To the Toontrack support team

[Nathan Watkins]

I’ve got everything dialed in exactly right between the Hart Kit and the Roland TD-20. Everything triggers great. Even the hats are opening and closing as they should with all variable positions transitioning smoothly (between fully open and fully closed). It works great! I’m not even getting unwanted splashes when I play quarter notes with my foot. The problem is that the Roland TD-20 sounds are terrible for recording, which is why I bought S2 in the first place. But Superior 2.0 is not triggering right.

1) The center snare hits are way louder than hitting the edge of the snare (hitting with equal velocities). Yes, a real snare sounds tonally different when you hit the center vs. the edge, which is the reason for positional sensing/triggering, but it is not louder as portrayed in S2.

2) The hi hat doesn’t open and close smoothly, especially if you are trying to play a groove in between full open and full close. It either wants to jump to closed or open; in other words it sticks or catches. A lot of times the hat doesn’t close when I close it. Even though it is setup right on the TD-20 and it triggers correctly when I listen to the TD-20 sounds, it isn’t triggering correctly through S2. I can’t play quarter notes with my foot without splashes (yes I have adjusted the offset parameters on the TD-20), and there is an open hats sound every time you let off the pedal (I know this simulates what really happens, but it is unnatural sounding).

I’m not trying to be negative. On the contrary, I think that S2 has excellent potential (the recording of the sounds is phenomenal), but it is going to have to get much more user friendly for you guys to really sell this. When you do get it there, the product will sell itself, but as for now, and I think that I speak for a lot of people, it is proving to be rather difficult to achieve natural, believable, and professionally usable results when using S2 with E-drums.

Is there any way that you guys can get in touch with Pat Thrall to get settings they used for S2 and its integration with the TD-20 brain and the Hart Pro kit? That would be an enormous help at least to those of us who are using that configuration. I have tried the Joe King methodology, but all the problems that I listed above are still occurring even after trying the VH-11 and TD-10 setup. And I tried downloading and using the e-drum template for the TD-20 from the Toontrack free downloads section. This is still not getting there. I am still experiencing the issues above even after trying that. What will it take to get the results seen on the S2 demo? I read through the S2 owner’s manual, but it is not very thorough; it does not go into depth on all of Superior 2’s parameters for implementation with e-drums. It needs to go much deeper if people are going to have to tweak this on their own. A lot of it has been guess work, and this program is too complex to leave things to guess work. Thank you for you help and support!

Sincerely,
Nathan

Topic

[Damian Blunt]

1)  If the predefined volume of articulations relative to one another do not suit you, you can adjust the  volume of individual articulations by going to the instrument pane in the bottom right hand corner, selecting the articulation you wish to adjust, pressing the ‘edit articulation only’ button, and adjusting the volume fader in the instrument pane. 

While you have ‘edit articulation only’ selected you can further play with the velocity controls in the ‘voices and layers’ pane (adjacent to the instrument pane) to help you get the response you desire.

2)  If  you go to the free user download area /extra downloads/superior/edrums and download the edrum guide pdf, there are guidelines on how to adjust the foot splash response.  These guidelines are for Superior 1 but they are easily translated to Superior 2.

The alternative is to turn the foot splash off completely by selecting the ‘open pedal’ articulation only, going to the voices and layers pane and under layer limits select zero for each of the soft, gradient and hard hits.

Out of interest which hihat are you using.  Is it a Hart or Roland?

Damian Blunt - Toontrack
Quality Assurance
Betatesting

[Nathan Watkins]

First let me say thank you for your help. I will definitely try these suggestions.

I am using the Hart hihats.

Out of curiosity, have you been able to get S2 tweaked out the way that you want?

[Damian Blunt]

I have Superior 2 working perfectly for my own needs – I tweak both S2 and my TD-12 to get the performance I want…
 
One thing I forgot to ask is have you downloaded and installed Superior 2.01? – the hihat performance is much improved.
 
I know John Rammelt uses a Hart kit and I seem to recall it took him a while to get everything tweaked, but once done it outperformed his Roland kit….so I’d keep trying – there’s no reason that S2 should be a limting factor in getting the edrum performance you desire.

Damian Blunt - Toontrack
Quality Assurance
Betatesting

[Rogue]

Hi – thanks for your feedback.

first off, as Damian advised you should download and install Superior 2.0.1, which improves the hihats response for modules sending excessive amount of CC data which is very likely what you are experiencing.

besides that, Damian and Joe probably already said it all: adjust articulation volumes to your liking, turn footsplashes off if you don’t want that effect simulated or it is somewhat intrusive with your setup. Same for not getting any closed hats, select the ‘HatsCtrl’ and lower the limit until you don’t have to forcefully stamp on the pedal to get closed hats. This will kill the ‘Tight’ hats but this may be the only way to get reliable response from your controller if you have tried to adjust it in the various ways recommended by Hart.

On a closing note I would agree that we need to organize a dedicated edrum documentation to avoid confusion and we are working on that. I would however disagree that guess work is the only way currently to get the hihat working, all the tips and advices on this forum for example pretty much systematically explain why some particular step is performed.

So, please bear with us but also keep up-to-date with your software in the meantime as more so than extra ‘edrum’ documentation or templates that ‘magically’ will transform your playing into NirZ’s (a typical show setup takes a couple of hours, not including Nir’s breakfast), understanding what each control in Superior performs will get you a long way down the road to perfect response from your kit.

Best Regards,
RM

Rogue Marechal - Toontrack
Configuration Manager

[Author]

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