KVR Audio

filkertom · Post by **filkertom** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 7:19 pm

Gotcha, klagga -- thanks for asking, and for sharing. I wish you tremendous joy with Studio Drummer, and hope it does everything you want it to. You do have an advantage -- you're well used to Kontakt. Do not discount that.

I actually used to do all my drums with loops in Acid Pro, because the MIDI sounds available simply weren't good enough... but I'm getting better samples all the time, as well as better patterns. And, as I said, I use Band In A Box quite a bit; their Real Instruments have improved vastly since they first came out a few years ago, and they've got a heck of a lot of good drums these days. (I do wish they wouldn't focus so much on "swing" patterns rather than "even"....)

The sounds for SD and BFD are great, but I've found both DrumCore (free) and Jamstix (demo, saving up to buy 3) to be much more intuitive to use. I'd like to like MDrummer more, but it's a bit of pain as well. Maybe I'm just lazy, but if I'm getting darn good results with something that I can use easily, anything in competition with it has to have pretty damn fantastic results relative to the difficulty of use, and Kontakt/SD/BFD don't give me that.

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 7:23 pm

filkertom wrote:Multis are also a pain, especially with routing. I'm very used to things like WusikStation and Garritan's Aria, where you click on the channel box, assign, and BAM there you are, routing and everything already taken care of. Trying to use a drum set from Steven Slate EX, on the other hand, means individually routing each drum in the set. If there's a way to not have to worry about that, I haven't found it.

Kontakt 4.2 (and Player, too) have new macros for setting up outputs. They are really useful. See:

I bet that first one in the list solves it for setting up Steven Slate Drums.

[/img]

boombaxx · Post by **boombaxx** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 7:38 pm

Steve Slate drums come with there own mixer layout in Kontakt i thought

filkertom · Post by **filkertom** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 7:39 pm

Hm. The wording on it seems to indicate otherwise, which is likely why I didn't try it... but I did just try it, and nothing in the Batch functions menu works. The comparison chart at NI says that the Player can't handle script functions; I bet that has something to do with it. Ah, well. I might still be able to save a makeshift template for SSD_EX....

Thanks for the help, m'friend.

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 7:45 pm

Nope, this has nothing to do with scripting.

Unfortunately I don't have Kontakt Player installed, but I can assure you that this works splendidly.

1. Load x number of instruments
2. Run the first output macro command
3. I get x outputs named according to instruments that I have loaded.

GIF which proves this to be true (I used empty new instruments as templates):

filkertom · Post by **filkertom** » Tue Aug 02, 2011 7:57 pm

No, no, no.

I automatically get that many outputs. What I don't get is them being routed to my preferred sound output (Realtek), or them being loaded into two stereo tracks rather than one track for each drum.

Just an ease-of-use thing, really.

klagga · Post by **klagga** » Wed Aug 03, 2011 9:11 pm

Apparently, a couple of guyes here don't like Kontakt at all for drums.

That's a bit funny since I've read threads, can't remember which now, where other guys really like Kontakt for drums. Where are you, and what's your take on the GUI for Studio drummer?

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Wed Aug 03, 2011 9:21 pm

The GUI is freaking awesome.

pljones · Post by **pljones** » Wed Aug 03, 2011 9:23 pm

Give me Studio Drummer and a couple of months and I'll let you know

.

I got Kontakt2 for ns_kit7 as was (now NaturalDrumKit) as I didn't want a dongle for Halion3. Fortunately, Doug decided Kontakt was far better at handling drums than Halion and continued supporting with updates and new kit pieces until he sold up. There are plenty of drum libraries around - Analogue Drums, AcousticsampleS, Wavesfactory all spring to mind - using Kontakt. I play my kits "live" - I'm not sequencing. I don't want to have to mess around too much to get a realistic, natural, live sounding kit. I've updated through to Kontakt 4 as the scripting features have been added and expanded and I've found that, alone, worth having. (Now I'm unemployed, the €99 is harder to come by...)

Of the Abbey Road kits, I've only got the 60s set and do really quite like the larger kit. I'd like a bit more detail in the hi-hats (but that applies to every kit I've heard apart from ns_kit7) but it's very playable. The UI is okay - I ended up leaving the mapping at default settings and setting my edrums up to match, rather than vice versa, so that part of the UI is just wasted on me. The other two tabs aren't really that exciting...

And I couldn't care less about included grooves, etc. Actually, I could: I think they're a waste of money for me and I'd like to see them as an optional extra, reducing the price of the main product appropriately (as I reckon they'd probably sell well to many people).

Dean Aka Nekro · Post by **Dean Aka Nekro** » Wed Aug 03, 2011 10:25 pm

EZD/SD2, XLN AD, FXpansion BFD/BFD2 and Cakewalk SD2/3 - It looks like a bit of all of them combined, Mainly the XLN AD FX section implmentation but fresher and EZD all round simple to use idiot proof layout. Really original idea by NI there, I'll give them that

Kompletist's will no doubt be very happy, The price is quite fair and the cowbell in some of the demos sound stunning. Personally won't be treating myself as Toontrack, Wavemachine Labs plus Ableton Live's Drumracks are plenty already. If i were fresh in for 'real' sounding drums then i would be intrested for sure

Dean

darsho · Post by **darsho** » Thu Aug 04, 2011 6:08 am

I watched the Video about Studio Drummer on NI's YT channel and was totally unimpressed.

I do my drums using Reaper's Media Explorer to surf through my MIDI Files from Groovemonkee and audition and play drums from Kontakt or Addictive Drums. All I need is the Media Explorer and a track with a plugin on it.

I didn't see anything in the Video of the NI Studio Drummer that seemed very different to what I can do already without it.

The drums sounded nice though, yet I got so many drums already, I can't see why I would need more.

However, if one starts just with using sampled Acoustic Drums and has no other solution for it already, I guess Studio Drummer is surely a contender for the other out of the box drumplugins like AD, BFD and so on.

hibidy · Post by **hibidy** » Thu Aug 04, 2011 6:28 am

I thought it sounded pretty good, but it's still not SD imho. I have the "c & v and NY vol 2" add ons and with the plug ins I have I can do ANYTHING!

What would have sucker-punched me would have been if there was a really really ringy snare

MrDuke · Post by **MrDuke** » Thu Aug 04, 2011 7:28 am

Personally, I'm a user of XLN's AddictiveDrummer...and I'm certainly addicted. It has become my go-to drum software, it sounds superb, and you can even "jam" on it provided you've got a responsive pad controller (or a drum pad). It's easy to load kits, and change for instance a snare on the fly.

I tried Abbey Road Drums in Kontakt...and hated them. The only thing I can think of that might be good, is Kontakt's Memory Server - XLN AD can be really memory-hungry. But then again, so can Abbey Road!

hibidy · Post by **hibidy** » Thu Aug 04, 2011 7:34 am

OT, yeah.........wtf is the deal with xln anyways?

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Thu Aug 04, 2011 8:30 am

AD x64 is available for PC (there's a beta section on their forum). XLN has decided that recoding the whole AD to condone to Cocoa UI wasn't worth the time and resources they'd rather spend on developing AD2.

NI:s new Studio drummer - kills Superior drummer 2 and BFD2?