KVR Audio

stevescallion · Post by **stevescallion** » Sat Apr 24, 2004 7:52 am

Owning many percussion sounds, I still have this need: Some ultra high-quality drum samples with a huge sound. Know the drum sound ELP had? I don't play the same stuff as they do, but I need that sound for a special project. I want huge, powerful, ambient: snares, toms,kicks, cymbals...Not synth, but I'm not ruling it out. The snare must be crisp with a giant impact. And lastly, I do not want to buy expensive orchestral percussion packages that are 90% stuff I don't need at all. I use a MOTU MACH5 sampler, and it takes almost any sample species you sling into it. I prefer aiff, then wav...Am I asking too much? Am I just gonna have to beef up some of my own with effects?

I would appreciate any recommendations, and even bring your dog some quality table scraps, if we lived close enough:)

steve

evmsynths · Post by **evmsynths** » Sat Apr 24, 2004 9:02 am

Maybe try RMX-04 !

http://www.sinte-virtual.com/evmsynths

Regards
Etric

Svante · Post by **Svante** » Sat Apr 24, 2004 10:46 am

Kinda hard to tell what you mean by 'crisp snare with giant impact' ... anyway, the hugeness of snares is usually obtained using gated reverb, for which Ambience is top notch.

As far as I'm concerned, lifting individual drum sounds off records is ok, legally. (I mean, most sample cd people do it ... and every damn hip hop producer out there too). Check out the intro to "Hella Good" by No Doubt. Nice crisp snare there. Maybe boost the low range a bit for a 'huger' sound.

Teksonik · Post by **Teksonik** » Sat Apr 24, 2004 12:04 pm

I would recommend the Ambient Kits from Wizoo.There were like $9.00 each the last time I checked and worth it in my opinion.Some very nice snares in there.I know what you mean,I'm always on the lookout for the "perfect" snare.I've had some success layering two snare sounds together as well.A nice full round ambient room snare overtop a crisp snappy snare works for me.For freeware try the Kalava kits and Manytone also has some excellent free samples and a cd for sale(which reminds me I've always meant to buy that cd).

stevescallion · Post by **stevescallion** » Sat Apr 24, 2004 6:34 pm

Thanks for the helps, guys! Yes, I know all about processing, but I was hoping someone had done it better than me. A miracle? I can't be at the top of my game, I'm thinking. Maybe I dreaming of a snare that doesn't exist. But my only other choice is expensive orchestral sets, and like clockwork, you guys had answers I haven't checked out. Pro-sounding answers! This is the most informative forum site I have ever been to!

Thanks again

steve scallion

bitcrusher · Post by **bitcrusher** » Sat Apr 24, 2004 6:47 pm

my shameless self-promotion says to check Fxpansion BFD. Vintage Drums and classic mics in a nice room. You can certainly get a nice *real* ambience with no effort.

Theres 15 snares in the factory library, all multisampled velocities and multiple stroke types (hit/drag/rimshot/flam and Sidestick on the snares with decent rims).

The only downsides to BFD for your need is price (if you didnt want to spend around $300 for an acoustic drum solution) and maybe system reqirements (768 megs of RAM or greater and a fast disk, 9 gigs free HD space)

stevescallion · Post by **stevescallion** » Sat Apr 24, 2004 9:55 pm

"my shameless self-promotion says to check Fxpansion BFD. Vintage Drums and classic mics in a nice room. You can certainly get a nice *real* ambience with no effort."

Thanks Bitcrusher! Looks perfect! 24 bit, and real ambience, not reverb. Perhaps there is a misconception out there that if you keep buying samples, you'll find the magic snare. But without ambience, they are just snippets of sound to me. I was about to purchase Altiverb, ($400} plus spending another $300 for orchestral percussion. Suddenly BFD sounds like a great buy. It's certainly the best product I've seen of its type. I am very serious about drum quality, and won't settle for just anything, hence my frustration at the thousands of drum sounds out there. It sounds like you know exactly what I mean.

You said "self promotion". Did you write this thing?

steve[/quote]

bitcrusher · Post by **bitcrusher** » Sat Apr 24, 2004 10:40 pm

You said "self promotion". Did you write this thing?

I didn't write it.. Fxpansion are responsible for the technology! However BFD spawned from my personal drum library, Im a freelance programmer/engineer and I started recording my own samples but lacked a good solution for multichannel disk streaming playback (as I knew the CPU and disk load would be cut down dramatically if all the microphones, 11 in the case of BFD, were interleaved into a single file).

So I approached Angus about the idea a bit over a year ago (and they took it well beyond my basic needs) and well, I've been recording and editing drums for BFD ever since

Best,
Steve

stevescallion · Post by **stevescallion** » Sat Apr 24, 2004 11:50 pm

Bitcrusher, I respect greatly what you do. I know one thing: If you ever post any tips for improving sampled drums, I'll sure pay attention.

Out there

steve

stevescallion · Post by **stevescallion** » Sun Apr 25, 2004 1:35 am

However, I think with the 512 ram, 800 mhz mac G4 that I use, this would be too much demand for me to run it in Protools 6.0.

Hmmm....

still out there,

steve

Squids · Post by **Squids** » Sun Apr 25, 2004 9:48 am

Another shameless plug (many developers around here): http://www.sonicreality.com/news/studioPhonik.php

or www.sampletank.com

and

http://www.sonicreality.com/news/idrums.php

or

http://www.esoundz.com/details/viewDeta ... errer=home

Or even another one we call "Eclectic Drum Capsule" (formerly FX Drum Capsule) which is more ambient than the Studio Drums Capsule.

Out of all of the above I think that Studiophonik, as a plug-in for ProTools, will be something that will get you very close to what you want. For one thing, it allows you to mix basically between dry and room ambience on the module but it also has quite a few drums with particular brands and character that may get it even closer. For instance, you mentioned ELP. Carl Palmer used a Premier kit? There's a great vintage Premier kit in Studiophonik for example.

SampleTank 2 itself might also be a good choice, except it is a bit of everything but you can do a lot with the drums inside because it has some great internal fx. Plus you can import new drums.

I-Drums is even more insane in terms of drum sizes, bit and sample rates etc. but it is more of a medium ambient sound for flexibility. It's an amazingly realistic library and will probably be in native Mach 5 format when/if it can stream. It will be in AIFF on the disc though for it's support of either Kontakt or EXS when it is released. Both products are due out in a few months though.

The Drum Capsules you can get now on www.esoundz.com and there will be an update to them next month.

Since you are looking for big ambient drums, I think some of your best options are Studiophonik and BFD. I think BFD is great for this kind of sound and you have even more mixing options if you want. It just requires a bit more resources for all of the mics but in my opinion it can be worth it. Studiophonik is perhaps a bit less resource hungry but also has less mic mixing (although enough to mix between direct and overheads or dry and room mics). It has other instruments in there too which you may or may not need... however they are top notch and between that and say Sonik Synth 2 (check this out: www.ikmultimedia.com/keyboardss2/html and listen to some of it's demo riffs on the gallery page linked to at the bottom of the page or here: http://www.ikmultimedia.com/Main.html?keyboardss2 ) you'd be able to authentically do entire ELP instrumentation.

Perhaps all of these suggestions are more costly (apart from the Capsules) but for those that are serious about music production they can totally be worth it. Good to know about them at least.

Yossarian · Post by **Yossarian** » Sun Apr 25, 2004 10:26 am

You might also want to check out Drumkits From Hell Superior from www.toontrack.com . It’s a VSTi like BFD but it doesn’t stream which (depending on how you’re used to working) might make it a bit clunkier to use than BFD. The good part is it also puts less strain on your computer. The minimum Mac requirements quoted are G3 500 MHz, 512 MB RAM. I would seriously consider getting more RAM, though (Toontrack recommends 1.5 GB). For a little less than the price of BFD you get 35 GB worth of high quality drums and percussion, which is not too shabby.

/Yoss

Angus_FX · Post by **Angus_FX** » Mon Apr 26, 2004 12:36 pm

However, I think with the 512 ram, 800 mhz mac G4 that I use, this would be too much demand for me to run it in Protools 6.0.

Hmmm....

If your 800 is a dualie and you can fit it with another 256M, you should be OK... we have run BFD on as little as a single-550 TiBook, and it's getting more efficient with every sub-release, but you wouldn't be able to run it at the same time as a decent-sized PT session (or Altiverb) on a single 800.

stevescallion · Post by **stevescallion** » Mon Apr 26, 2004 8:59 pm

Thanks, Angus. I shall look into all this. BTW, you friends all say you are a good, helpful fellow. I welcome any advice you may have from now on.

Saving the world from their own spleens,

steve

Any expert advisors for ultra high-quality drum samples?