Hi, I have been discussing the design of a drum sample library for Hydrogen with Comix (Hydrogen author), Bill Bailey (my studio partner and a drummer) and Bobby Josland (drummer). I don't think any of us has experience with designing a high quality sample library. We've got some questions and hope to get feedback in the form of "this is my experience" and "I don't know but imagine...." The objective is to create a high quality sample library that has the potential to "sound" like a live drummer. Hydrogen has features that will help achieve sound and feel. From the perspective of the library I'm only concerned with "sound." Snare Drum For the sake of argument, assume there are three primary sounds; 1, 2 and 3 and that each sound has three volume levels; low, mid and high. This means there needs to be nine snare drum samples--the reality is that we'll have many, many more than that. The objective is to sequence a part that has the dynamics of a live player--snare roll or whatever. Are three volume/dynamic samples for every single sound enough for a sequence to achieve or get close enough to the dynamics of a live player? Does anyone know how the commercial drum libraries are produced? Maybe we need five volume/dynamic samples for every sound. Stereo Image I'm interested in knowing what people think is the best solution for achieving live sounding stereo imaging. I've spent several days recording test sounds and conlcuded that some instruments are probably best treated as stereo samples. Dry (no reverb) snare drums can potentially be mono tracks but I suspect cymbals must be stereo. The cymbal recording strategy will be to form a somewhat natural semicircle and possibly use an X/Y mic pattern. When sequencing ride cymbals they need to bleed from the listeners Hard left side across the stereo field and into the Hard right side. If we don't treat cymbals as stereo images they could fail to sound like a live player when sequenced. Snare drums might achieve live sounding stereo imaging from 1 in 2 out reverbs. In addition to dry mono snare drums, we intend to produce a number of reverb processed (wet) stereo samples. Anyway, I'd appreciate any thoughts on these issues. I don't expect production to begin for another two or three weeks and that will be somewhat dictated by the usability of Ardour. With the push for Ardour 1.0 I'm preoccupied with testing and not using it. Incidentally, the production will be done in our studio which has accoustically tuned rooms and with some high quality signal chains; Neumann -> Avalon, and some average chains. The overheads are SM81 which run about $600.00 U.S. a pair. They aint great but they are good enough. Those signal paths will run through a Soundtracs Solo consol and insert into a Tascam Dm-24. The drums will sound great because Bill, Bobby and I know what we're doing. If we don't know what we're doing someone should shoot us--we've got about 90 years of combined experienced with playing and recording drums. ron __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger. http://messenger.yahoo.com/
