LinuxMusicians

Hey all,
I dropped this question in the DrumGizmo IRC without any luck, thought I'd try here

I am working on using the samples from Analogue Drums "The Boxer" https://www.analoguedrums.com/products/the-boxer/ to build a DrumGizmo kit. The structure of this kit doesn't have many velocity layers (just a handful) but each has a bunch of round robin/alternate hits. I was looking for some advice on the best way to integrate these into the instrument config.

My initial thought was to set the "power" for each alternate hit as a different value, but very close to each other. Each velocity group would then have a larger gap in power. Hopefully would be able to tune the humanizer to jump around alternate hits, but not all the way to a different velocity group.

After looking around I saw the suggestion of just giving each round robin hit the same "power" - DrumGizmo would then be clever enough to use different samples for successive hits. I tried this route and seemed to just get the same sample repeating/no alternates.

If anybody has insight on the best way to set up this type of sample set with DrumGizmo it would be much appreciated!

From what André (chaot4) told me on the Reaper forum (after the release of 0.9.16), round-robin functionality currently doesn't work properly. He initially thought it did (but said it could be improved) but after a discussion he realized something wasn't quite right. It's apparently a goal for the next release to resolve this.

So whatever way you are creating the kits at the moment, it won't work quite right, and in the future you might have to remake your kits (to fit whatever is done to make round robin work correctly, if any extra parameter is required for instance). I have some kits I've been working on too, and I don't want to finalize/release them until round robin works correctly (so I don't have to remake the kits later).

If we knew that assigning the same power level would be all that's required, that would be good news. I could complete the kits and release them knowing that upon the next DrumGizmo release, I wouldn't have to remake the kits.

Hello,

I created some drumgizmo patches for some sample libraries, also wrote a graphical tool to do so (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gROFmQnfHs).

Drumgizmo uses velocity groups to select samples, so from the given velocity it builds a lower and upper limit around this velocity and selects a sample from within this range (I think randomly, but I am not absolutely sure, I read through the code but this is already some years ago). So in principal it is enough to give them the same hit power (that is also, what my DGPatchMaker does).
The hit power itself is calculated in drumgizmos DGEdit as a kind of squared sum calculation, so it's basically analogous to a RMS calculation of the sample, so this is also what I used for automatic hit power calculation in DGPatchMaker. For some drum kits I entered manual hit power values according to the description in the sample libraries.

I didn't know about the round robin problems in 0.9.16, but it's good to know. Hope that will be solved soon.

lg,
Michael

empowerg wrote:Hello,

I created some drumgizmo patches for some sample libraries, also wrote a graphical tool to do so (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gROFmQnfHs).

Hi Michael,

DGPatchMaker looks appealing! I can't find it on the 'net though. Some links are dead, etc. Is it still available to download?

Thanks for the insight guys - Looks like I just need to wait for the functionality to be fixed/refined.

Dude, Michael! the PatchMaker program looks like it could be super useful! I was thinking about writing something similar. I did whip up a script to build the Instrument xml files as a first step in that direction (using sox to check the RMS and auto-set the power levels). Didn't get it very advanced or reliable yet though.

Was also thinking about the best way to share DG mappings for sample packs available on the net. Could be pretty sweet to get a set of community built mappings hosted somewhere. An easy(er) way to create mappings and a place to share them really seems like it could be a big asset for DG.

Analogue Drums has an area for user-submitted mappings for unofficially supported software - was thinking of at least sending mine in to them when complete. Wonder if some of the sites that make sample packs would be willing to donate sample packs to the DG project in exchange for outsourcing building the kit mappings?

Anyway - thanks again for the responses

Hi everyone,

I can confirm what JamesPeters said. Also, I am very sure, that when we fix the sampling algorithm, then round robin functionality can be achieved through choosing same power levels. Maybe some parameters have to be changed also in the UI (because the new sampling algorithm will have more parameters), but that should be straight-forward and especially not require any further changes to the drum kits.

- chaot4

chaot4 wrote:Hi everyone,

I can confirm what JamesPeters said. Also, I am very sure, that when we fix the sampling algorithm, then round robin functionality can be achieved through choosing same power levels. Maybe some parameters have to be changed also in the UI (because the new sampling algorithm will have more parameters), but that should be straight-forward and especially not require any further changes to the drum kits.

- chaot4

Thank you André! I'll complete my DrumGizmo kits soon and then contact you to host them on the DrumGizmo site.

This sounds amazing.

JamesPeters what kind of drum kits are you working on? Are they in the same style as the one used in DG? I love those because of the natural sound and feel. It actually feels like a real drummer

They're the kits from http://www.tchackpoum.fr made into DrumGizmo format...plus a bunch of careful weeding-through of the files (renaming, reorganizing, deleting round robins which aren't as consistent sounding). They're very natural sounding with different articulations for each kit piece, recorded in a nice sounding drum room (separate OH/room channels), and the sound works well for lots of styles (primarily I'm interested in rock, metal and that sort of thing).

JamesPeters wrote:They're the kits from http://www.tchackpoum.fr made into DrumGizmo format...plus a bunch of careful weeding-through of the files (renaming, reorganizing, deleting round robins which aren't as consistent sounding). They're very natural sounding with different articulations for each kit piece, recorded in a nice sounding drum room (separate OH/room channels), and the sound works well for lots of styles (primarily I'm interested in rock, metal and that sort of thing).

If that's the kit from the samples from Reaper community, I was the first rc second person to have it because I was the one that put in the request to Michael to make a DG kit out of that. Michael is the dude that did those very long but very educational and informative videos on using DG with Muse and Ardour.
I really like that kick butt it's still not as natural-sounding as the ones put up there by the DG boys. I love those drum kits.

"That kick"? These kits contain 3 different kick drums, with different articulations/setups:

Ludwig Superclassic 64 20": normal, damped and jazz
Premier Signia 22": normal and damped
Sonor Antique 20"

If you used "the" Reaper kit which was available initially it was probably just one of the above, and only one of the articulations/setups. I know Vincent added more kits later, after his initial kit was made. The files were named differently and there were some other differences I had to account for. I don't know if he made Reaper kits of all of them (I had only noticed 1 kit like that, and then I just started making the DG versions since the CPU demand was far lower that way).

There are 5 different snares, 3 different sets of toms (and 1 more set I'm creating by editing a copy of one of those sets), and a bunch of cymbals (all with different articulations like side/rim/etc.) Chances are you haven't used this setup yet. Also I mapped the channels in such a way it's easy to control the room/OH separately from the proximity mic channels. So even for that kick you'd heard already, you'll probably like it more now.

Well I'm just one here saying thank you to all you guys for the hard work because I've been teaching myself how to mix and I'm glad for all these kits you guys provide in the DG community because it helps me develop what it needs or what I need to mix a live drum kit and not one of those polished ones that's made for the other two platforms mvsd forms. Thanks again guys.

Between Vincent recording these samples of his drums, and the developers making DrumGizmo, I'm just glad to contribute what I'm capable of (translating these into DG kits). These samples are a gold mine, in my opinion. Pairing them with DrumGizmo is like being able to actually mine the gold.

JamesPeters wrote: Hi Michael,

DGPatchMaker looks appealing! I can't find it on the 'net though. Some links are dead, etc. Is it still available to download?

I have it in a github repo but currently a private one. It was still very rough on the edges and worked automatically only for the drum libraries from DrumDrops, for which I made 3 patches for DrumGizmo (as shown in the video). For other libraries with different naming conventions/channel/microphone assignments, it is a bit more manual work, although I tried to automate quite a bit of it.

As DrumDrops then did not show further interest in pursuing the DrumGizmo patches, I then paused development, but also made 2 patches for open source drum libraries (see here: https://libremusicproduction.com/news/2 ... -drumgizmo). I also started with TChackPoum, but, ran out of time (I do quite a lot of different stuff and there didn't seem much general interest in it back then)

When the new XML format for DrumGizmo files came out, I started upgrading the SW to the new file formats, but then ran out of time.

If there is a general interest, I can have a look about dusting it off a bit, finish the work on the new file formats and make the github repo public. So if some people say, they would be interested, I might give myself a push to look at it again.