Modalics new drum plugin MINDst

[OrLubianiker]

I mean... I'm a prince fan but can't say that's the reason I designed it that way XD
Maybe subconsciously I was channeling the purple one...

I will have to tell you my Prince story then.

I LOVE Beat Scholar. I have spent a couple hours trying to convince drummer friends to test this with their MIDI kits because I love the sound but cannot decide if the piano roll would be efficient so I'll just have to buy it lol. I have an erae touch, push comes to shove I'll play the drums like that guy in the dream theater cover. Perhaps need to learn to play drums. Again, I LOVE Best Scholar. I watched all the videos trying to understand in non-drummer terms whether it will allow me to do all of the uneven meter, tuples and such I so love.

Maybe I'll just use nestup for my nested tuples like usual:

https://nestup.cutelab.nyc/

I'd love to hear your prince story

Thanks for the kind words about Beat Scholar - hey that nested tuple thing is pretty awesome!! I'll mess around with it for sure.

[OrLubianiker]

is there a manual to download? i have many questions and the site has almost no actual info about the plugin, just lots of marketing copy, which doesn't exactly inspire confidence...

Sure, you can find the manual here:
https://downloads.modalics.com/MINDst-D ... Manual.pdf
It will be updated along with hotfixes/changes we make.

What is it you want to know? I'm the co-founder of Modalics and I'd be happy to answer anything.

Thanks, the manual actually answers most of my questions (some of them not even directly in the text, but from looking at the screenshots—actually some nice design there!).

Mostly wondering about an articulation list for the kit pieces. For instance, are there separate bell/tip/edge articulations for each of the cymbals? Are the hi-hats just played with tips or are there shank articulations too? Are there rim clicks/rimshots for the toms? Just an overall articulation list for each kit piece would be helpful. Thanks!

Thanks for the compliments about the design! I actually designed the plugin and all the website graphics/manual etc... Much appreciated

A general rule of thumb for us when sampling is to only sample the articulation the sampled musician feels are natural to his playing style and sound good on that instrument.
Our articulation list is pretty massive, some things are decided automatically by our algorithm such as which hand is playing which drum, the hi hat closing sample switches according to time passed from the hi hat opened, every instrument was sampled from stand still and from previous resonance and that's also decided automatically....

But most articulations are fully mappable and you can even split the velocity and apply diff. articulation per velocity ranges
The main ride has bell/bow/crash articulations
All other cymbals have bow/choke but are sampled in a ton of dynamic layers and RR's so you can basically get something like a gentle tip sound on the lower velocities.

Our kit really shines in hi hat and snare articulations and variety, you'd have a hard time finding a VST that plays snare rolls and rudiments as well as ours without any intricate programming whatsoever. We have features like a reactive snare trigger that will make the next hit play with a special sample that is just the 2nd hit from a 2 stroke roll. Making it sound like a super realistic 2 stroke roll!

In the HH we sampled tip & shank and many other sounds you can get out of it, all in a massive amount of dynamic layers and round robins.

[DCrown]

Can you play the plugin on keys of a keyboard, too? I mean will it also sound good? Your videos show drummers playing with sticks, so maybe that's the only way to make it sound good!?

[OrLubianiker]

Can you play the plugin on keys of a keyboard, too? I mean will it also sound good? Your videos show drummers playing with sticks, so maybe that's the only way to make it sound good!?

Sure! legitimate question... It works really well with keys or pads, I use my lil' AKAI keyboard all the time and it's really fun because the kit is so responsive to your dynamics that it feels very natural.

We chose to demonstrate with E-Kits because we're fortunate enough to work with some amazing drummers and we feel it's a pretty cool way to expose the dynamics and responsiveness of the kit.
But even with a mouse and keyboard it sounds just as alive

[runagate]

Well I bought MindST. I've been happily playing with it for three days. It's not often I get a thing which is obviously what I needed and wanted but did not realize it. I absolutely love it. It is fun to play on the drum pats of nektar and kontrol and maschine and quneo. It's even more fun to play with drumsticks on an Erae Touch. The hi-hat magic makes me profoundly happy. I paid $100 and I'd have paid that for whatever voodoo you programmed into the hi-hat pedal/choke function. It's even kinda fun to hit the GUI drums on a touchscreen which obviously doesn't work great due to no velocity and latency, but makes configuring things a breeze. As you stated, even mouseclicking the damed snare sounds better due whatever weird two-hand and articulation magic is happening.

I love it. It's basically what I've wanted since I first tried to offload drum programming onto a silicon graphics PC or some weird old drum synth standalone app on a MAC LE.




I added this image. Note the scrollbar on the right..... there's a LOT of articulations configurable, and this is just the hats. I am fooling around with trying to convince one of my MPE controllers to allow Y and Z axes to control hat open/close and choke (KMI SoftStep 2) [ another edit] Just thought I should mention the SoftStep is a MPE footpedal with 4-way and pressure assignable to notes or CCs

[jancivil]

I LOVE Beat Scholar. I have spent a couple hours trying to convince drummer friends to test this with their MIDI kits because I love the sound but cannot decide if the piano roll would be efficient so I'll just have to buy it lol. [...]
Perhaps need to learn to play drums.

So I checked it out, so far watched one video.

it's very cool! (BTW: an endorsement by Yogev Gabay is something. Check out his YT channel, Time Consuming. I know him from the Berklee Tigran Hamasyan "Drip" w. the Indian music ensemble vid.
This Intro To vid has nothing for nested tuplets. To get it to do nested I guess will be a matter of rests and particular rests used as though ties. ie., some mentation required

I looked at the web page for Nestup but the markup language appears to only be a Max for Live thing. I'm not doing that.
The page has '[nested tuplets] hard to do in a piano roll'; there is a way to do it that's only slightly convoluted in Logic, and there's a way to partially do it in Cubase. I don't remember the trick in Logic. I described it here in "Hosts" years ago.

In Cubase, which does not do nested tuplets, so they say, but there are two different possibilities that are de facto nested tuplets:
while defining tuplets in the Quantize Presets dialog there are two levels, Tuplet and Grid.
There are three types of Grid available: regular, triplet, and dotted. So you want 5 nested 'over' eg., triplet 8ths, just set the grid to "8T" and type "5" in the tuplet box. Now there's a secondary grid when that preset is selected inside the timeline grid which is still a 16ths-to-quarter grid.
Of course it allows meaningless ones, eg., "dotted quarter 6-lets" are just simple quarter notes.
Effecting something 'worse', like (9:7):4 isn't possible until you turn the thing upside down and effect 4 in the time of 7. Any basic tuplet can be written out in duple terms if you go deep enough, using ties w. this upside down look; at the next level ie., nesting, there 9 being 3x3 means doable [in Cubendo by the above M.O.], an 11:7:4 not so much. I took on the project to do everything up to 20-something this way (except for multiples, being duplicated effort), 20-some yrs back. quasi-manic (hypomanic) days.

[OrLubianiker]

Well I bought MindST. I've been happily playing with it for three days. It's not often I get a thing which is obviously what I needed and wanted but did not realize it. I absolutely love it. It is fun to play on the drum pats of nektar and kontrol and maschine and quneo. It's even more fun to play with drumsticks on an Erae Touch. The hi-hat magic makes me profoundly happy. I paid $100 and I'd have paid that for whatever voodoo you programmed into the hi-hat pedal/choke function. It's even kinda fun to hit the GUI drums on a touchscreen which obviously doesn't work great due to no velocity and latency, but makes configuring things a breeze. As you stated, even mouseclicking the damed snare sounds better due whatever weird two-hand and articulation magic is happening.

I love it. It's basically what I've wanted since I first tried to offload drum programming onto a silicon graphics PC or some weird old drum synth standalone app on a MAC LE.




I added this image. Note the scrollbar on the right..... there's a LOT of articulations configurable, and this is just the hats. I am fooling around with trying to convince one of my MPE controllers to allow Y and Z axes to control hat open/close and choke (KMI SoftStep 2) [ another edit] Just thought I should mention the SoftStep is a MPE footpedal with 4-way and pressure assignable to notes or CCs

Thank you! I appreciate you saying that. We put a lot of effort into making MINDst just feel seamless no matter how you play it, marketing-wise it's a point that is hard to drive as it really requires diving in and getting a feel for the product to fully understand what we did here

Hopefully testamonials such as yours will help build the credibility that we really did make something unique here - The sampling methodology and the tailored algorithms make all the difference.
For instance what you mentioned about the snare, from the dynamic range to the zones, to LR behaviour and reactive samples - all the mechanisms we built into the snare to make it sound realistic and make it switching between dynamics and articulations on the snare mid-phrase just feel natural.

We hope this is just the beginning and that we'll be eble to expand on these ideas in the near future with other sample packs and expansions.

[jancivil]

I learned of Beat Scholar via this thread.
bought it, I like the approach of subdividing inside of every beat (I do wish it did 10, 11 et c). I'll be sending it to BFD3 (as well as editing against the hard quantized whole thing).
But, I'm impressed by MINDst. NB: I normally pay no attention to 'drum plugin', I'm so solid with BFD3.

I spent myself dry this month; is it going to be $99 tomorrow/payday?
If so it's a definite buy.

[OrLubianiker]

I learned of Beat Scholar via this thread.
bought it, I like the approach of subdividing inside of every beat (I do wish it did 10, 11 et c). I'll be sending it to BFD3 (as well as editing against the hard quantized whole thing).
But, I'm impressed by MINDst. NB: I normally pay no attention to 'drum plugin', I'm so solid with BFD3.

I spent myself dry this month; is it going to be $99 tomorrow/payday?
If so it's a definite buy.

We're likely going to stick to the $99 price tag for a while longer, give a solid chance for people to get it for the intro price.
We'll also announce another nice suprise pretty soon I hope. Maybe as early as next week.

We're actually fans and users of BFD ourselves, the natural sounding samples inspired us when we planned how to best capture the samples for MINDst.
I appreciate you getting Beat Scholar! We'll also be improving Beat Scholar and adding some cool features to help synergize BS with MINDst.

[jancivil]

thanx

I think a good idea with MINDst will be to have presets of note mapping; eg., acc'ding to BFD et al, and e.kit type of maps (cf. hi hat behaviors), even zendrum setups (if you have one oc). I can't know if runagate made it have that mapping or that's the default, but I'm quite set in my ways (basic GM for kick/sn/hat/toms but cymbals rather ad hoc 'catch as catch can').

[innervisions]

thanx

I think a good idea with MINDst will be to have presets of note mapping; eg., acc'ding to BFD et al, and e.kit type of maps (cf. hi hat behaviors), even zendrum setups (if you have one oc). I can't know if runagate made it have that mapping or that's the default, but I'm quite set in my ways (basic GM for kick/sn/hat/toms but cymbals rather ad hoc 'catch as catch can').

We have those! If you click the 'Map' window you can load/save MIDI mapping presets, and we did create mapping presets for some other products like Addictive Drums, GGD, etc.

Having that said there's also room to add more, so let us know what is missing.

[innervisions]

This is a bit unrelated but we're also giving away a free plugin until the end of the month (Jan 1st 2024), so we thought to update the people here.

It's called BitFuzzer and it's an expanded version of the crusher section that's on every mixer channel in MINDst Drums.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsWY5k_kYvw

Grab your license here if you like:
https://www.modalics.com/products/bitfuzzer

[DCrown]

Couldn't you offer a kind of light version demo? Not only to find out how it sounds etc, but also to see whether plugin runs on someone 's system and cpu-usage.

[innervisions]

Couldn't you offer a kind of light version demo? Not only to find out how it sounds etc, but also to see whether plugin runs on someone 's system.

Yeah, we're working on a way to offer some sort of SD (compressed/lossy) samples that will allow us to download a trial without blowing up our server costs, I'm hoping we'd have a solution for that in the next few weeks.

[DCrown]

Couldn't you offer a kind of light version demo? Not only to find out how it sounds etc, but also to see whether plugin runs on someone 's system.

Yeah, we're working on a way to offer some sort of SD (compressed/lossy) samples that will allow us to download a trial without blowing up our server costs, I'm hoping we'd have a solution for that in the next few weeks.

I hope you could also extend your special offer for existing customers in order to be able to demo before purchase.