Reaper Users and Drum Samples

H-evolve

H-evolve

Member
Apr 21, 2014
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Montreal, Canada
I've been searching the forum and also on Google and perhaps I'm not using the good keywords, but I can't find anything about my very noobish question.

I have Superior Drummer (+ Metal Foundry) and I am not so satisfied with it. Whatever I do I can't make it sound good. It is surely partly because their samples aren't great, and also a lot due to my noobiness at this.

That being said, reading here, I found the samples from Seraph Recordings! Going through it I am thinking "Shit, I could build my own drum kit with what I like!"

So first question, are those only used to "Improve" an existing drum track? That is, you can't really use them as the basic drum sound?

And second question, is how do you load them in Reaper? If I have my MIDI track, for the drum line, how do I say "the key of C should use THAT sample?". Saw people talking about Slate Trigger but man.. this is 100$... surely I don't need to spend that much money to just do that.

I am sorry it is a very software dependant question, but I have no idea how to do it. Any help, link sending me to some video or whatever, would be appreciated.
 
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If I remember correctly the Seraph samples come with NKI's so you could build your own kits in Kontakt. I can't verify for sure because I lost my drive with all my samples and Peter won't respond to my emails to get new links. So, yes you probably can, but FUCK Seraph :)
 
By itself, Reaper just a plugin called ReaSamplomatic 5000... but depending on how the sample set is organized it might be really complicated to set up a kit with that.
 
FarBeyondMetal said:
If I remember correctly the Seraph samples come with NKI's so you could build your own kits in Kontakt. I can't verify for sure because I lost my drive with all my samples and Peter won't respond to my emails to get new links. So, yes you probably can, but FUCK Seraph :)
Click to expand...

Well, you are correct, as I have been experimenting for the last hour or so. The problem I have si that Kontakt Player doesn't seem to allow third party samples or something. Or at least, the problem I have now, is that after some time, Kontakt stops like I am in Demo mode or something... I don't want their damn 300$ software and a bunch of samples I'm never gonna use...!!! I just want to play my samples!

It was actually working quite fine with the NKI file you were talking about. It just stopped saying it was a "demo".
 
I believe Kontakt Player is only meant for bundling with samples, you can't use it to build a kit - that's what the full Kontakt is for, among other things.

There are a few similar free plugins, they probably won't load NKIs though - Independence Free, Short Circuit, for starters.
 
I can send you a template for Reaper with some samples (you can then just replace those with your own), if you give your e-mail.

How many samples you have? I mean, how many drums and cymbals, and are those single shot samples? With that information I can create a template where you only need to add your samples and it's done.

I always use ReaSamplomatic5000, because in my opinion it's amazing, and doesn't cost 100$...
Here's one song done with that:
 
henryjarv said:
I can send you a template for Reaper with some samples (you can then just replace those with your own), if you give your e-mail.

How many samples you have? I mean, how many drums and cymbals, and are those single shot samples? With that information I can create a template where you only need to add your samples and it's done.

I always use ReaSamplomatic5000, because in my opinion it's amazing, and doesn't cost 100$...
Here's one song done with that:
Click to expand...

That's very nice of you. I can't listen to you sound cloud from work, the firewall blocks it. I'll try at home later today!

So far I don't have much, as I didn't want to go on a shopping spree for samples before knowing how to use them. You can still, if you want, send me your template and whenever I have enough I'll be able to use it. My email is hugues.bergerpelletier@gmail.com (I don't mind leaving it here in public).

When writing music, I normally use something like 1 kick, 1 snare, 4 or 5 toms, and around 5 cymbals. Meaning that at some point I'll have samples for all those.

I'll definitely have to look ReaSamplomatic5000.... So far I have only read that it is not user friendly and difficult to use, but you seem to say otherwise!

Thanks again
 
Just my 2 cents about all this...

The cool thing with stuff like Superior is that the plugins itself manage a lot of useful things (at least to me) like :
- multisamples/roundrobin and many velocity layers
- samples correspondance = 1 top mic sample / 1 bottom mic sample / 1 OH sample / 1 room sample...etc will all be linked/locked from the same original hit/performance, and not be randomly triggered.
- mic options and in depth bleed management

So in the end, you'll get a very natural and coherent result.
Going the "frankenkit" route, you're approaching your drums more like EDM = only summing very disconnected elements, that are mostly recorded with less velocity layers and not all the cool stuff I listed above, and with nothing that will glue them together.
You can definitely use some room reverbs and stuff like that during mixing to gel a bit the kit together, but that's not the same as using some nice OH or room mics, or even bleed from every mics.

When using programmed drums, I much more like the following approach :
- mimic a real drum recording with Superior, spending a lot of time on pure MIDI programming (the parts itself, velocity, humanisation...etc), and then on the kit/sounds, mics, bleed...etc.
- if needed and depending on the genre, augment/enhance those raw tracks by adding other samples on top of it (mainly kick/snare). You can even use oneshot samples for this (= only 1 sample / 1 hard hit), so that you get best of both worlds, a really nice dynamic/realistic original sound from Superior, blended with a very robotic / consistant one.

So yeah, I advocate trying to find a SDX that better fits your needs too.
I personally don't really like Metal Foundry (sometimes using cymbals and some toms), but you could be able to get some really nice results from the basic Avatar library, even if this one is beaten to death and have been heard everywhere :)

EDIT : oh and if you want really raw tones, don't want to spend any more money and have a bit of a nerdy mind, you can also try this http://www.drumgizmo.org/wiki/
 
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TRUIE said:
Just my 2 cents about all this...

The cool thing with stuff like Superior is that the plugins itself manage a lot of useful things (at least to me) like :
- multisamples/roundrobin and many velocity layers
- samples correspondance = 1 top mic sample / 1 bottom mic sample / 1 OH sample / 1 room sample...etc will all be linked/locked from the same original hit/performance, and not be randomly triggered.
- mic options and bleed management
Click to expand...

True. But that all can be done with ReaSamplomatic too.

I have recorded a real drumkit with 8 mics, every hit from every mic, and rendered as 8channel samples.
That sampler can use those multichannel samples too, and send each channel to different tracks (Kick, snare, t1, t2.....OH, Room.........)
So it sounds exactly like the real kit with all 8 mics.
 
I don't use Reaper and that sampler, but I was not even speaking about multiple outputs, are you sure it can do what I listed (like managing bleed, multiple velocity layers and multiple random samples for each layer, and linking all the samples like 1 snare top sample linked to its bottom, OH, room and all the bleeds counterparts ?).

You can do all of this with Kontakt too, but you have to do it yourself and it involves some in depth knowledge of this plugin (and all the corresponding samples to start with) or it depends of the company that sells you the samples.
 
TRUIE said:
I don't use Reaper and that sampler, but are you sure it can do what I listed (like managing bleed, multiple velocity layers and multiple samples for each layer, and linking all the samples like 1 snare top sample linked to its bottom, OH, room and all the bleeds counterparts ?)

You can do all of this with Kontakt too, but you have to do it yourself and it involves some in depth knowledge of this plugin (and all the corresponding samples to start with).
Click to expand...

Well, henryjarv would be the best to answer, but I don't think it can, at least, handle the variations of velocity (how hard you hit), since purchased samples are usually only sold with 1 or maybe 2 or 4 intensity levels. But, for some metal genre, it's often all-in from the beginning to the end of the song.

But I'm curious to hear henryjarv on this.
 
TRUIE said:
I don't use Reaper and that sampler, but are you sure it can do what I listed (like managing bleed, multiple velocity layers and multiple samples for each layer, and linking all the samples like 1 snare top sample linked to its bottom, OH, room and all the bleeds counterparts ?)
Click to expand...

Yes. Well that bleed thing is "on/off", because what is recorded to mic....It is what it is. But you can mute channels if you wan't.

I can post here template with few samples when I have more time..
 
I'm not saying it's bad and that you can't get something at least usable out of it, but it definitely can't do all the things that a sampler like Superior can do (I'm not speaking about the samples themselves, only the samplers).
It looks like something like shortcircuit : you can add samples, manage different velocity layers (like from veloctiy x to y = trigger this one sample...etc), but it can't do round robin, bleed management, samples linking...etc.

Judging by this video :
 
TRUIE said:
but it can't do round robin, bleed management, samples linking...etc.
Click to expand...

It can do round robin. (12 layers if I remember right...)

Samples linking......With those multichannel samples, yes it can. Because everything hits at the same time from multichannel file and is sent to different channels

Bleed, I already told about that.

But I don't force you to believe :D
 
Don't worry, I'm really open to believe all of this :)
Do you have some video example or screenshot of some scripting showing all of these features ?

EDIT : not sure I explained well what I call "sample linking" because of my english.
I mean, when you sample drums, you set up all your mics like for a real recording, and when you sample let's say a snare, you also record every other mics.

A sampler like Superior, when it plays let's say "Snare Hard 01 Close mic",
it will also plays
Snare Hard 01 Bottom Mic
Snare Hard 01 OH
Snare Hard 01 Room Close
Snare Hard 01 Kick Mic bleed
...etc.
It won't trigger randomly "Snare Hard 02, 03, 04...etc" from the round robin pool independently on each other mics.
All of the samples are linked, just like in a real recording.
Do you see what I mean ?
 
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TRUIE said:
A sampler like Superior, when it plays let's say "Snare Hard 01 Close mic",
it will also plays
Snare Hard 01 Bottom Mic
Snare Hard 01 OH
Snare Hard 01 Room Close
Snare Hard 01 Kick Mic bleed
...etc.
Click to expand...

And that happens with ReaSamplomatic too, IF you use MULTICHANNEL samples. Actually, DrumGizmo works like that too, but it uses 16ch samples......Maybe there was one 8ch kit too, don't remember.

If I record a snare hit, with 8 mics, I can render that hit, from all mics, into one sample, where is 8 channels.
And if I play that sample from sampler, that sends each channel to different tracks.

One 8ch snare sample has all this information:

Snare_Kick_01--->Kick
Snare_Snare_01--->Snare
Snare_T1_01--->T1
Snare_T2_01--->T2
Snare_T3_01--->T3
Snare_T4_01--->T4
Snare_OHL_01--->OHL
Snare_OHR_01--->OHR

And now it can be mixed like a real drumkit. No scripting or anything like that, that's just how it works if you want to.
 
So that sampler might be way better than what I was thinking.
But let's be realistic, that's still a very complicated approach and for someone that want good natural results into one efficient GUI and easily tweakable, I'd still advocate to stay with Superior and try finding an SDX that fit your needs.

But that Reaper sampler looks good ;)
 
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