Question about Slate settings (OH, Dynamics etc)

[JayB]

I've seen a bunch of threads on what everyone's fave slate kits are, but I can't seem to find one that details what most people do as far as all the settings that are available. Like, for kicks, should overheads be on or off? What about dynamics, should that be left at the default 60% or put down to zero? Any other insight would be greatly appreciated!

 

[JayB]

Somebody wanna chime in?

 

[Manicompression]

I too am curious about this. I recently picked up trigger platinum, vcc and an ilok 2. I feel like it would make sense to print the direct hits, z1s I believe they are called and then print the ambient studio tracks on another track so you can control and automate levels separate from one another during different sections of your tracks. However I wonder if the samples generate randomly or if the hits would correspond and how much of a difference this would make.
Also, I remember Aaron Smith talking about how you had to treat the slate samples in a particular way to make them sound the best, Im curious as to what his and some of the other people on this forums approach is. Im sure i will suss out something awesome once i get my next recording tracked though, trigger really feels like an improvement over drumagog 4 that i was using.

 

[Manicompression]

In reference to your questions I would venture to say that you dont want any room in a kick sound if your doing metal, and maybe only a little bit if you were doing something more rock and rollish. Also I would leave the dynamics at 0 or close, from what i can tell most kicks on metal albums are pretty much static in volume.

 

[JayB]

In reference to your questions I would venture to say that you dont want any room in a kick sound if your doing metal, and maybe only a little bit if you were doing something more rock and rollish. Also I would leave the dynamics at 0 or close, from what i can tell most kicks on metal albums are pretty much static in volume.

OK, so leave overheads off then and 0% dynamics? Can anyone else confirm this?

 

[Skinny Viking]

personally, I always try to preserve at least SOME dynamics in a kick track when I replace. Even a small amount goes a LONG way to making it feel and sound more natural

 

[Tommy Evans]

I never touch the "dynamics" setting. For kicks I don't use any room. For snare/toms I use rooms.

 

[JayB]

I never touch the "dynamics" setting. For kicks I don't use any room. For snare/toms I use rooms.

When you say room do you mean the room mic volume or the overheads on button? Like should I be lowering the room volume knob all the way for metal AND turning the overheads button off?

 

[JayB]

personally, I always try to preserve at least SOME dynamics in a kick track when I replace. Even a small amount goes a LONG way to making it feel and sound more natural

Ok, so I should leave it at the default 60% Dynamics?

 

[tempe]

I'll just chime in and say I've never really paid much attention to specifics with these settings and I'm mostly using trigger these days. But if I'm ever stuck programming entirely with slate I'll try and make it so I can approach it as much like a real kit as possible, I'll also say that a little bit of room on your kick can be really cool. If it gets flubby just high pass!

 

[grywolf627]

personally, I always try to preserve at least SOME dynamics in a kick track when I replace. Even a small amount goes a LONG way to making it feel and sound more natural

This!! SOME dynamics in the kick is important. Not a great amount, but some...or it'll end up sounding like my old TR-707 drum machine (heck, even with that you could accent notes).

 

[Skinny Viking]

Ok, so I should leave it at the default 60% Dynamics?

Thats really a judgment call for you to make .. like I said, for me personally, I like to retain a little bit of the original dynamics. That may not always translate into 60% ... it just means that its usually never Dynamics= 0%

Best thing you could do would be take a 30 second clip of a tune where there's various forms of kick movement going on, and bounce down some variations ... one at 0%, one at 25%, 50%, 75% & 100%

listen to them all and see if one of them hits that sweet spot of sounding right but also "feeling" right

you may find that you don't even really notice much a difference between a few ... at least then you know not to obsess over an exact percentage too much

 

[JayB]

Ok thanks guys! One more question, sort of unrelated but I didn't want to open a new thread about it. I'm working in a session that's almost maxed out as far as tracks, and I'm wanting to redo the Slate drum samples. My main question is regarding toms. For toms, I know that the 3 different main toms should all be high passed differently. However, I'm low on track space and I just wanted to open up an aux, put the three toms on it, and bounce down a stereo "stem" of the toms, and I was going to do this for two different types of toms and blend them. Is there any way to throw an eq on each specific tom or do I need to bounce all 6 tom sounds and process them individually (which would take about ten years bouncing the whole album in Pro Tools)

 

[AudioGeekZine]

the overheads and rooms come up on different tracks in SSD4 so I don't really know what you're asking about.

 

[JayB]

the overheads and rooms come up on different tracks in SSD4 so I don't really know what you're asking about.

In 3.5 there's a button in Kontakt player for overheads on or off, and also a knob for room mic volume.

Does anyone have any input as far as my previous question about bouncing toms?

 

[JayB]

I'm also thinking of maybe just opening up a separate session with each tom on its own Kontakt track, with the high passes and just bouncing them in that session. Does anyone know if there is a way to export certain midi tracks (I don't want to export everything) , sort of like the export to file function?

 

[ashgallows]

you can eq them in the instrument, each tom should have a 3 band eq in the effects tab. whereas i dont remember there being a hipass filter there is a low shelf filter which honestly can be better for pulling out lows imo. there also might be a full fledged eq you can put on the tracks in the mixer section of the instrument inc. hi pass filter

 

[JayB]

you can eq them in the instrument, each tom should have a 3 band eq in the effects tab. whereas i dont remember there being a hipass filter there is a low shelf filter which honestly can be better for pulling out lows imo. there also might be a full fledged eq you can put on the tracks in the mixer section of the instrument inc. hi pass filter

Thanks! Do I need to open a full multi kit for this? When I just threw in toms individually in its "mixer" thing I didn't see an eq at all...

 

[mairomaster]

Just select "Effects" view in the desired instrument panel drop down menu. In the default position it shows the mixer for the individual instrument, from where you activate room sound, OH, adjust the levels etc.

 

[ashgallows]

in the mixer window of kontakt there are faders and above that are slots for inserts, simply add an eq insert. if you load certain snares there is a limiter on the track by default, thats where you can load inserts. the mixer view should be a tab at the top of the whole instrument with what looks like 3 little meters in it.