash ride, 13″ hats set up, minimal kit, huge range of tones, all class. He makes Boss Dr Rhythms sound like a guitarist having a lash on your kit.

[Author]

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