Per Instrument swapping

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Qualitymix
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Per Instrument swapping

Post by Qualitymix »

I've had a look at the roadmap for DrumGizmo, and while I see a few references to per instrument features such as volume control, I don't see what I'm looking for: the ability to swap out single instruments for other ones. For example, let's say I loved my drum kit the way it was, but this particular song calls for a different snare. Rather than building an entirely new kit that uses the same samples for everything but the snare
JamesPeters
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Re: Per Instrument swapping

Post by JamesPeters »

Under "backlog: major features" it's there. Search for the term "alternatives".
chaot4
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Re: Per Instrument swapping

Post by chaot4 »

The big problem with this feature is that all of our kits are recorded with different microphone setups. So, switching a snare e.g. from DRS kit with the one in Crocell kit would be problematic, because the output of the 16 channels of DG would be completely different.

However, if you of course make a DG kit from your own drum kit and you indeed sample several snares, then it makes absolute sense to be able to swap them. This kind of is already possible by creating the kit with both snares and then editing the .xml files to whichever you want right now (or having two different .xml files for this), but of course this is a very hacky solution.

What exactly is your setup such that you would want to use this feature right now?
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Re: Per Instrument swapping

Post by JamesPeters »

chaot4 wrote: Fri Apr 03, 2020 7:48 pm The big problem with this feature is that all of our kits are recorded with different microphone setups. So, switching a snare e.g. from DRS kit with the one in Crocell kit would be problematic, because the output of the 16 channels of DG would be completely different.
I thought about this. If the kit pieces weren't all recorded with the same mic setup, it would require a person to intentionally try to make each kit piece work in a similar manner, possibly editing the sounds of room/overhead channels (of the samples themselves) and balancing volumes among various kit pieces they'd be swapping, and choosing to omit certain channels which aren't similar/compatible enough (room, overhead, etc.) It's possible to do, but it means people have to do a fair bit of work and compromise.

For now I'm content using multiple DrumGizmo instances to combine different kit sounds as I need. The CPU use of DrumGizmo is low enough.
chaot4
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Re: Per Instrument swapping

Post by chaot4 »

The issue with that approach (meaning, somehow matching up the different kits) is that it might heavily compromise on quality and that's basically the one thing we are not willing to compromise on. I also would be really excited to have this feature, but I just don't see a good way right now. Except, as mentioned above, if we indeed have drum kits that were recorded with different snares (or other drums).
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Re: Per Instrument swapping

Post by JamesPeters »

I think using separate instances of DrumGizmo is good, for me anyway. That's why I made 2 versions of a drum kit:
  • Version 1: has most kit pieces in a single DrumGizmo kit (I ran out of channels for everything, lol), and
  • Version 2: has all the kit piece groups as separate DrumGizmo kits (1 for the snares, 1 for the kicks, and so on, a total of 7 instances of DrumGizmo required for all of it).
As long as each kit is handling a different MIDI note range, it works fine and the CPU increase is very reasonable. It also allows me to keep overhead and room sounds from each group of kit pieces separate. I get control of room/overhead sounds of snare separate from room/overhead sounds of toms, etc. Version 2 uses 38 audio channels as a result.
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