OcUK Musicians

Dirk Diggler

Dirk Diggler

Dirk Diggler

Soldato
Joined
6 Jan 2013
Posts
22,210
Location
Rollergirl
Just putting the feelers out, we must have a few musicians on here? I've just bought myself a new set of E-drums and could do with some info on DAW setups etc.. The last time I picked up a drum stick, electronic drums were the stuff of Tomorrow's World :p

Any drummers out there..?
 
I could write for hours on this but won’t as I’m lying in the Caribbean sun.
What I will say though, is are you on Mac or PC? I’ve always used Logic but it’s down to personal preference, if you want to really play around with sounds then EZ Drummer is well worth looking into and works with most DAWs with relative ease.
 
[FnG]magnolia said:
Our drummer used to use Yamaha e-drums. We use Reaper as our DAW. What's your emergency, caller?



How very dare you! One out of two isn't bad though.

e: this is what they sound like although not track 4.
Click to expand...
I'm using Reaper and it feels good to use, but the bain of my life so far is input lag. Basically, how do I set up the input and output properly.

Maccy said:
I could write for hours on this but won’t as I’m lying in the Caribbean sun.
What I will say though, is are you on Mac or PC? I’ve always used Logic but it’s down to personal preference, if you want to really play around with sounds then EZ Drummer is well worth looking into and works with most DAWs with relative ease.
Click to expand...

I'm on PC, and tried EZ Drummer but didn't get far enough as my free trial ended before I could properly assess it.
 
^ Superior Drummer 3 is even better and what we use now. It's not cheap but is probably best in class right now, whether you're running e-drums or using the midi data in the package.

I think DAWs can be quite personal -you either gel with one or not. We did try Logic and Pro-Tools and both have their strengths - not least of which Pro-Tools being basically industry standard - but I prefer Reaper's flexibility. But regardless - whatever works for you is the best choice.

e: I think we cross-posted. The lag is to do with your ASIO settings, how you've calibrated you e-drums and how Reaper is set up. For live recording you want the buffer to be as low as you can without glitching. The Reaper forums have great technical walkthroughs on how to set this up, let me find a link or two.
 
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[FnG]magnolia said:
^ Superior Drummer 3 is even better and what we use now. It's not cheap but is probably best in class right now, whether you're running e-drums or using the midi data in the package.

I think DAWs can be quite personal -you either gel with one or not. We did try Logic and Pro-Tools and both have their strengths - not least of which Pro-Tools being basically industry standard - but I prefer Reaper's flexibility. But regardless - whatever works for you is the best choice.

e: I think we cross-posted. The lag is to do with your ASIO settings, how you've calibrated you e-drums and how Reaper is set up. For live recording you want the buffer to be as low as you can without glitching. The Reaper forums have great technical walkthroughs on how to set this up, let me find a link or two.
Click to expand...
Cheers mate, really appreciated. I'm nearly there with it, but the lag is killing it.
 
I use Sonar Production Studio and Superior Drums.
I will be buying a Behringer X32 soon and linking that to a laptop I will be able to record all our gigs to separate instrument channels to load into my DAW.
The band bought a very cheap from Gear4Music eDrums for £80 and when I plugged it into my DAW via USB all the drum channels lined up in it, that was impressive.
 
Maccy said:
Equally, a better TD module will help too
Click to expand...
Yes, that's inevitable. I wasn't sure if I'd get back into playing so I didn't want to spend any more than £1k, but I can tell it's like buying a mid tier GPU; the upgrade itch is strong. :)

I take it I could swap out the module itself and use with the existing kit? I know I'll eventually change out the lot but doing it incrementally would be ideal.

SexyGreyFox said:
I use Sonar Production Studio and Superior Drums.
I will be buying a Behringer X32 soon and linking that to a laptop I will be able to record all our gigs to separate instrument channels to load into my DAW.
The band bought a very cheap from Gear4Music eDrums for £80 and when I plugged it into my DAW via USB all the drum channels lined up in it, that was impressive.
Click to expand...

The band bought a cheap what for £80, mate? Also, is Superior Drums from Toontrack?
 
TD 8 with Addictive Drums here. Uses the modules midi to trigger samples in a laptop. Pretty good but the delay gets too high at anything other than lowest sample rate.
 
Dirk Diggler said:
Yes, that's inevitable. I wasn't sure if I'd get back into playing so I didn't want to spend any more than £1k, but I can tell it's like buying a mid tier GPU; the upgrade itch is strong. :)

I take it I could swap out the module itself and use with the existing kit? I know I'll eventually change out the lot but doing it incrementally would be ideal.



The band bought a cheap what for £80, mate? Also, is Superior Drums from Toontrack?
Click to expand...

Gear4Music eDrum kit about £200 new but got it second hand for £80. During 2020 when we could play open air gigs with us seated, our drummer used them live. I thought he would break them apart.

Pretty sure Superior Drums are Toontrack and a step up from EZ Drummer which I used to have.
 
SexyGreyFox said:
Gear4Music eDrum kit about £200 new but got it second hand for £80. During 2020 when we could play open air gigs with us seated, our drummer used them live. I thought he would break them apart.

Pretty sure Superior Drums are Toontrack and a step up from EZ Drummer which I used to have.
Click to expand...

Ah, ok. I did the EZ Drummer trial but didn't get long enough as I had to go to work and it expired by the time I got back - it's quite expensive for what I'm doing at the moment.

bloodiedathame said:
TD 8 with Addictive Drums here. Uses the modules midi to trigger samples in a laptop. Pretty good but the delay gets too high at anything other than lowest sample rate.
Click to expand...

This is what I'm trying to do, use the midi to trigger the samples but as you say it's the delay that kills it. I'm wondering, are these programs with samples really meant for post processing rather than live play?
 
Dirk Diggler said:
This is what I'm trying to do, use the midi to trigger the samples but as you say it's the delay that kills it. I'm wondering, are these programs with samples really meant for post processing rather than live play?
Click to expand...

Latency is always the killer no matter what you're triggering in a studio.
For example I've recorded data into a DAW but have to turn the volume off the keyboard but it then triggers the samples ok on playback.
@Lowe is probably the man for this stuff if he's still around.
I was also surprised how the sounds on that cheap eDrum kit sounded on the recording and i didn't have to do a lot with them.
Your Roland module should be even better.
 
And just to clarify, the power of EZ Drummer and Superior Drums is not only their drum samples but their 1000s of MIDI drum loops so somebody like me without drums in the house can create a John Bonham type drum track and 99.9% of listeners would be fooled.
Not sure if Superior Drums is the cheaper option if you just want to trigger samples yourself.
 
Yup fellow drummer here. I had a Roland TD17-KVX for a few years (trying to sell it actually now). For a while I used it with Superior Drummer 3 - I bought a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 which I used along with ASIO4all driver. It worked.. ok. Managed to get the latency down to about 6ms but at times even that was too much. Got a bit fed up with having to invest so much time in SD to get what I wanted sound wise I just went back to using sounds from the TD17 module - I bought some aftermarket kits from V Expressions and got it sounding fairly decent. I've heard plenty of people getting amazing results from SD3 but I just couldn't get my head round it.

Now I've got a house with a garage, I built a soundproofed room in it and have a full accoustic kit.
 
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