Virtuosity Drums (Update 924 Available)

[DSmolken]

Also wrote out a tutorial explaining how the Epic knob does its trickery.

https://sfzformat.com/tutorials/epic_drums

Using SFZ, but the concepts are easily transferrable to Kontakt, HISE and many other samplers.

[brijawi]

Thanks for the tutorial - interesting and insightful.

[Frits van Zanten]

I tried it today, but to me the kick drum seems unusually high pitched, almost like a low tom. I also think the volume is rather low. Am I doing something wrong, do I lack musical insight?

[DSmolken]

Yup, also rings pretty long. Jazz drums are tuned very high these days, and are also smaller sizes than kits for other styles.

[cdbaksu]

Beautiful sounding kit, one of if not THE best jazz kit around today!

Great job and thank you!

[Samulis]

I tried it today, but to me the kick drum seems unusually high pitched, almost like a low tom. I also think the volume is rather low. Am I doing something wrong, do I lack musical insight?

As noted by DSmolken, (modern) jazz drums are often quite high-pitched and smaller compared to other styles. That said, you can use the 'Kick' tune knob to adjust the kick to a lower pitch if desired, and the 'Dampen' knob can be used to 'tighten' up the kick so it does not ring out so much. Lastly, the 'Epic' knob will also serve to deepen and thicken the entire kit; not a 'jazz' sound, but maybe more useful for other, heavier styles.

Regarding volume, the samples are uncompressed and unprocessed, offered in a more 'naturalistic' style than many other drum kit libraries. Jazz is often less processed than other genres, and there are many valid, contrasting opinions on drum mixing, so we left the signal pretty much untouched from the mics to your computer. You may choose to add compression, EQ, saturation, etc. as you desire to the signal chain to achieve a specific effect, but you will of course just like any real drum performance lose some noise performance in the process.

Beautiful sounding kit, one of if not THE best jazz kit around today!

Great job and thank you!

Thank YOU! Glad folks seem to be getting some good use about it. When we first put it out, we weren't sure if anyone would actually even use it or want it!

As a side note, I have set up a Virtuosity Drums Demos playlist on Soundcloud to supplement the demos on the KVR page (will add those to the playlist soonTM). Anyone is welcome to send in or share a track to be added:
https://soundcloud.com/samulis/sets/vir ... rums-demos

[OneWhite]

I didn't know about this great product until today. Thank you!

[cdbaksu]

Thank YOU! Glad folks seem to be getting some good use about it. When we first put it out, we weren't sure if anyone would actually even use it or want it!

As a side note, I have set up a Virtuosity Drums Demos playlist on Soundcloud to supplement the demos on the KVR page (will add those to the playlist soonTM). Anyone is welcome to send in or share a track to be added:
https://soundcloud.com/samulis/sets/vir ... rums-demos

Such a great integration into my rhythm section sequencing, again, thank you for the awesome job!

I do have a problem with a ride cymbal not playing, the B2 note, it seems to have a mind of its own. I've tried increasing the poly to 128 from sforzando, and even tried a separate track just for that ride cymbal. It still won't play notes randomly, no matter the tempo or subdivision.

Any advice? Thanks in advance!

[DSmolken]

Try using a separate instance of Sforzando for each mic (turn other mics to 0 in that instance) and send them all the same MIDI data. That effectively gets you 128 polyphony per mic, which seems sufficient even for doing 32nd notes on the ride at like 100 bpm.

Now, if 32nd notes isn't dense enough and you're doing rolls on the ride, well... that's probably fixable by cloning a spare set of ride samples, shortening them and fading them out after like 4 seconds, and using the short samples for the middle of the roll. Maybe. It is open source so I suppose somebody could try that.

Also, I don't know what the polyphony limits in sfizz are, but as sfizz now supports multiple outputs it might be worth for somebody to try to make a multiout version of this kit in sfizz. Might both improve dealing with routing mics and allow more polyphony voices.

[DSmolken]

Virtuosity Drums updated with a bugfix... a user found that notes at exactly velocity 44 would not play every fourth round robin on some of the cymbal notes.

Download links - both should be the same.

https://github.com/sfzinstruments/virtu ... v0.924.zip

https://www.versilstudios.com/Distro/Vi ... ms-924.zip

[Danilo Villanova]

Virtuosity Drums updated with a bugfix... a user found that notes at exactly velocity 44 would not play every fourth round robin on some of the cymbal notes.

Download links - both should be the same.

https://github.com/sfzinstruments/virtu ... v0.924.zip

https://www.versilstudios.com/Distro/Vi ... ms-924.zip

Thanks!