Roland V-Drums

[Mistral]

The sound files in BFD are proprietary? Uh, that's a big no. They are all in .WAV format.

Well, that's what I read.

 

[crankypants]

5. Now the fun and long part...I will split the midi notes by choosing spit notes or whatever it is called in pro tools, and this will put each individual drum on its own midi channel.


This takes some time, but gives you as many drum tracks of audio on individual channels for mixing, effects, etc. Its great!!!

This is awesome. I have a TD-3 and I've been wanting to do the same thing. The most annoying thing is to have an entire e-drum track recorded and not be able to bring the cymbals down, bring the snare up, etc. It's kinda hard to do this beforehand and know exactly how it will all sit in the mix.

It sounds like if I had EZdrummer it has it's own mixer for this? Off to do some research on EZdrummer...

 

[Dumby]

Have the volume adjusted on your cymbals, snare and whatever before hand. That's what I had to do with my TD-3 and it's fine again for homerecording.

 

[Robert D]

Have the volume adjusted on your cymbals, snare and whatever before hand. That's what I had to do with my TD-3 and it's fine again for homerecording.

The problem with that is that you really don't know what the right balance of things are going to be until you get into a mix. That's why with all aspects of recording, including things like how much compression to put on a vocal, you want to commit as little as possible at the tracking stage, and leave as much control as you can for the mixing stage.

"Fine for home recording" is a very relative benchmark, with some people doing very casual home productions, and some endevouring to do profesional quality productions. Indeed, there is professional work being done in home studios, and being commercially released. Even amoung hobbyists, there are different levels of , shall we say...obsession.

 

[Mistral]

splitting the midi notes to different tracks won't make any difference when it comes to mixing.. in fact it only makes things worse in most situations.. first of all you won't be able to easily see where each drum hit is in relation to each other when doing editing.. but furthermore, you still have to assign these notes to instruments.. now what are you going to do, make a different instance of whatever drum plugin you use and waste 5x the resources and probably crash your computer in the process..?? or map the channels all to a single plugin anyway - in either case you wouldn't end up with any more mixing control than you would have before.. ya see plugins like EZdrummer let you assign each midi note/drum sound to its own stereo output already.. Same thing with Addictive Drums, and many others I'm sure.

It's also worth mentioning that if you are adjusting "volume" levels on the midi channels themselves, you are making a big mistake.. all that does is add or subtract the midi velocity value for those notes, so it will choose a softer or louder sample, but you are changing the actual samples and the dynamics of how the piece is played by doing so.. so never do it this way. Unless of course that is your intent.

 

[Mistral]

The problem with that is that you really don't know what the right balance of things are going to be until you get into a mix. That's why with all aspects of recording, including things like how much compression to put on a vocal, you want to commit as little as possible at the tracking stage, and leave as much control as you can for the mixing stage.

"Fine for home recording" is a very relative benchmark, with some people doing very casual home productions, and some endevouring to do profesional quality productions. Indeed, there is professional work being done in home studios, and being commercially released. Even amoung hobbyists, there are different levels of , shall we say...obsession.

Congrats on the 2000th post

 

[Robert D]

Hey guys,
I have the TD-6 drum set and I use it to record my drums into pro tools m-powered using midi. I play my drums just like an acoustic kit instead of just programming them. Once I have them in pro tools on a midi track, I have a way of splitting up all the tracks using midi and then recording each midi track, sometimes as many as 10, as an audio track for individual mixing. This is how I do it.........

......This takes some time, but gives you as many drum tracks of audio on individual channels for mixing, effects, etc. Its great!!!

Here is a link to my myspace page. www.myspace.com/sethbrand12 I write and record my own music. On these two songs I am playing ALL of the instruments and singing, and the drums are recorded with my TD-6 set just as described above. Tell me what you think!!!

seth

Seth,
Wow! You have a lot of talents going on there. Good songwritng, good chops on all instruments, good recording and mixing, and overall good production skills. It's rare not only to get good at all those things, but to handle them all yourself and not let it all bog down your productivity in the process. Congrats man, I really dig the tunes.

Back to drums - Yes, the process you described is the way to get the most out of a TD-6 module. I was contemplating upgrading to a TD-10 to get the multiple outs when I visited the FXpansion booth at AES. I was blown away with BFD. Now my process is like this;

1 - Open a new Project in Samplitude (my DAW software of choice) using a saved template with BFD All VSTI pre-configured.
2 - Play my V-Drums to whatever guide or click tracks I'm using on the song, recording the midi-stream out of my TD-6 module.
3 - I now have 1 midi track, a stereo overhead track recorded with a pair of C-12s , a stereo room track recorded with a pair of U-87s, a stereo PZM track, mono snare top track, mono snare bottom track, mono inside kick track, mono outside kick track, mono hi tom track, mono mid tom track, mono floor tom track, hi-hat track, and two cymbol tracks, each sharing a pair of cymbols.

Since the tracks haven't been rendered, I can still do edits to the midi file and hear the results in the individule audio tracks, even as I'm applying compression, reverb, etc. to those tracks. Way Cool!

 

[crankypants]

splitting the midi notes to different tracks won't make any difference when it comes to mixing.. in fact it only makes things worse in most situations.. first of all you won't be able to easily see where each drum hit is in relation to each other when doing editing.. but furthermore, you still have to assign these notes to instruments.. now what are you going to do, make a different instance of whatever drum plugin you use and waste 5x the resources and probably crash your computer in the process..?? or map the channels all to a single plugin anyway - in either case you wouldn't end up with any more mixing control than you would have before.. ya see plugins like EZdrummer let you assign each midi note/drum sound to its own stereo output already.. Same thing with Addictive Drums, and many others I'm sure.

It's also worth mentioning that if you are adjusting "volume" levels on the midi channels themselves, you are making a big mistake.. all that does is add or subtract the midi velocity value for those notes, so it will choose a softer or louder sample, but you are changing the actual samples and the dynamics of how the piece is played by doing so.. so never do it this way. Unless of course that is your intent.

Excellent points. I wouldn't expect to adjust volumes via the MIDI channels themselves. But, assuming I'm going to use the MIDI tracks to trigger my TD-3 drum module, I could record an audio track of each drum sound and adjust the levels of the audio tracks in my mix.

It's sounding more and more like EZdrummer could give me better control over individual drum/cymbal levels (while also gaining me some better sounding samples).

 

[mattkw80]

Seth....

your myspace stuff sounds great.

Which kit(s) do you like in the TD-6 ?

 

[Dumby]

Yes, yes and yes.

The problem with that is that you really don't know what the right balance of things are going to be until you get into a mix. That's why with all aspects of recording, including things like how much compression to put on a vocal, you want to commit as little as possible at the tracking stage, and leave as much control as you can for the mixing stage.

"Fine for home recording" is a very relative benchmark, with some people doing very casual home productions, and some endevouring to do profesional quality productions. Indeed, there is professional work being done in home studios, and being commercially released. Even amoung hobbyists, there are different levels of , shall we say...obsession.

The balancing was a problem yes, and I had to solve it through trial and correction in the beginning with quite a few takes to suit my "benchmark" level of quality achievable/desired. But it's an aspect of the hobby that keeps me busy and ambitious.

 

[Robert D]

Whatever gets the music made is the best way to do it, for sure. As I eluded to earlier, the production process has a tendency to kill the muse, and when self producing you have to find the balance between the best production techniques and not stopping the music in the process. I've certainly struggled with that. BFD is in that regard a real find for me.
I have one song that I recorded the drums straight from the two outputs of the TD-6 in one take, never chnged a thing, and it made it through the mix sounding good, but that's the exception to the rule.

 

[Robert D]

The sound files in BFD are proprietary? Uh, that's a big no. They are all in .WAV format.

Well, that's what I read.

The straight dope is....... your both right, though Mistral is more right. I was gonna agree with him yesterday, but I decided to hold my tongue till I knew for sure. I opened up the data folders for a BFD kit, and there to my surprise was a bunch of wave files. Hmmm........ further inspection showed that even though Windows sees these files as wave files, and a wave file editor does indeed open them, they are nothing even remotely resembling a waveform. It's some data stream encoded into a wavefile, and clearly proprietary.

B.T.W. Mistral - thanks, I didn't notice number 2000. Dont' tell my boss.

 

[Mistral]

Thanks, I don't normally like to put my foot in my mouth so needless to say I was a bit confused to find they used the wav format, or tried to disguise it as such..

 

[mattkw80]

Another question about Drums....


With the TD-6, you get 2 Toms, and 1 Crash.

If I wanted to subsitute 1 of the Toms for a second crash (by switching cables into the brain)..... which Tom would I keep..... ?

(I'm having trouble explaining myself here....)

If there is a "high" and "medium" and "low / floor tom" which one can I do without, if I'd rather have a second crash instead ?

 

[Dumby]

Which ever one you want. You can assign which ever sound you like to each pad, a cymbal can be a bass drum, it's whatever you want, I've seen a couple guys at a local music store put a TD3 and 6, and have the craziest kits. They're excellent drummers to begin with but you get the point.

 

[mattkw80]

For a second just forget that they are even Electric Drums...... if you are a drummer who only has 1 Tom, would you want it to be the Tom with the higher tone, or the Medium Tone ?

Which ever one you want. You can assign which ever sound you like to each pad, a cymbal can be a bass drum, it's whatever you want, I've seen a couple guys at a local music store put a TD3 and 6, and have the craziest kits. They're excellent drummers to begin with but you get the point.

 

[Dumby]

Another question about Drums....


With the TD-6, you get 2 Toms, and 1 Crash.

If I wanted to subsitute 1 of the Toms for a second crash (by switching cables into the brain)..... which Tom would I keep..... ?

(I'm having trouble explaining myself here....)

If there is a "high" and "medium" and "low / floor tom" which one can I do without, if I'd rather have a second crash instead ?

That's weird, I got two crashes and three toms, a five piece kinda deal with my TD3, and I added a double kick pedal...check out the pic of my set in the distance on my soundclick

 

[Dumby]

For a second just forget that they are even Electric Drums...... if you are a drummer who only has 1 Tom, would you want it to be the Tom with the higher tone, or the Medium Tone ?

If I want a latin flavor and there's flamenco's blaring, I want a high tom. If I'm playing a Sabbath cover and I can only have one tom, the floor tom. Pick the tom you need according to the color of the song. That's the best way to decide, besides you don't have to be restricted to only one in your situation.

 

[mattkw80]

Hey Dumby,


Yeah I actually got more pieces than what I listed, but I only listed the Toms and Crash for simplicity in asking my question.

That's weird, I got two crashes and three toms, a five piece kinda deal with my TD3, and I added a double kick pedal...check out the pic of my set in the distance on my soundclick

 

[mattkw80]

Thanks for the info.


So..... looks like I will convert 1 Tom to a second crash, and then have

x1 Medium Tom

and

x1 Floor Tom

If I want a latin flavor and there's flamenco's blaring, I want a high tom. If I'm playing a Sabbath cover and I can only have one tom, the floor tom. Pick the tom you need according to the color of the song. That's the best way to decide, besides you don't have to be restricted to only one in your situation.