Anyone produce highly sampled hi-hats?

[brainwreck]

I recently moved to using an e-drum kit as a controller for playing sampled drums. On the sampled drums aspect, all is pretty well for me except for the hi-hats. Since sampled hi-hats in commercial drum samplers don't have many openness levels (max I have seen is 9 openness levels), the audible switching among openness levels (and foot pedal hunting to target a desired openness level) is a problem for me that I would like to alleviate. What I'm thinking is something like 16 openness levels, 16 velocity levels per openness level, and 4 variations per velocity. Does anyone out there offer a sampled hi-hat at that level of detail or higher?

I just want to be able to play an e-hat without having to concentrate on the relationship between the foot pedal openness and the sampled hi-hat openness, which I can't do at the moment. I have tried searching to find something, but I get sock-blocked by all the 'free samples' search results and the lack of sample level detail descriptions for available commercial drum samples. Maybe someone else here has ran onto something that I haven't seen yet.

Alternatively, I might just end up ditching the e-hat and miking up a real one in it's place. But that would take away from the 24/7 time window for when I can play drums.

[DeathByGuitar]

Superior Drummer 3 has a lot of detail in this area and you can control the response curve of the pedal and assign different openess levels to different pedal states. What software are you currently using?

[brainwreck]

Originally Posted by DeathByGuitar

Superior Drummer 3 has a lot of detail in this area and you can control the response curve of the pedal and assign different openess levels to different pedal states. What software are you currently using?

How many levels of openness, specifically? I haven't found any information on that.

I have been using ezdrummer 2 and addictive drums 2. I'll have to look back, but I think I found a max of 9 openness levels for one of the hi-hats in ezdrummer 2. But the hi-hat openness level switching is still blatant. This isn't a velocity curve issue or a pedal range issue. It is a sample detail issue, specifically on the number of available openness levels for hi-hat.

If superior offers many more openness levels for it's sampled hi-hats, I would be willing to take another look at it. But at the same time, I'm content with my current drum samplers, except for the hi-hat openness levels. So I would be spending $400 just for that one feature, if it exists, which I would rather not do. Hence the search for an individual detailed sampled hi-hat.

[brainwreck]

From discussion over here: https://forum.cockos.com/showthread....207693&page=20 That is 7 openness levels, A-G, not 9 levels.

Ezdrummer2 - 14" Sabian HHX Manhattan - Tip articulation

Closed		CC4 value
A		127-126
B		125-120
C		119-90
D		89-60
E		59-30
F		29-8
G		7-0
Open

[brainwreck]

If you ask me, for e-drumming, the current available drum samplers are majorly flawed in this area. If you are programming drums, it doesn't matter so much. But when you are actually playing an e-hat and have to pedal hunt for an openness level, and when the openness levels surprise you as you are playing the pedal, the blantant switching between openness levels makes for a very clunky playing experience. The same goes for the onboard hi-hats in drum modules. So for e-drumming, tons of kits, kit pieces, mic options, and mixing doodads mean nada with such a flaw in the way of the playing experience.

[DeathByGuitar]

I'll have to take some screenshots and render some audio clips of different hi hat samples. I remember SD2 having like 5 different levels of open, all of which where multi sampled. I haven't fooled around with adjusting the hi-hat openess sensitivity because my Roland FD-8 doesn't work well in-between fully open and fully closed. Terrible design.

[brainwreck]

Originally Posted by DeathByGuitar

I'll have to take some screenshots and render some audio clips of different hi hat samples. I remember SD2 having like 5 different levels of open, all of which where multi sampled. I haven't fooled around with adjusting the hi-hat openess sensitivity because my Roland FD-8 doesn't work well in-between fully open and fully closed. Terrible design.

Unless your FD-8 is defective, it probably isn't an issue with that pedal. I have an FD-7, and what I found is that it works fine. All it needs to do is track a little foot movement allowing for the module to spit out some CC4 values. The problem that I found is the sudden and blind switching of closed'ness to open'ness hi-hat sample sets. It gives the illusion that the pedal is overly sensitive because of the audibile discrete sudden switching. But the pedal is only really a resistor connected within a circuit providing a change to a continuous voltage. The circuit changes voltage, which is converted by the drum module to CC4 values. As long as the module is smoothly putting out a full range of values without any weird issues, the operation of the pedal is ok.

[DeathByGuitar]

Originally Posted by brainwreck

Unless your FD-8 is defective, it probably isn't an issue with that pedal. I have an FD-7, and what I found is that it works fine. All it needs to do is track a little foot movement allowing for the module to spit out some CC4 values. The problem that I found is the sudden and blind switching of closed'ness to open'ness hi-hat sample sets. It gives the illusion that the pedal is overly sensitive because of the audibile discrete sudden switching. But the pedal is only really a resistor connected within a circuit providing a change to a continuous voltage. The circuit changes voltage, which is converted by the drum module to CC4 values. As long as the module is smoothly putting out a full range of values without any weird issues, the operation of the pedal is ok.

I think my FD-8 is defective. But again, I'll send you some examples later of what SD3 can do

[brainwreck]

Originally Posted by DeathByGuitar

I think my FD-8 is defective. But again, I'll send you some examples later of what SD3 can do

What makes you think so? Regardless of the sounds that superior is putting out, have you looked at the CC4 output values of your module in relation to pedal positions to see if it is working smoothly? I think it is too easy here to think that something else is going on, missing where the problem actually lies.

[DeathByGuitar]

I've looked at the CC values and such but the issue can also be heard in my TD-6 module and also in the TD-3 before it. The in-between sounds just aren't audible assuming they're being triggered at all. I've used other FD-8's that didn't have this issue so I'm assuming mine is partially broken but I don't care since I don't have a use for half-open sounds when playing my TD-6 currently.

But this is a conversation about sampling software, not hardware. I'll make a clip of some sort (audio, video, something) showing the HH articulations in SD3. If there's anything in particular you want demonstrated, lemme know. If you have any MIDI you want processed to demo, I can do that too. Also if I don't send you anything within the next 8 hours, PM me to remind me.

[brainwreck]

Originally Posted by DeathByGuitar

I've looked at the CC values and such but the issue can also be heard in my TD-6 module and also in the TD-3 before it. The in-between sounds just aren't audible assuming they're being triggered at all. I've used other FD-8's that didn't have this issue so I'm assuming mine is partially broken but I don't care since I don't have a use for half-open sounds when playing my TD-6 currently.

But this is a conversation about sampling software, not hardware. I'll make a clip of some sort (audio, video, something) showing the HH articulations in SD3. If there's anything in particular you want demonstrated, lemme know. If you have any MIDI you want processed to demo, I can do that too. Also if I don't send you anything within the next 8 hours, PM me to remind me.

Hardware/software is all relative in figuring out where problems lie for this stuff.

I think I'll take you up on sending a MIDI file your way. I'll play and record the output of my hi-hat and pedal. But if you don't mind, it will likely be later tonight or earlier tomorrow before I can record and send something.

[mikeroephonics]

I sampled a friend's 10" Sabian AA Mini Hats 10 years ago, sampling around 5 degrees of open-ness. I agree that this isn't enough, but I had to get them back to him for his live gigs, and haven't bothered sampling them further, as my Toontrack libraries sound better anyway (DKFH-S & Custom & Vintage.) Although they only have around 4 degrees of open-ness each. To be clear, I mean the mics, pre-amps and room sound better. The hi-hats are very nice, especially played in isolation. Closed, they're pretty dry and not everybody's cup of tea.

In addition to the concern of the numbers of open-ness sampled is the number of degrees of closed positions, varying from tight foot pressure, to no foot pressure at all, where the foot isn't on the pedal. There's a wide variety of sound just in these closed positions. I sampled 3: tight, medium pressure and loose (no foot on pedal.) Depending on the hi-hats used, I'd say around 5-7 degrees of pedal tightness should be sampled, to capture these sounds. There's an audible increase in sizzle as you lay off the pedal, which is obviously the most noticeable when the foot is released entirely.

I found on the 10" Sabian AA Mini Hats that even the slightest change in top cymbal height had a pronounced effect on the sound, due to how the cymbals can wobble around as the distance between them increases. The tilting screw beneath the bottom cymbal also changes things a lot, and most definitely needs to be taken into account when sampling over the course of multiple days.

Add to that all the combinations of cymbal positions to be struck, and whether it's the stick's side or tip hitting the cymbal, plus velocity layers and random samples per velocity layer, you can end up with a rather large set of samples just for your hi-hats. Not that it matters in terms of HDD space, but for the cost of studio time to sample all of this? Yikes!

[brainwreck]

The biggest concern for me with sampled hi-hats is that the continuous change in sound when playing a real hi-hat clues me in on where to stop my foot for a desired level of openness. But with sampled hi-hats at inadequate openness levels, I'm not clued into anything. I could be within the exact same sample pool for 20 CC4 increments before a change happens. So it just changes rather abruptly from one openness level to the other. I do like that toontrack's samplers has what they call 'transmuting', but that is more about getting a more realistic opening and closing of the hi-hats when not striking them. What I am pointing out is something different. If I am playing a sampled hi-hat, say in the closed position, and I intend to open to somewhere around the half-open position, instead of as on a real hi-hat where the sound changes continuously until reaching that half-open position, I get sudden steps. Maybe it isn't obvious to everyone, but it is very obvious and annoying to me. And hell, I'm not even a proper drummer. But had I not looked into it deeper, I would have continued thinking that it is a hardware issue, when it is not. The hardware just sends out a stream of note values and CC4 values for the sampler to deal with as it pleases. And since the the internal sample playback for the module behaves essentially the same way, it would be rather easy to just assume that it is a hardware issue that will be resolved when upgrading to the ultra professsional and ultra realistic Roland TD-5000KXZY. But that just isn't the case. A lowly pedal and module vs. an expensive pedal and module are going to send out CC4 values just the same and how a sampler reacts to those values is independent of the hardware.

[Tod]

Originally Posted by DeathByGuitar

But this is a conversation about sampling software, not hardware. I'll make a clip of some sort (audio, video, something) showing the HH articulations in SD3. If there's anything in particular you want demonstrated, lemme know. If you have any MIDI you want processed to demo, I can do that too. Also if I don't send you anything within the next 8 hours, PM me to remind me.

Originally Posted by brainwreck

Hardware/software is all relative in figuring out where problems lie for this stuff.

brainwreck is right, unless you know for sure what your pedal is doing on the hardware side, then what's happening
on the software side doesn't mean much. Of course a person might get lucky where the combination just works, but if
you truly want to make good judgment calls, you really need to know what your pedal is doing.

A good pedal should put out 127 values. A better pedal should have an adjustment for a curve. Ha ha, now I'm just
postulating here my friends, I've never played an e-kit nor even played with a drummer that did. There may be
technical reasons that e-kit hat pedals are difficult make to work properly. There's also the possibility that the
hi-hat pedals are built around their own modules, which I'm sure are the weakest part of the link, and the more I
think about it, that could be it.

I'm really anxious to make an attempt at creating a good hi-hat for the e-kits. My good drummer friend is totally
tied up right now, so it's going to be a while.

[brainwreck]

Tod, I have a couple of drummer friends, and I am thinking it over.

On the pedal issue, it is really a module issue.

[ivansc]

I am sorta happy with SD3s take on Hi Hat control, but would LOVE for someone to come out with a really good Hi Hat pedal and a module capable of at least sending out a smoothly changing MIDI strweam that mirrors the pedal.

(and if its not too much to ask, pedal cost under $150?)

[dazastah]

The problem is the fact it is sampled, and the number of hihat controller zones.

Lets say you had 16 zones of closed to open .. then * that by 16 sample layers..
256 samples. Lets now add edge and tip hits for both left and right hand .. = 1024 samples.

I'm not sure if any sampled library has done this.. Then , imagine programming this to work in reasampler..

I would and have use actual cymbals/hihats with epads..

[brainwreck]

Originally Posted by ivansc

I am sorta happy with SD3s take on Hi Hat control, but would LOVE for someone to come out with a really good Hi Hat pedal and a module capable of at least sending out a smoothly changing MIDI strweam that mirrors the pedal.

(and if its not too much to ask, pedal cost under $150?)

Thing is, only so many of those MIDI control change values are being used anyway. If there are 7 openness ranges (7 sample sets), guess how many control values you actually need to access them. And even if the number of openness ranges were greatly upped to something like 32, that is still only a 1/4 of the available control change values, 0-127. So then what matters is how much pedal movement is required for going from one range to the next. Roland and other drum module manufacturers could very easily add parameters for adjusting openness ranges to their products (even for the lowest cost stuff) rather than a gross 'pedal sensitivity' or 'pedal curve' parameter, just the same as the drum sampler developers do. It can also be adjusted via a dedicated plugin. But this isn't an issue of 'pedal smoothness'. When we're dealing with so few openness ranges to begin with (in the modules and in the samplers), the result just cannot be smoothed. It doesn't matter what hardware you throw at it, because we're dealing with switching among just a handful of sample sets over the entire pedal travel. So if the pedal moves smoothly and the module outputs at least the number of control change values as there are openness range sample sets, that is about the best you can hope for no matter which pedal and module you use. So in order to really smooth out hi-hat pedal response, we aren't dealing with the pedal at all. We're dealing with the number of openness sample sets, which is what this thread is about. A handful just doesn't cut it. How would anyone like it if there were only a handful of velocity responses for the snare, where the output volume jumps by large increments rather than following the values of 0-127? It would be a clunky playing experience. Right? That is similar to what we are dealing with for hi-hat openness ranges. The underlying difference being that volume in the digital realm has very small increments of change, and so we do not hear the switching when we adjust volume, where openness of sampled hi-hats has very large increments of change and the switching is blatantly choppy.

I feel like I could talk about this all day and it still might not register until you hear it. I'll upload something in a bit.

[DeathByGuitar]

Originally Posted by brainwreck

Thing is, only so many of those MIDI control change values are being used anyway. If there are 7 openness ranges (7 sample sets), guess how many control values you actually need to access them. And even if the number of openness ranges were greatly upped to something like 32, that is still only a 1/4 of the available control change values, 0-127. So then what matters is how much pedal movement is required for going from one range to the next. Roland and other drum module manufacturers could very easily add parameters for adjusting openness ranges to their products (even for the lowest cost stuff) rather than a gross 'pedal sensitivity' or 'pedal curve' parameter, just the same as the drum sampler developers do. It can also be adjusted via a dedicated plugin. But this isn't an issue of 'pedal smoothness'. When we're dealing with so few openness ranges to begin with (in the modules and in the samplers), the result just cannot be smoothed. It doesn't matter what hardware you throw at it, because we're dealing with switching among just a handful of sample sets over the entire pedal travel. So if the pedal moves smoothly and the module outputs at least the number of control change values as there are openness range sample sets, that is about the best you can hope for no matter which pedal and module you use. So in order to really smooth out hi-hat pedal response, we aren't dealing with the pedal at all. We're dealing with the number of openness sample sets, which is what this thread is about. A handful just doesn't cut it. How would anyone like it if there were only a handful of velocity responses for the snare, where the output volume jumps by large increments rather than following the values of 0-127? It would be a clunky playing experience. Right? That is similar to what we are dealing with for hi-hat openness ranges. The underlying difference being that volume in the digital realm has very small increments of change, and so we do not hear the switching when we adjust volume, where openness of sampled hi-hats has very large increments of change and the switching is blatantly choppy.

I feel like I could talk about this all day and it still might not register until you hear it. I'll upload something in a bit.

Yeah. Everything about this thread is diminishing returns until you upload some MIDI for me to work with. I look forward to helping you as much as i can.

[Tod]

Originally Posted by DeathByGuitar

Yeah. Everything about this thread is diminishing returns until you upload some MIDI for me to work with. I look forward to helping you as much as i can.

Hi DeathByGuitar,Tell me exactly what you need for midi and I can put it together for you.

I assume the notes will be F#1(46) with CC4 as the controller.

[DeathByGuitar]

Originally Posted by Tod

Hi DeathByGuitar,Tell me exactly what you need for midi and I can put it together for you.

I assume the notes will be F#1(46) with CC4 as the controller.

All I really need is a MIDI file where someone is playing the hi hats, going between different foot pressure levels on the HH controller. I was going to run that through Superior Drummer 3 to demonstrate what it could offer the OP instead of EZ Drummer 2. I suppose I could generate that kind of thing myself but I wasn't sure if he had some specifc parameters he was wanting to put in there.

[brainwreck]

DeathByGuitar, apologies. I got wrapped up in other things today. I will post a proper response tomorrow. But quickly for now, what I would like to know is at what control change values superior switches it's sample sets for hi-hat openness ranges. I discussed this with others in another thread recently for ezdrummer, starting at post #189: https://forum.cockos.com/showthread....207693&page=19

And going on what minerman posted in post #198, it looks as if superior has 8 openness ranges. So I wonder if that is the same for other hi-hats in superior.

[brainwreck]

DeathbyGuitar, I don't know if you had a chance to check out what I posted above. What I would like to know about Superior is how many sample sets it switches among for hi-hat openness. Someone in the discussion that I mentioned above (minerman) posted a screen shot showing how many openness levels are available in Superior (looks like 8), but it would be nice to hear the transistions between the openness sample sets. So for doing that and some other useful things, I jumped into learning jsfx. And for the purpose of that discussion, I made a jsfx CC4 slider that is useful for exploring the openness ranges of a sampler's hihat. To use it, you just place it before the drum sampler, play your hi-hat as normal, and adjust the slider. It replaces any incoming CC4 value with the respective value of the slider position. In hindsight, I should have spent more time on it, making it output hi-hat notes and CC4 values without having to play the hi-hat and pedal. I will do that eventually. But it works for this purporse for now, and a MIDI file can be setup to output notes and CC4 values to it any way.

So if you are up for it, here is the simple jsfx plugin: https://app.box.com/s/k6nebaokk73pxfo5leeinrkxflxoqhcm

Save the .txt file to your jsfx folder, which should be at C:\Users\<your-username>\Appdata\Roaming\Reaper\effects

And here is a Reaper project that just loops a midi file of hi-hat note 20 at a fixed CC4 value (so that you don't have to play your hi-hat): https://app.box.com/s/jjm1udi3frvbnhcyu8mr74fck38o0093 I think the variable hi-hat note should be the same in Ezdrummer as it is for Superior, but you may need to change it in the MIDI file.

Insert the plugin before Superior and hit play. Adjust the slider in the jsfx to switch through the ranges of hi-hat openness, noting at what values the openness ranges change, like I did in post# 191 over here for Ezdrummer: https://forum.cockos.com/showthread....207693&page=20

What I have found by doing this myself is that the number of openness ranges provided in Ezdrummer 2 and Addictive Drums 2 is far too less. I think the number of openness ranges needs to be at least double of what it is and probably more like 16 openness ranges. And I didn't do this from out of nowhere. I was noticing something that I didn't like with e-hats, but I didn't know for sure what it was until I began exploring the issue a little deeper. So my conclusion, and the point of starting this thread, is that I want a hi-hat with more openness ranges than what is currently provided in drum modules and drum samplers. And 16 ranges seems like a decent number, since 8 CC4 increments worth of pedal movement is fairly small in comparison to the current situation where there can be a large number of increments before switching to a new openness range. Of course, even more would be nice, but that further increases the number of samples to be stored, loaded, and switched among, which could be a problem. Most full kits seem to be around max a couple of Gb's worth of samples. And for a highly sampled hi-hat, we are looking at something like that size for the hi-hat alone.

[Glennbo]

Originally Posted by brainwreck

I recently moved to using an e-drum kit as a controller for playing sampled drums. On the sampled drums aspect, all is pretty well for me except for the hi-hats. Since sampled hi-hats in commercial drum samplers don't have many openness levels (max I have seen is 9 openness levels), the audible switching among openness levels (and foot pedal hunting to target a desired openness level) is a problem for me that I would like to alleviate.

Something I forgot to mention in our PMing about this is that I use a dual trigger pad for my hihat, and at full open, I have two levels of full open.

The same is true for fully closed so I have a super tight "tick" hitting the center, but a less tight sound on the edge. Playing eighth notes back and forth between the full open or full closed pedal positions gets a much more natural sound than just staying in one zone, and is really quite similar to how I play a real hihat, changing positions on every hit.

[DeathByGuitar]

I took a video the plugin you made to demo the hi hat capabilities of SD3 using 4 different sets of hats from the Avatar, Allaire and Hit Factory kits. Didn't have the default Superior 3 library installed because I sorta hate the way it sounds but that's just a personal preference.

I hope this video I made can be of some slight help. My needs for E-drums and samples are pretty rudimentary so I'm not sure if I quite understand the bigger picture of what you're getting at. However, I feel like the Smoothing feature in SD3 makes the hats sound a bit more realistic, FWIW. I show that extensively in this video.

https://youtu.be/aZl4rG8WVQw

[Tod]

Originally Posted by DeathByGuitar

I took a video the plugin you made to demo the hi hat capabilities of SD3 using 4 different sets of hats from the Avatar, Allaire and Hit Factory kits. Didn't have the default Superior 3 library installed because I sorta hate the way it sounds but that's just a personal preference.

I hope this video I made can be of some slight help. My needs for E-drums and samples are pretty rudimentary so I'm not sure if I quite understand the bigger picture of what you're getting at. However, I feel like the Smoothing feature in SD3 makes the hats sound a bit more realistic, FWIW. I show that extensively in this video.

https://youtu.be/aZl4rG8WVQw

Great demonstration, now I see what brainwreck meant about the JS plugin. I thought that hi-hat did pretty well through
the transitions, but I'm not a drummer and maybe you guys think differently.

I also notice that the values are reversed, 0 for open and 127 for closed. That is reversed from what we discussed in
the other thread, not that it matters.

Your video used midi notes, but can you hook your pedal up to the JS slider so that it shows what your pedal is doing? I
think that would be very beneficial.

[brainwreck]

Thanks much for making the video, DeathbyGuitar. Hopefully you see what I mean by the switching between openness zones (rather than a more gradual transition). I'm not saying that it is a problem for everyone, but it is for me. Say that I am playing in the fully closed range, and I open the pedal up a bit for a sizzle sound, I might get what I expect, being just slightly open, or I might cross a boundary of that target range and end up in the wrong range. And making a quick and very small adjustment of my foot might not get me to where I want to be because the openness ranges are so course. That is my problem with sampled hi-hats. Not matter where I have the pedal position, I want a small adjustment to make a corresponding small adjustment in the openness, and that does not happen. Of course it depends on the span of values assigned to each openness range, but making one range smaller makes other ranges bigger. So then, having adjustment over a small number or ranges isn't very helpful to me. There needs to be more ranges to work with, so that each range takes up a small amount of pedal movement, with the sound of openness reflecting that.

So for myself, the hi-hats in Superior (and every other drum sampler so far) seem like a nogo for playing e-drums without being bothered by the hi-hat openness issue.

The best analogy I can think of for this is if a sampled snare only had something like 8 velocities. It would be a bad experience to play on, never really knowing if your low hit might trigger a too hard hit, your medium hit might trigger a too hard or too soft hit, or your hard hit might trigger a medium hit. So then you might adjust the velocity spans so that your soft hit samples are assigned to a small span, but then your other spans increase. The velocity spans for such a sampled snare would just be too course to not notice the switching between velocity ranges and having adjustments for the ranges of hit hardness wouldn't fix the problem. It would only alter it. And I feel that is the case for openness of sampled hi-hats, that the control change spans are just too course to make for a non-clunky playing experience.

Also, I'm really surprised that I haven't seen anyone bring this issue up before. This is my first go at using an e-hat, and I was noticing a problem right away. I just didn't know exactly what the problem was until I started digging deeper to figure out exactly what the issue is, specifically.

[DeathByGuitar]

I understand what you're saying and I sympathize, but damn...that's EXTREMELY specific. I can't imagine any company would go to that amount of sampling detail for something that can't be heard in a mix. It's really just one of the trade-offs of not playing a real drumset. I hope this isn't totally murdering your enjoyment of playing e-kits.

I guess it's kinda like how I love my Axe-FX II to death but I'd still love to have a real Dual Rectifier because there are teeny tiny little nuances that are basically impossible to emulate. But in both these cases I think it boils down to diminishing returns. Would having hi hat samples with 8 or more levels of openness produce that much difference in whatever music you're making?

Also, I'd love to hear examples of what you're creating with all of this in mind.

[brainwreck]

Originally Posted by DeathByGuitar

I understand what you're saying and I sympathize, but damn...that's EXTREMELY specific. I can't imagine any company would go to that amount of sampling detail for something that can't be heard in a mix. It's really just one of the trade-offs of not playing a real drumset. I hope this isn't totally murdering your enjoyment of playing e-kits.

I guess it's kinda like how I love my Axe-FX II to death but I'd still love to have a real Dual Rectifier because there are teeny tiny little nuances that are basically impossible to emulate. But in both these cases I think it boils down to diminishing returns. Would having hi hat samples with 8 or more levels of openness produce that much difference in whatever music you're making?

Also, I'd love to hear examples of what you're creating with all of this in mind.

For now, I'm just trying to play and practice drums at low(er) volume so that I can spend alot more time on drums than I could practically do with an acoustic kit. I'm far from being a good drummer at this point. So in that regard, electronic drums are great...with caveats. But now I'm looking at having to add in a real hi-hat to get back the expressiveness that is lacking with limited sampled hi-hats, and that might end up being a volume problem, limiting my time window for playing drums.

The above analogy to a snare with limited velocities is the best way that I can describe my issue with sampled hi-hats. Everything else is pretty ok after spending some time dialing things in. But the hi-hat thing is damn annoying to me. I feel like it is a hinder to playing expressively and practicing effectively where playing hi-hat is involved.

So it seems that I will be giving a real hi-hat a go, while also spending some time working up my own highly sampled hi-hat. It won't sound as nice as commercially sampled hi-hats, but at least it will have much less choppiness of openness.

By the way, I was just banging around using the onboard sounds from the TD-11. The number of openness ranges there is 4!, with no means for adjusting the boundaries of ranges. On top of that is machine-gunning across the entire kit. Gahhh... I can deal with that though for practicing rudiments and such. But when it gets down to playing and creating, it is like a toy.

[DeathByGuitar]

I still think Superior Drummer 3 would be worth a shot. I just re-downloaded the core library and will make a video of hi-hat stuff later. No machinegunning anywhere like you'd have with a drum module.

Just to be clear, you said that you were playing your kit using EZD 2 and AD 2 for sounds, correct?

[Glennbo]

Originally Posted by brainwreck

By the way, I was just banging around using the onboard sounds from the TD-11. The number of openness ranges there is 4!, with no means for adjusting the boundaries of ranges.

As a drummer with about 40 years of professional stage and studio experience, I am not bothered one bit by the coarseness of open to closed on my V-Drums with Superior. In most cases, I either have the hihat fully closed for the tick sound, or wide open for the roaring "ride the hat" effect.

On my pad kit, when the pedal is full open, it is 100% open/roaring in the center of the pad, but on the edge it is more of a 75% open, so when I want to ride the hihat, I've got two levels of open with the pedal full up, and for fully closed I've got super tight samples assigned to the center of the pad, and slightly less tension samples on the edge. There's really nothing in the way the pad hihat plays that makes me want to use my real hihat, which is only five feet away from the pad kit, since I have both an acoustic kit and V-Drums in my studio.

[ashcat_lt]

Originally Posted by dazastah

Lets say you had 16 zones of closed to open .. then * that by 16 sample layers..
256 samples. Lets now add edge and tip hits for both left and right hand .. = 1024 samples.

Per microphone! Probably 6 or 8 times that many in the end. And cymbal hits can get pretty long.

Maybe not what you want to hear, but I'm afraid the only thing to do at this point is to accept the fact that an ehat is not the same instrument as a hihat and then learn to play the new instrument. Use the tools available to make it more comfortable for you, but it's going to come down to familiarity and muscle memory.

BTW - You don't have to buy SD just to change the pedal curve. There are a number of plugins that will gladly do that for you before it even hits your VSTi.

[brainwreck]

Originally Posted by DeathByGuitar

Just to be clear, you said that you were playing your kit using EZD 2 and AD 2 for sounds, correct?

Yep. Soundwise, EZD 2's hi-hat sounds are nice. And neither EZD 2 or AD 2 have any noticeable machine gunning - that is a limitation of hardware modules where not many samples can live onboard because of very limited memory. But as far as I can tell from your video, the hi-hats in EZD 2 are about equivalent to what is in Superior in way of openness ranges. And EZD 2 has transmuting. So I think Superior wouldn't offer me anything in way of solving my sampled hi-hat issue. As far as velocity and control change settings (which are lacking in EZD 2), I can do that myself using jsfx.

Any way, I went ahead and ordered a set of zildjian new beat hi-hats to give a real set a go. It's just a matter of whether the volume will be an issue in limiting my time window for playing.

[DeathByGuitar]

Originally Posted by Glennbo

As a drummer with about 40 years of professional stage and studio experience, I am not bothered one bit by the coarseness of open to closed on my V-Drums with Superior. In most cases, I either have the hihat fully closed for the tick sound, or wide open for the roaring "ride the hat" effect.

On my pad kit, when the pedal is full open, it is 100% open/roaring in the center of the pad, but on the edge it is more of a 75% open, so when I want to ride the hihat, I've got two levels of open with the pedal full up, and for fully closed I've got super tight samples assigned to the center of the pad, and slightly less tension samples on the edge. There's really nothing in the way the pad hihat plays that makes me want to use my real hihat, which is only five feet away from the pad kit, since I have both an acoustic kit and V-Drums in my studio.

Yeah I think there's a good chance that brainwreck is making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill here. I can relate because occasionally I'll have bouts of obsession about little details like this but I honestly don't think that this issue is worth the effort to produce an elaborate set of hat samples. Going between slight variations of hi hat openness is such a tiny aspect of playing drums (unless a majority of your playing involves extremely elaborate hi-hat variations...constantly, if not exclusively). I really feel like this concern is a bit myopic, honestly. brainwreck,I hope you don't take offense to that. But honestly I feel like if Superior won't suit your needs then no software will be good enough for you.

[brainwreck]

Originally Posted by ashcat_lt

Per microphone! Probably 6 or 8 times that many in the end. And cymbal hits can get pretty long.

Maybe not what you want to hear, but I'm afraid the only thing to do at this point is to accept the fact that an ehat is not the same instrument as a hihat and then learn to play the new instrument. Use the tools available to make it more comfortable for you, but it's going to come down to familiarity and muscle memory.

BTW - You don't have to buy SD just to change the pedal curve. There are a number of plugins that will gladly do that for you before it even hits your VSTi.

I have tried playing with a mono channel for hi-hat, and it would be fine for non-recording purposes of just playing and practicing. But for a mono channel + stereo overhead channels + 2 articulations for tip and shaft (which is fine to me for recording), I think I calculated something like 2.5 Gb's total. So the possible issue would be one of memory.

No way in hell I would want to hand edit all those samples, though. I would hopefully use Reaper's available tools and/or write a set of scripts for that. Something like:

For recording samples: Begin recording. According to current pre-defined X db range, if recorded peak is within range, save recording to pre-defined filename, else throw out and prompt for new hit. Loop for number of required hit variations. Increment db range and repeat.

Once all the recorded hits are collected: Load file, find beginning of hit, slice at zero crossing, find decay threshold point, slice at zero crossing, fade out, render. Repeat for all files.

Of course that all sounds easier said than done, but it gives a rough idea of what would be required for making doing this practical.

[DeathByGuitar]

Originally Posted by brainwreck

Yep. Soundwise, EZD 2's hi-hat sounds are nice. And neither EZD 2 or AD 2 have any noticeable machine gunning - that is a limitation of hardware modules where not many samples can live onboard because of very limited memory. But as far as I can tell from your video, the hi-hats in EZD 2 are about equivalent to what is in Superior in way of openness ranges. And EZD 2 has transmuting. So I think Superior wouldn't offer me anything in way of solving my sampled hi-hat issue. As far as velocity and control change settings (which are lacking in EZD 2), I can do that myself using jsfx.

Any way, I went ahead and ordered a set of zildjian new beat hi-hats to give a real set a go. It's just a matter of whether the volume will be an issue in limiting my time window for playing.

Okh okay. Well i hope that gets you where you need to be. Good luck.

[brainwreck]

Originally Posted by DeathByGuitar

Yeah I think there's a good chance that brainwreck is making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill here. I can relate because occasionally I'll have bouts of obsession about little details like this but I honestly don't think that this issue is worth the effort to produce an elaborate set of hat samples. Going between slight variations of hi hat openness is such a tiny aspect of playing drums (unless a majority of your playing involves extremely elaborate hi-hat variations...constantly, if not exclusively). I really feel like this concern is a bit myopic, honestly. brainwreck,I hope you don't take offense to that. But honestly I feel like if Superior won't suit your needs then no software will be good enough for you.

No offense taken. I think each of us should decide for ourselves what works for us on a personal level and what doesn't. And if something doesn't, we can do what we are able to alleviate the difficulty. If I thought that it wasn't a real problem for me personally, no way in hell I would go through all the trouble of creating something to fix the problem. So the plan here is to first give a real hi-hat a go and determine if the volume is an issue. If it is (and I think it will be), then I move on to sampling the hi-hat and getting it working in a jsfx. And in the meantime, I am learning (with help) what I need to know to make that happen.

[Glennbo]

Originally Posted by DeathByGuitar

Yeah I think there's a good chance that brainwreck is making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill here. I can relate because occasionally I'll have bouts of obsession about little details like this but I honestly don't think that this issue is worth the effort to produce an elaborate set of hat samples. Going between slight variations of hi hat openness is such a tiny aspect of playing drums (unless a majority of your playing involves extremely elaborate hi-hat variations...constantly, if not exclusively). I really feel like this concern is a bit myopic, honestly. brainwreck,I hope you don't take offense to that. But honestly I feel like if Superior won't suit your needs then no software will be good enough for you.

Just for a real point of reference, I opened my Superior 1 folder (Drumkit From Hell Superior), where the samples are individual .wav files you can see, and organized into folders like "HiHat", "Snare", Etc.

For the five or six drum kits that were included in that first version of Superior, take a guess at how many individual wave files there are, just for hihat, and nothing else???


. . .


. . .


. . .


OK, time's up. There are a whopping SEVEN THOUSAND and TWENTY THREE hihat wave files, totaling 2.8 GB of data. This is on the oldest version of Superior ever made.

[brainwreck]

Originally Posted by Glennbo

OK, time's up. There are a whopping SEVEN THOUSAND and TWENTY THREE hihat wave files, totaling 2.8 GB of data. This is on the oldest version of Superior ever made.

How many sets of hi-hats is that for? I am assuming that each hi-hat has channels for direct mic, stereo overheads, and at least stereo room.

[Glennbo]

Originally Posted by brainwreck

How many sets of hi-hats is that for? I am assuming that each hi-hat has channels for direct mic, stereo overheads, and at least stereo room.

Funny you should ask, I just rebooted out of Linux and back into Windows to find that out for myself, and the answer is *eight*. Oh, and I mis-typed the total number of files by 400. The complete total number of files for eight hihats is 7,423 or roughly 927.875 samples per each hihat. There is a separate folder for Ambience that has around 8000 files in it.


09/29/2003 09:38 PM 309,010 TO05_04_DS_FH_R_L04.wav
09/29/2003 09:38 PM 313,430 TO05_04_DS_FH_R_S01.wav
09/29/2003 09:38 PM 322,868 TO05_04_DS_FH_R_S02.wav
09/29/2003 09:38 PM 316,084 TO05_04_DS_FH_R_S03.wav
09/29/2003 09:38 PM 321,886 TO05_04_DS_FH_R_S04.wav
7423 File(s) 2,807,448,704 bytes

D:\Superior\Drummer\Hats>

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