MDrummer: 80's gated drum routing / best practices?

[Annabanna]

I spent some time with MDrummer today creating various larger than life 80's kits, and the number of options for setting things up has me scratching my head a bit about the best way to do a few things.

Mainly at the moment, I'm looking at ways to set up gates for reverbs and OH / room. I'd like maximum control, though, so looking for individual gates for kick/snare/toms. Just wondering from those who've spent a lot more time with this what sort of options might be ideal for that.

For instance, I see there's an option to mix the room/oh into the sound itself rather than having it route through the room/oh busses. I'm thinking maybe do that option, then use the envelope control for the sound to emulate the gate? Not sure if the envelop is after the room/OH in that scenario.

Digging in, but these sorts of options make me wonder if there might be simpler or better ways to do this that are not immediately obvious to me or that preserve the ability to easily retime gates to new tempo, etc.

thx

[goldglob]

Just quick thoughts from a non-expert:
For maximum control don't use 'Mix OH and Room'.... keep the OH and Room separate so that you can gate whatever you want to.
Retiming gates: I don't think that parameters of MD's internal FX can be automated/learned, but you can use MIDI controllers to change overall presets.

[Annabanna]

...
For maximum control don't use 'Mix OH and Room'.... keep the OH and Room separate so that you can gate whatever you want to...

Yeah, I generally try to keep things as flexible as possible. I spent some time last night, though, really digging into each of the individual sounds to see what sounds best for each. Ended up with a kick that's all OH, SN that's mainly bottom mic with good amount of room, etc.

By using the combined OH/Room, I obviously lost the ability to, for instance, gate the room individually without affecting the root sound or OH, but...

For the sort of unrealistically boombastic but super clean 80's pop funk aesthetic I'm after at the moment, being able to draw in the ADSR for the overall sound of each drum INCLUDING the Room/OH let me really dial in exactly the right amount of gated ambience vs attack, etc. We'll see. Haven't had time to dial in the rest of the kits, and not getting on with the toms at the moment, but the ability to custom draw each "gate" vis ADSR, then use a nice long plate as a send to add an overall shimmer/smoothness seems to be working at the moment.

I'd love to keep EVERYTHING separate, but my problem with dialing in the kind of clean 80's sounds I want is that the gates don't give enough control. Especially the ones within MDrummer which seem to be missing hold, etc. Screws up timing, ghost notes, etc whereas what I really want is something timed exactly to tempo where I can fade out from one exact point in time to another. For the moment, that's proving much more useful than the gates.

For the TurboReverb, is it me, or are there a lot of missing options in the version within MDrummer? I'm not seeing the same edit screen option with the custom sampled early reflections, etc? I've got some very specifc stuff dialed in on the full version, and just not seeing some of those options. Am I missing a way to get the full turbo reverb inside MDrummer... or maybe inside MXXX with a multi-out instance of MDrummer inside it?

I'm trying to embrace the self-enapsulating concept of MDrummer, so I'd hate to have to explode the whole multi-out setup out into Logic just to be able to dial in the reverb.

[goldglob]

Yes, I can see the advantage in the accuracy of ADSR.
But just noting:
ADSR will indeed affect OH and Room as well as close, regardless of 'Mix OH and Room' enabled or not....yes? (Which is what you would want?).

And no, TurboReverb within MD doesn't have the Edit tab etc.

Re the intricacies of setting it all up within MXXX, I haven't figured all that out yet! The whole 'this_ within that_ within this' thing is beyond my requirements thankfully!

[Annabanna]

...
But just noting:
ADSR will indeed affect OH and Room as well as close, regardless of 'Mix OH and Room' enabled or not....yes? (Which is what you would want?)...

Hmmm... I might have just assumed otherwise. Seemed to me that the ADSR would affect the sound which would then be sent to the room/OH, so doing it that way, the room would ring out past where the ADSR had cut it off since it wasn't done reverberating in the room. Even if so, wouldn't be by much. I could be wrong about that, though. Will check.

[goldglob]

I understand what you mean, and yes, after ADSR adjustment the room will still ring out longer than the close, but it will still be affected, kind of in tandem. So I guess if E.G. you wanted to keep your close sound intact and just shorten the room we're back to gates?

[goldglob]

......or set up a duplicate drum. 1st drum no room, 2nd drum all room with appropriate ADSR.....?

[Annabanna]

......or set up a duplicate drum. 1st drum no room, 2nd drum all room with appropriate ADSR.....?

I played around with a few variations like that. Trying to simplify where possible. The next month should be interesting.

I'm trying to steamline my process as much as possible with templates since I tend to have a particular sound I'm after overall. Right now, I'm building an 80's beat building template in Logic so I can have all the individual sounds preset from and ready to go to call up an instant vibe of George Kranz, Prince, Midnight Star, etc. The idea is to be able to have a reusable mix elements between Linn drum machines, gated kits, etc where each is ready to go with reverb, etc intact and pre-dialed.

To that end, it might be useful to keep everything inside MDrummer like the tuts show, but I'm wondering if that will cause more issues by forcing all processing onto a single thread, and still need to find a way around missing some of the per track processing I typically do in Logic like fav compressors, tilt EQ, etc.

I've also spent a good bit of time last month working out some good drum verbs in mTurboReverb, and having difficulty getting them to do what I want in the stripped down version inside mDrummer. Maybe I've missed something, but the stripped down version doesn't appear to be preserving many of the details or controls of the presets I've taken a lot of work to set up in the full version. If I can't find a way around that, I don't think I'll have much choice but to use mDrummer as a module only, though one with the added benefit of a more flexible ADSR than, for instance, that in Addictive Drums which I had been using.