Community feed-back for "compound instrument" feature needed!

[deva]

We (@corrados, @chaot4, @NarcoticV and myself) have for a while now (years actually) been working on new features specifically for improved support for midi eDrumkits.
The idea for a generalized compound instrument has come up as a solution to many of these new features (thanks @NarcoticV ) that is able to solve a lot of the needs we have right now.
But it seems that the potential of such a concept is a lot bigger than our current requirements, so we would like to get input from our user and the community at large before we start designing it.

The idea is this:
Currently a drumkit consists of a number of instruments, each containing samples, each mapped to a name which can be used inside a midimap to be played on a specific midi note.
What we are proposing is a new type of instrument, a compound instrument, that does not contain samples, but rather contains other instruments along with any information needed for the engine on how/when to play them.

Basic examples could be "hihat foot with tambourine" or "hihat splash, hihat foot, hihat closed, hihat medium open and hihat fully open" where the pedal openness is controlled with midi CC event on a single midi note instead 5 as it is today.

So; what cool features could you imagine being expressed through this concept? - and never mind if it makes sense technically, we'll figure that part out afterwards

[tavasti]

That could be used to double kick with another kick (or same kick with pitched down) to get fatter sound.

[deva]

That could be used to double kick with another kick (or same kick with pitched down) to get fatter sound.

So basically the opportunity to play two instruments at the same time. Would something like "offset" be interesting for this? I mean, for example, play two kick samples on top of each other, but delay one by 2ms to avoid phase issues.
I guess a pitch change mechanism would also be needed, which I'm not sure is possible for the engine to handle in real-time...

[tavasti]

That could be used to double kick with another kick (or same kick with pitched down) to get fatter sound.

So basically the opportunity to play two instruments at the same time. Would something like "offset" be interesting for this? I mean, for example, play two kick samples on top of each other, but delay one by 2ms to avoid phase issues.
I guess a pitch change mechanism would also be needed, which I'm not sure is possible for the engine to handle in real-time...

I personally don't (at least immediatelly) find offset useful, but sure implementing it would not be too hard.

And for pitch shift, I think it can't be real-time, but would require doing those pitch-shifted samples at drumkit config time.

[GMaq]

And for pitch shift, I think it can't be real-time, but would require doing those pitch-shifted samples at drumkit config time.

To my knowledge most specialty Kick-fattening Plugins (we don't have many on Linux) work by mixing the existing kick sound with some kind of deep bass synthesis and then allowing the user to select the frequency, amount of blend, and resonance. I would guess this much less CPU intensive and latency inducing than realtime pitch shifting.

Via Wine I have used Boz Digital's Saquatch 2 and Big Foot as well as Metric Halo's MH Thump and they work well, which might be an easier route for deepening a Kick than making Drumgizmo's new compound feature handle either extra samples or pitch shifting..

[tavasti]

And for pitch shift, I think it can't be real-time, but would require doing those pitch-shifted samples at drumkit config time.

To my knowledge most specialty Kick-fattening Plugins (we don't have many on Linux) work by mixing the existing kick sound with some kind of deep bass synthesis and then allowing the user to select the frequency, amount of blend, and resonance. I would guess this much less CPU intensive and latency inducing than realtime pitch shifting.

But that is totally different thing what is easy and what is wanted. I have recently used BFD3, and there it is possible to link drums. And making another drum, tuning it 7 half steps down, and then filtering from there only relevant frequencies gives pretty good results. Sure, if you are working on genre where sounds need just to be fat, then synthesis is great option. Geonkick is great tool for such.

And for me, kick was example, I've done some thing for snare and toms also.

[NarcoticV]

To summarize a bit what has been suggested so far:

There are two main use-cases on the radar:

• Combining multiple instruments together to be played both/all at the same time (e.g. the kick drum layering);
• Combining samples of multiple instruments together, but still selecting a single sample only from the total set of samples (e.g. for hi-hat pedals, where we will combine closed/(half-)open samples into a total sample set, then select one based on hi-hat position).

I think for defining such instruments, so far the following is needed:

• an entry to refer to a sub-instrument from another instrument.
• the entry also defines whether the reference is an additional instrument playback, or a set of samples to be imported into the current instrument.
• the entry can annotate the sub-instrument playback (1st case) or samples (2nd case) with additional information in the context of the current instrument, for instance:
  • a position for which the samples should be imported (hi-hat case)
  • offset / pitch shift / volume / balance / pan or other modifiers for the sub-instrument playback (playback case)

I think a good implementation would also allow multiple layers of including. It should work regardless of whether the sub-instrument itself has sub-instruments or not. Let's have a look whether there is a straightforward approach for achieving this.

Am I missing anything so far?

[NarcoticV]

I think another use-case could be kit layout w.r.t. sound panning.

If a kit consists of mono samples for each piece, these sampled instruments themselves could be mono (one channel only). A meta-instrument could then be used to expand each instrument into stereo with a given panning/balance setting, in order to create a kit with custom stereo spacing.

I know this is not very relevant for the included kits which seem to be multi-mic'd anyway, but could be great for imported kits from other sample pack sources.

[deva]

Distributing multi-channel kits to stereo could probably also be done with this. Making it possible to pan each of the mono channels on the multi-channel kit to L/R and set the volume.
This would be a crude way to make a stereo mapping for a multi-channel kit (there would no other processing such as EQs or compressors), but would make it work for hosts that only supporting stereo plugins.