My drums sounds like s#¤t!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Damien
  • Start date Start date
D

Damien

New member
I have a problem with the sound on my drums. Instead of micing them up I use my midi synth to create drum sounds. However i don't really like the sound of them so now I´m looking for either a place where I can finde some nice drum sounds for download or a way that i can get my drums to sound more thight with the rest of the music.
What i am really looking for is a way to make my midi drums sound better.

Thanx.

Damien
 
What sound card are you using? If you are using something that supports soundfonts (such as Sound Blaster Live) then I can point you to some URLs that have some decent sounding drum soundfonts for your midi files.
 
I'm using a SB Live 1024 and Soundfonts works fine
Please tell me where I can find them
Thanx

/D
 
The set I like the sound of (and I am a drummer) is called "Drums by Slavo". You can find it by browsing to http://www.hammersound.net. Choose the "Sounds" link on the left side, then choose the "Soundfont Library" link, then choose the "Drumkits and Percussive Kits" link.

There are eight pages of drum soundfonts. You can find the "Drums by Slavo" soundfont by clicking on the forth page. It is somewhere near the middle on that page.

The drums and cymbals sound quite good. The only thing I find missing from the kit is a good heavy crash. There is a great splash cymbal sound and a great china cymbal sound, but no real big crash with lots of decay.

You might also check out http://www.personalcopy.com/sfonts.htm and try the drums found there (pc_drums_42.exe). I haven't tried them, but other stuff I found at that sight has been decent.

If you want to pay for some soundfonts, the drums found at http://www.sonicimplants.com are amazing sounding.

Hope this helps.
 
So let me get this right (please excuse me, this is all new to me). From what you two guys are saying, it is possible to download sampled sounds and import them into your soundbank? How do you do that, once you have downloaded the sounds? How do you use them? Is it possible to save whole lists of different sounds (a database) and call up different ones according to your needs? When you play back downloaded MIDI files, will it play the default sounds as recorded by the MIDI or does it playback using your own selected sound bank?

I am using a s/b AWE64 sound card.

Sorry for all the questions but it would seem I am missing a crucial piece of the jigsaw in my knowledge of home recording.

Paul
 
I am not sure about the Awe 64 card, but the Soundblaster Live allows you to do just that. You can download sampled sounds and then use them instead of your standard midi banks. You set up a database of sorts by just keeping the soundfonts on your hard disk or a CD, and call them as needed. The nice thing about the SB Live card is that it will allow you to use up to half of your system RAM to load soundfont samples.

When you download a midi song, it will play using the sounds you have set up in your general midi soundfont bank. Cakewalk allows you to attach a specific soundfont set and instrument to each midi track you are using. It is very flexible because if I don't like the sound of a particular soundfont, but it is close to what I want, I will bounce the midi track down to audio using cakewalk, and then apply some of the directx plugins to the resulting audio track to get some pretty cool sounding end products.

Alan
 
The AWE 64 has this capability too, but one crucial difference -- it uses onboard RAM to hold the fonts, while the SB Live card uses your system's RAM. The off-the-shelf AWE 64 has, I think, 4 MB of RAM, which is not much. You can buy modules to expand it as high as 32 MB, I believe, but that's pricey -- almost $200 for the 28 MB extra. I just bought an SB Live instead, it was half the price!
 
Thanks guys! Unbelievable! You certainly live and learn. My AWE 64 card has 12 meg RAM but yours and Aljordans explanation now makes me understand why I keep getting an error message "insufficient sound font memory" when I try to use downloaded soundfonts which until I read this thread, I didn't know you could do. Looks like a trip to PC World for a s/b live card then!

One more question, how can I download some common drum loops that I can speed up/slow down in Cakewalk to use with my recordings. And I don't want to buy them. Any suggestions? Or am I asking too much?

Paul
 
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