KVR Audio

Lunch Money · Post by **Lunch Money** » Tue Jun 22, 2004 8:38 pm

I...can't... wait!!! Brain... going... into... meltdown!

I NEED DRUMS!

Just kidding. I have all the patience in the world for someone offering a set of free, high-quality drums.

Greg

Meffy · Post by **Meffy** » Wed Jun 23, 2004 11:20 pm

Lunch Money wrote:I have all the patience in the world for someone offering a set of free, high-quality drums. ;)

Same here!

My tail-twitches are involuntary, I assure you, and mean nothing. Patience, patience for good things... :-)

Meffy

Spe3D · Post by **Spe3D** » Thu Jun 24, 2004 12:58 am

I am hoping that they get their mirrors and sites worked out so that the news can be officially announced big time – this would be great indeed – Oh! the pain of holding back.

I am sure when Kingston is ready to announce he will – he has a main sponsor to consider and this is where the hold up is at the moment, looks like it will be a big project to me. But the guys are working hard to sort their end out so all should be cool soon. It does exsit and it will be worth the wait

Best regards,

Spe3d

:O)

Aleatoric · Post by **Aleatoric** » Thu Jun 24, 2004 2:01 am

sounds great! Would love a NI Battery version! Cant wait to play these new kits on my DrumKAT.

Spe3D · Post by **Spe3D** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 12:03 pm

Hello! K-v-R

Apparently these kits are at the brink of their release from the main sponsors site – who should be online soon.

However

If you have not guessed already I have the kits available at my site in the download section.

http://dspevo.com/Harmony_Counterpoint/ ... cid=46#cat

It is with great thanks to Kingston Drums and BombSquad that these high quality drum kits can now be made available.

If you don’t want to get the kits from my site – please wait until the main BombSquad server comes online.

If you do get them please offer some feedback to their creator Michael Kingston

Best regards,

Spe3d

:O)

Sicklecell666 · Post by **Sicklecell666** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 12:42 pm

Spe3D, you're the man! Thanks a million for helping share these great kits.

Kingston, biggest thanks of all go to you for sharing them in the first place. You've made ALOTTA people VERY happy.

Best wishes to you both.

wgreenlee1 · Post by **wgreenlee1** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 12:55 pm

Thanks for these drum sounds.
Will check them out.
You guys are way to good to the community.

Thanks again.

Sascha Franck · Post by **Sascha Franck** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 1:03 pm

Got 'em!
Great, will give them a testride in a few minutes!

Thanks a lot allready to Kingston and Sp33d.

Kriminal · Post by **Kriminal** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 1:14 pm

Well, i got them. Basically, i have no interest or need for multisamples, so i got left with about 24 hits from a 55 meg DL

And, TBH, i already have these drums anyway, in a multitude of acoustic kits.

Sorry, but nothing special there for me.

Sascha Franck · Post by **Sascha Franck** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 1:43 pm

Hm... general sound: nice.
I was just wondering, the kit programs for the EXS aren't velocity sensitive, pretty weird for drums (easy to fix but still weird).
Also, some of the samples aren't cut well enough, they're just too lush - pretty much noticeable on the kick samples which have an "offset" of over 10 ms, "kick8.wav" even comes up with around 20ms. The same is true for some of the snares.

Still, nice sample quality but there's a lot of work involved to make things useable.

Kingston · Post by **Kingston** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 2:08 pm

Sascha Franck wrote:Hm... general sound: nice.
I was just wondering, the kit programs for the EXS aren't velocity sensitive, pretty weird for drums (easy to fix but still weird).
Also, some of the samples aren't cut well enough, they're just too lush - pretty much noticeable on the kick samples which have an "offset" of over 10 ms, "kick8.wav" even comes up with around 20ms. The same is true for some of the snares.

Still, nice sample quality but there's a lot of work involved to make things useable.

about the offset, I had to do it. I've seen too many kits with the initial attack cut off. This can have a major impact on some of the compressors, especially hardware, and especially on very short attack times. Also, as the offset is very slightly variable it adds to the realism and feel: you won't get away trying to quantize to grid anymore.

As for velocity sensitivity, The samples are NOT normalized. Again, too many kits have done it and managed to screw up the *real* recorded volume differences.

These kits, apart from few hits, will always play at their original recorded volume. To me this was extremely important, YMMV.

Sascha Franck · Post by **Sascha Franck** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 2:32 pm

Kingston wrote:[
about the offset, I had to do it. I've seen too many kits with the initial attack cut off. This can have a major impact on some of the compressors, especially hardware, and especially on very short attack times. Also, as the offset is very slightly variable it adds to the realism and feel: you won't get away trying to quantize to grid anymore.

Sorry, even if you say "don't bite the hand feeding you", now you're starting to talk nonsense.
A) I can't think of any reason why there should be 20ms of silence in front of a sample (it's not just some slow-ish attack but silence).
B) There's again no reason for one sample to have that much offset while others are cut properly.
C) Values around 20ms are way too large in any way. 20ms equal around 6-7 meters in terms of sound travelling. I allready have a hard time to compensate for my 6ms of latency when playing VSTis, another 20ms is just not necessary.

As for velocity sensitivity, The samples are NOT normalized. Again, too many kits have done it and managed to screw up the *real* recorded volume differences. These kits, apart from few hits, will always play at their original recorded volume. To me this was extremely important, YMMV.

Well (sorry to say so, really), I allready thought that this was your intention, but then you failed on almost all of the kicks (at least on those contained in the kits) ans on quite some others too. There's a lot of kicks that will be louder at velocity 1 than they will be at velocity 127. No way to play some natural sounding patterns with such a setting.

As said, I'm sorry about those harsh sounding comments, but I'm not the sort of "wow dude that's kickass" sorta guy because I don't think all that praising makes sense in case there's something where criticism is more appropriate.

Kingston · Post by **Kingston** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 2:52 pm

I will argue about the offset decicion till the end. Open up the files, zoom in, both horizontally and vertically and you see the initial transient there, starting very very low. (I'll double check my original samples just to make sure there no errors there.)

It's odd that you find it a hard to deal with, as I've always concidered my self musician with very tight timing and I've never in four years had a problem with it. Maybe I'm subconciously compensating for it while I play. Dunno.

There's a lot of kicks that will be louder at velocity 1 than they will be at velocity 127. No way to play some natural sounding patterns with such a setting.

Huh? What do you mean by that? There something like 3-6 samples per key with the kicks spread to two or three keys. I don't think you understood the way these were meant to be played. You're supposed to spread your playing to two keys, instead of just varying the velocities. I know most GM players will stumble with it though.

Sascha Franck · Post by **Sascha Franck** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 3:23 pm

Kingston wrote:I will argue about the offset decicion till the end. Open up the files, zoom in, both horizontally and vertically and you see the initial transient there, starting very very low. (I'll double check my original samples just to make sure there no errors there.)

There actually IS some sound there... but when playing it feels like a large offset on a lot of them. It might be *some* sound you captured - maybe a tad above noise floor, some air being moved by the kick pedal, whatever... it doesn't *feel* like being a part of the sound and it also doesn't sound like (unless I'm deaf - which I may be, at least partly...).
Anyways, with some kicks it's impossible to get them tight enough unless you struggle with negative delays on playback.

It's odd that you find it a hard to deal with, as I've always concidered my self musician with very tight timing and I've never in four years had a problem with it. Maybe I'm subconciously compensating for it while I play. Dunno.

Don't get me wrong, I'm the last to have anything against lush sounding/programmed drums, but it's just that I want to make that decision. So, in case I want a laid back kick I would just record it like that or shift the track a bit back - but I don't want to be forced by the sample to have it laid back.

I wrote: There's a lot of kicks that will be louder at velocity 1 than they will be at velocity 127. No way to play some natural sounding patterns with such a setting.

Huh? What do you mean by that? There something like 3-6 samples per key with the kicks spread to two or three keys. I don't think you understood the way these were meant to be played. You're supposed to spread your playing to two keys, instead of just varying the velocities. I know most GM players will stumble with it though.

A) I usually like it, to somewhat program my basic patterns in realtime. For that I only use 1 key per drum instrument.
B) Take your "Easyrider Kit (Kick Wood and Snare Wood).exs" kit. Here's an MP3, all three kick notes (C1, C#1, D1) played at velocity 1, then played at velocity 127:
http://home.arcor.de/s.franck/kingston.mp3
The same happens when you use about any other kit.
So, even IF your kits require more than one key to play one instrument, you hopefully won't argue that there's not much sense for a natural sounding kick to be as loud at lowest velocity as at highest velocity, will you?
There's no velocity response and that's why things need to be readjusted.

I'm taking your thought of "the sample level has got to define the output level" theorie a bit further:
This ONLY makes sense in case you have a LARGE number of velocity zones (let's say 30 at least).
Just try to program some dynamic ghost note playing in case there's only 3-4 velocity zones and no further velocity response happening... it's impossible to make this sounding even halfway realistic.
So, for sampled kits with fewer zones you almost *need* to set the output level to respond to velocity. In case some zones will then sound unrealistically high or low in volume, you could still adjust the zones volume level a bit.

You may still argue with me, but the above given kick MP3 is just more than enough prove for what I criticized.
Personally, if I find the time, I may finetune a few of the sets (at least the EXS ones) to suit my needs a bit better.

Kingston · Post by **Kingston** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 3:47 pm

A) I usually like it, to somewhat program my basic patterns in realtime. For that I only use 1 key per drum instrument.
B) Take your "Easyrider Kit (Kick Wood and Snare Wood).exs" kit. Here's an MP3, all three kick notes (C1, C#1, D1) played at velocity 1, then played at velocity 127:
http://home.arcor.de/s.franck/kingston.mp3
The same happens when you use about any other kit.
So, even IF your kits require more than one key to play one instrument, you hopefully won't argue that there's not much sense for a natural sounding kick to be as loud at lowest velocity as at highest velocity, will you?
There's no velocity response and that's why things need to be readjusted.

I'm not quite sure what your point with this example was, other than to demo the sound of the kick at different velocities.

What you are hearing is what the microphone captured, with no compression or normalization. There simply isn't much velocity difference there. Any keymap based velocity mangling would alter the real recorded volumes. You can, of course, do it on your own.

To me that was simply unacceptable. The lowest velocity should still be lower than the high, unless you are doing something wrong on your end? Could it be that you still didn't get the way this kit is meant to be played?

Again, those used to GM mapping will stumble.

(and like I said in the very first post because I knew of the paradigm differences, "for those requesting GM compatibility, go away")

Kingston Drums released