I tend to think DFHS (and hopefully 2.0, which I'm buying this summer) are pretty straightforward; load it up, start penciling in the piano roll, and boom - insta-awesome. But please, someone correct me if I'm wrong!
Metal Drums Test - Steven Slate Drums 2.0 & Kontakt
- Thread starter Josh Burgess
- Start date
MetallyGuitarded
He whom thou art not
I loaded DFHS sometime last summer and the GUI seemed a bit intimidating but I was impressed with how well it ran on my under-powered system. It sounded good out of the box but it sounded to me like it needed a lot of Compression, Gating, EQ, etc before it would make a good final track. Keep in mind that I knew jack about mixing drums then and only slightly more now.
It's pretty obvious that if you know how to work it it's amazing and conversely it's apparent that if you know approximately jack shit about drum production it can sound real dumb. This is a clear case of an ID10T interface error. I don't even know how to get great sounds out of Addictive yet and from other tracks I've heard I know you can. I just think it would be beneficial for myself certainly and perhaps Josh to start small, take baby steps.
It might also help to point out that guys like me using EZDrummer and Addictive tend to expect/hope for Sneap level drums out of a $150 drum software, which is clearly ridiculous.
It's pretty obvious that if you know how to work it it's amazing and conversely it's apparent that if you know approximately jack shit about drum production it can sound real dumb. This is a clear case of an ID10T interface error. I don't even know how to get great sounds out of Addictive yet and from other tracks I've heard I know you can. I just think it would be beneficial for myself certainly and perhaps Josh to start small, take baby steps.
It might also help to point out that guys like me using EZDrummer and Addictive tend to expect/hope for Sneap level drums out of a $150 drum software, which is clearly ridiculous.
MetallyGuitarded
He whom thou art not
Side Note: I wish there was a way to load only the kits you want in DFHS instead of having to load the whole 40GB library. I'm behind the times with an 80GB as my largest drive.
for cymbals? no, there's definitely not many cymbals at all, especially compared to other packs like DFHS. but I'm guessing that's probably because they didn't spend much time on them because they were thinking most people using the pack would just be sample replacing kick and snares and not programming drum tracks.
I can get good sounding kicks and toms, but the snare and cymbals are sounding weak for heavier music. it seems like 90% of the snares have a ton of ring/ping/boing kind of sound, which I really dislike for metal. I like snares with a lot of crack. I was fine with the cymbals at first but now that a few people have brought it more to my attention I've noticed how weak and out of place sounding they are with heavier drums... almost every kit uses the same cymbals...
Yeah, I originally bought the slate drums thinking it'd be nice since they're already processed, but it seems like they still need a decent amount of work getting them to fit with heavier music.... a lot of it seems a little too focused on the commercial rock/pop stuff. I've been programming midi drums a lot in tablature programs and pretty good at it (as far as composing goes), but these are my first attempts at triggering samples with the midis. I actually remapped the drums I wanted to use to the same mapping tabit/powertab/guitarpro/etc. use to be able to quickly write in those and then export the file to midi and import it in DAW.... just for getting quick tracks started. and it worked pretty damn well. just have to go in and edit velocities after that. there are scripts in kontakt that "humanize" and "randomize" velocity/volume/timing/etc., but they don't seem to work very well, because it's too random.... half of the time doesn't make sense or sound realistic. So, to get it extremely realistic sounding is very, very tedious as you have to go in and edit velocitys for each individual drum and cymbal, and I haven't bothered doing that yet because it's really time consuming. For basic (but good sounding) scratch tracks though, I thought it was fine and was happy with the kicks I was getting, but the snare and cymbals are bothering me. The pantera kit snare is the only one with enough crack, and even then I have to make sure the velocity hits are pretty high to keep that crack... I think most of the snares here are more focused on that big radio rock kind of sound rather than the metal "crack"...
MetallyGuitarded
He whom thou art not
Have you tried tried EZ Drummer with the DFH pak? The snare in that is pretty damn snappy. Most people hate it but I think I know what you're going for and it might be that EZ Drummer has that. Plus it's really EZ. Pun intended.
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