Drumkit from Hell - Installation from Hell

  • Thread starter Thread starter Middleman
  • Start date Start date
Middleman

Middleman

Professional Amateur
Ok guys, I read all the fancy hype at several forums. I listened to all the fancy demos BFD, DFH and numerous others. The quality of the sound of the DFH (Drumkit from Hell – Superior) sold me however. Little did I know as I sat down to do the install what a wild ride it was going to be.

I got my little Christmas present and went to install it late Christmas night. Huh, read the box - requires 40 GB of free drive space. Like how many people have that much free space? I see that the samples only take 35GB and are on double DVDs. 18 minutes per side of copying, lets see, times 9 sides that’s almost 3 hours of copying! With 37 GB available on one of my drives, I began.

Somewhere around 11 PM, on the last disk, I hit the doomed wall of the data limit on my drive. You see 37 GB isn't really 37 GB it’s an approximation that drives report to Windows. So, tired and rejected, I went to bed with visions of hard drives dancing in my head. I mentioned to my wife that I needed to get up early and pick up a larger drive. Well, I got the old "We've already spent too much money on Christmas routine". None the less I was determined and needed a good night of sleep to come up with a plan.

Sunday morning

So, I needed a new hard drive and it can't show on the credit card or I will face the wrath of wife, as I call it at my house. The extra funds are not in the bank for a few days.... I pondered this dilemma as I sat staring out the window in the local bagel shop down the street from my house. It was 9 AM and I was sure the stores would be open early if not for business, for the returns everyone would have the day after Christmas.

As I bit into the last piece of my Walnut and cranberry bagel and was washing it down with freshly squeezed orange juice; the best orange juice I have tasted in California by the way. I don't know what the owners of this place do but they must used fresh squeezed because it has a refreshing taste you don't get out of a can. Anyway, as I was pondering what happened to all the orange trees in Orange County, a plan popped into my head.

It was almost subversive in nature that I would use my wife's own relatives to accomplish my goal. Had they not copped out and gotten me Best Buy certificates again this year, while all the rest of my crew got solid, well thought out gifts, this devilish plan would not have come about. Every year they opted for gift cards for me because, they just don't know what I like and, given my usual Christmas list, my list of wishes is always a little bizarre. $500 mics, $1000 preamps and the like, if you’re reading this, you know what I mean.

The plan was simple. I would use all of the Best Buy cards my wife’s sisters had gotten me and get the hard drive. Surely if there was a difference of price, I could come up with the difference with the cash in my wallet. With this bold idea in mind I headed to Best Buy.

I perused the hard drives for about 5 minutes and settled in on a Seagate brand, 120MB, that should keep the Drumkit From Hell data-wolves at bay for a few years and, there is that Bosendorfer Grand piano software I have been wanting, that will need some running room. I normally buy Maxtor’s because, when they fail, even years later, the company always ships you one overnight to help you out. I like that in a company. The rebate for $50 however caught my eye on the Seagate. So here was the math: $99 for the drive, $50 rebate that gets me to $49. Surely the relatives bellied up to the bar and put at least $20 apiece on my two gift cards. That would leave me a $10 delta which I could cover with cash on hand. It would still hit the credit card because it was a mail in rebate but by then I could explain how it was almost free.

I paid for the device and to my surprise the relatives had been very generous this year, $40 on one card, $30 on the other. They must have had a good year back there in the Midwest. So for those of you challenged by numbers here is the summary.

$99 drive
- $70 in gift cards
$19 remaining.

Plus I had $50 coming back to me once I sent in the rebates. So I got the drive for free and still had $31 in my pocket. Summary: free drive, $31 to spend on something else. That should appease the little woman.

It did. Not without a few penetrating looks and a shaking of the head, but hey, I am a gear hound, I live for these moments.

Back to the install – 1 hour later

A simple install of a hard drive should take about 15 minutes if it is a slave. If you are putting in a master or swapping drives around then add about 30 minutes for copying your files to the new drive, changing jumpers and firing up the beast.

As I walked back in the house my sons where waking up, around 11AM. With looks of product returns in their eyes, I knew the next several hours were not going to be centered around getting DFH up and running but driving around town to take care of duplicate gifts.

Back to the install – 6 hours later

Ok, gifts took longer than I expected. The wife wanted to do some shopping as well as make some returns. Back at the house, nothing in my way.

What should have taken an hour to install took about 2 because, well if you’ve ever swapped drives around, you know. All was finally working however and I sat down to fire up DFH.

I am a Sonar user, have been for many years. Sonar leans toward a new technology in plug ins called DXi, which I like a lot. Automatic delay compensation is the primary reason, compatibility is the next. I have used a few VST plug ins but, because you have to use a wrapper (piece of software which makes VST look like DXi), I found them rather kludgey in the Sonar environment. DFH is VST but remember, these are the best sounding drum, to my ears, out there. I did the install which turned out to be a very non-Windows type of install. No wizard, just click on the .msi file to install the plug ins.

At this point I realized that Sonar would not recognize these VST plug ins because I had not installed the VST wrapper during the Sonar initial install. I am on 4.0.1 version which is a downloadable upgrade. It now became apparent I would have to uninstall Sonar. Install from the original disks, add the VST wrapper, and then upgrade again to the latest version. This took about another hour.

I have to say my initial experience with DFH was pretty disappointing. The VST wrapper doesn’t size the on screen graphics of the product so when the plug in pops up, you only see part of interface. You have to close the interface and try a second time and then you sometimes can see all of the buttons. Add to this that initially only the kick and snare worked for me.

After another hour on the Toontrack.com message board (Toontrack makes the product) I found a work around for the interface by going into each of the 3 plug in interfaces for the DFH and specifying how large you want the plug in pop up to be. By manually inputting window sizes you can get the entire interface on the screen. I also found an update of the product which resolved some of the bugginess of the product right out of the box. Did I mention these are the best sounding samples out there? Good because it’s the only thing to keep you going because if you think this is going to plug and play, you’re in for a treat. If I had one wish it would be for Toontrack to make a DXi version of their interface…Please.

The last great hurdle is the midi integration of the product. If you use the DFH Superior mapping then you’re once again in for a surprise. The product does not map the midi controller notes to anything resembling the industry standard mapping for drums on a midi keyboard. Good: they do allow you to choose the GM midi standard Bad: Doing this provides a loss of functionality of the samples. After some digging there is a way you can remap the DFH Superior mapping to that of GM. After doing this you can save the mappings and build your own kit. Another very time consuming effort.

Ok, now the good part. The cymbals are…stunning. The drums are remarkable sounding. The areas of improvement are the interface which is very non intuitive. The manual which comes in the box is OK but some of the terminology like Superpad and subpad are difficult to understand. I would have preferred drumset, modification or subset which are more understandable to the reader.

1 out of 10, I give them 10 on the sounds and gradient implementation, a 5 on the interface, 4 on the install. A wizard to prompt the user for each disk and numbering the disks, or at least the envelopes would have been nice. When you are installing something over 3 hours and you are going and coming into the room, it’s easy to forget which side of the DVD you have copied and which side you have not. Oh, by the way that brings up another point. If you don’t have a DVD drive, add that to the cost of implementation. Just a heads up.

Finally, make sure you have an 80 or 120GB drive prior to install or it’s going to cost you additional. Also make sure you have a least 1GB or more of RAM for this product. Drumkit From Hell is a pig but a nice big fat juicy pig that you can learn to love.
 
I can't believe I read this whole thing. It took me almost as long as your install. :D :D

40 GIGAbytes?????? :eek: Considering I have a 30GB and a 20GB in my DAW, I would have to only listen to drums. Now I like drums... but not that much.
 
The reason there are so many files is that they sample the drums at various loudness levels from soft to hard. This makes about 10 wave files for every drum and cymbal. If you have a velocity sensitive pad or keyboard, a different file is triggered for how hard you strike your input device.

I went down this path because I wanted realistic drums instead of the normal midi flat sounds that have become a trademark of my recordings. I am always getting comments like, nice song and vocal but your drums sound bad. So, I bit the bullet and frankly went a little overboard.

Yeah I was a little verbose but it was an adventure. Now that things are running smoothly I need to dig into the product some more to determine if the effort has been worth it.
 
Did you ever figure out the secret behind the orange juice?

(Just had to ask...) :D
 
Fresh squeezed, Navel Oranges only. The old fashioned way. That's what the owner said. Man I love that bagel shop. It's decorated like an oldtime shop from the 1930s. Very quaint with old photographs of California history i.e. the building of the Bay Bridge, John Wayne on location shots of him making movies, etc. There are old sacks of flour sitting around and french windows on the front of the bldg, an old fireplace on one wall.

By the way, an update, things are going smoother now but you really have to delve into VST wrappers and DXi ports to get this baby tuned up right. Once you get through it, the drums sound better than any studio session I have recorded. So, this will save some time from having to mic up an actual drum set. However, this software is not for the faint of heart or someone looking to drop a plug in and run. Once I get a little better I will post some before and afters. For a beginner, BFD might be better for ease of use. The drawback is that the samples are not quite as realistic, at least to my ears. However, it would work for most things.
 
man U should be a writer...

I am planning to buy the dkfh superior, I knew about the non gm implementation, and about the size... but does it sound real or what? I think it is worth the time. tell us more about it

Lapieuvre
 
Wow that was a hell of a story!

I've had plenty of the same type experiences.I now have a dedicated DAW and don't take installing new stuff lightly.I don't even install patches unless I have problems.

The age of the mega-sample is upon us and with hard drive space being cheap within a few years these types of sample will be standard.
 
More?? Ok.

First I have it stable and running and the sounds are remarkable. You have to tweak the pitches to get big and fat rock drums. Also, your intial impression will be that the drums are too ringy, for lack of a better word. There are controls to gate the ringing out. The sounds are dry and untouched meaning they have not EQd, tuned or reverbized the samples. Thus these sound like recorded tracks you would get in the studio.

What I like:

The Ambience switches allow you to really capture the live sound of the various drumkits. There are basically 11 mics in the software which are assigned to the various drum pieces i.e. kick, snare, hh, cymbals, toms...
You can control each mic to include or exclude the ambient sounds from the other drum peices. For example, the kick mic can include or exclude ambient sounds from the snare, cymbals etc. This gives you a lot of variety in designing the sound of the drums. Once you have a setup you like, then simply save the set for easy recall the next time.

What bothers me:

Besides the install process, which can go easy if you have all the memory and hardware required, I have a couple of other dislikes. First is, if you try and use the product like a plug in on audio track, pointing your midi track to the drum audio track, the product does not work. You will only get Kick and top Snare, left and right coming through your speakers. Normal operation would be to do things this way and have either one midi track with all the drum data for all the drumkit pieces pointing to the plug in, or to create seperate midi tracks for each drumkit piece and reference the plug in. The idea being to mix your drums from the trackview in the upper left track area. Then route the plug in audio track to the main buss or soundcard. This is the Sonar recomended way and is standard for DXi plug ins and most of the VSTs I have used.

Not DFHS however. Its the DFHS way or the highway when it comes to working with Sonar. I will explain.

The only way to get the product to function is use the Insert, DXi Synth, VST, Drummer, from the menu at the top of Sonar. Trust me, this is the only way this product works. That is until either Cakewalk or Toontracks decide to work together on a DXi version.

When done this way the proper outputs are displayed by Sonar. This method creates the following tracks and busses. I will finish in the next message.
 

Attachments

  • DFHS 1.webp
    DFHS 1.webp
    31.9 KB · Views: 284
Last edited:
A little hard to see but what you have here are 7 audio tracks representing each of the 11 mics as well as a midi track for the drums midi data. How does 7 equate to 11? Well, for some VST wrapper reason, Cakewalk takes some of the DFHS mic outputs and puts them hard left and hard right in a stereo buss. So, you have two mics, one placed left and the other right on a stereo track. This is true for the first 5 of these 7 tracks. The last two are OK for some reason because they only use one side of the stereo buss. One of them has a dummy side for Cubase Compatability. Confusing? Eyeah..

What this means is that you basically cannot mix your DFHs tracks from these 7 audio tracks. The work around for all this is using those Aux busses down below. Basically with Sonar's routing you can split each of the 7 Tracks into mono feeds and get all 11 mics on seperate channels in the Aux buss area. If you have been following this it also becomes apparent that you have to mix DFHS from the Aux buss area. Rather a pain in the behind and contrary to the way most mixing is done in Sonar. This has a couple of other ramifications, I hope someone from Toontrack is listening.

First it means that you have to mix your drums down below in the Aux bus area and the rest of your instruments up above underneath the first 8 tracks. Next it means that you better start with this template set up and ready to go especially if you think you will use any of your scratch tracks later in the mix. All of this applies under the creation phase of making music. There is another option after this point.

You can continue to use this template, mix drums below and instruments above right through your mix. However, another option is to Bounce the drums once you are sure you have them right, from inside DFHS. Bouncing creates external waves files of each Drumkit peice either into one stereo wave file or multiple mono files which can be imported back into Sonar. The positive part of this is that now you can have audio waves files of the drums back in the track area of Sonar with the rest of your instruments. Delete, Hide or archive the 8 inital tracks and their respective Aux busses and you have a cleaner environment for mixing.

One final note. For some reason ghost hits, subtle drumstick sounds are added during the bounce. You cannot preview these sounds to determine if you like their effect or not. At least I have not found a way. Most of the time these add realism and sound desirable so this was not a major issue. However, there were a couple of times I did not want them in the drum file and I would like to be able to control these prior to commiting to a final bounce.

The ultimate goal of Toontrack should be to to get this thing in a DXi form if they want more widespread adoption by Sonar users. As it stands, it is difficult to get this thing going unless you read the entire manual as well as go through pages upon pages of their user forum. They also need to take the best practices of Sonar users on their forum and incorporate them into the manual. Too much information is left to the user to find vs. providing much needed description and data on how to get it running. Definitely not for the faint of heart.

In the end I found it very difficult to understand why it does not operate like other software does in the Sonar environment and I hope they put some attention to improving its integration. Once again, on a positive note the drums sound very real. For my purposes this covers a multitude of sins but in this case, their implementation in Sonar is pushing the sin limit.
 
Last edited:
This sounds like a great setup for drums. I like the way it looks in S3 too. Since I`m not allowed to let the plastic of a credit card touch my skin since the Waves deal....., I`ll have to think hard on this. :( :cool: :D




Your installation issues sound scary though.
 
Last edited:
Well, it may be crying but they charge around $300 for this product. It's not ready for primetime in this sequencer. At least the way 99% of other plug ins work in this environment. They only have goodie comments at their forum which is a little suspect in my book.

That said, I don't want to be their enemy. I hope my comments make someone there aware of the frustrations Sonar users are having so they work to satisfy more customers; in the end improving their business.
 
The Seifer said:
crybaby from hell, toontracks #1 enemy
Click to expand...

I don't consider it it crying at all.
It's almost 2005!There are so many programs that work seamlessly with other hosts,Middleman is not asking for a lot.
Oviously Toontracks has a very high quality product and believes it to be the users responsibility to make it work for them.Gigasampler used to/still does have the same attitude and all it did was help their competitors.

From the description Middle man gave I won't be drooling over this software anytime soon.Realism is important,but you don't want to kill the creative process trying to sort out details in a software program.
Given market pressures and the quick turnaround in software updates I predict it won't be long before Toontracks staightens up this mess or a competitor comes up with an comparable alternative.

BTW I'm very glad Middleman posted this,I'm not really in the market for this,but he raised questions I would'nt of had I been looking.
I wish more members would post their reviews regarding new products and how they play with Sonar.Usually we find out about a programs warts only after we've bought and installed it.

Thanks....

LATER!!!
 
Ok, just an update. There is a way to have the software automatically play when you load a new project. You have to adjust the settings to turn off the cache mode. Make sure you have enough memory first however. This fires up DFHS right from the get go after you play a file.

I am getting used to the software by now and in deference to Toontracks, things are starting to hum pretty nicely.

Falling in love with the ambiance settings of the software. Just wanted to make sure if anyone searches on this later they know that after some initial issues, things worked out good.
 
Hi MIddleman! Thanks a lot, you answered my question about Sonar and RMIV I posted earlier. I used left and right sends to mono busses so I can finally treat drums samples as if they were real drums. (But with the RMIV, or DFH, you don't get the beer breath, annoying girl friend and random hits when you try to have a decent conversation!) But still, it's a very peculiar way of treating plug-in outputs. Hope they fix it in the future!!!

Again, thanks a lot!
 
I can't believe it... I DID read 'em all!!! :D

Thanks for sharing, Middleman! :)
 
Toontracks have their strengths and weaknesses. They are ridiculously arrogant, and seem to think that the many, many people who point out the deficiencies in their interface are just sub normal. But, the samples are fantastic and when you get it going, DFHS does sound great.

I had a real whinge on their forum about their shortcomings, some of which was justified and some of which, admittedly, was not. But I'm not exactly the only one.

Seifer is just an idiot who thinks it's clever to make caustic posts, there is no record of him ever saying anything constructive. I've been on this forum for about three years and he is the only person I've ever felt moved to be rude to. That's because he is a twat.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top