I’ve recently got GP4 to load a bunch of custom kits stored in EZDrummer for a show I’ve just finished. There are 36 rackspaces with their own kits (all kits are custom made from various EZDrummer expansion packs within EZDrummer3) and 44 songs in a setlist.
My challenge is the load time is phenominally rubbish! If I have to jump from, say, song 3 to song 20 during a practice, that’s 10+ minutes written off just while it loads (loading linearly is better, but still painful). I’ve set it to predict 7 songs rather than to pre-load the whole gig which is fine for the live show, but surely it shouldn’t be that bad? My keyboard player has 10/15 plus VST’s on practically each song and they all load instantly, it’s infuriating (admittedly on a slightly higher spec laptop than mine, but not hugely). Loading the gig initially is fine, takes about 30 seconds which I’m absolutely cool with, it’s the skipping between songs once I’m in the gig that’s the ball ache.
It’s loading on a new-ish (12months old) Acer Nitro 5 laptop, running Windows 11 with 16gb of RAM. Not a standalone music device, but very, very little else on the device and nothing running in the background. No anti-virus etc eating up the power. EZD is stored on the laptops SSD, kits/sounds/VST’s are stored on a 1tb external drive (Samsung T7, brand new) but the loading issue is identical even after moving them on to the device to test that. The wiring is literally midi in > EZDrummer with custom kit selected > audio out. There are no midi controls or extra widgets on any rackspace.
Anyone use EZDrummer and have this issue? It’s clearly not right so I’m putting money on me not having it set up correctly, but the above mentioned keys player has used GP for donkeys years and has looked and said it’s all right. I’m at my wits end!
Are your keyboard player’s VSTs EZDrummer plugins?
I presume you know that EZDrummer wants to load gigabytes of data (see attached screenshot from my own installation of EZDrummer) and if you have 36 rackspaces with their own kits then you’re trying to load into RAM way more data than you have room for, so your system is probably swapping data to/from your drive (even if it’s an SSD) and that is going to be a very slow process.
I didn’t know it loaded the full works every time, no. That would definitely explain it!
So, no point in using EZDrummer on GP then, or is there a way to just load the specific kit that I want as opposed to the whole lot?
New to the forum so not sure if this is a no no question, but is there an alternative program of some sort that would cope with EZD? Or is it more a case of sucking up the spend and getting standalone VST’s?
I’m using MDrummer (Melda Productions). I don’t use predictive loading: I just load gp-presets depending on the songname in the setlist. Loading a preset takes a few seconds (even when it involves loading samples).
I don’t know if it fits your use-case and every plugin has its learning curve.
How exactly are you using EZDrummer in Gig Performer? Are you creating tracks with beats or are you just triggering the samples?
Why do you need so many kits?
Have you tried setting predictive loading to 3 during rehearsals so that GP doesn’t actually have to load seven kits?
Alternatively, why don’t you just load EZDrummer once in your global racksace, save each kit as a GPUserPreset and then use GPScript to load different presets as you switch rackspaces. It still wouldn’t be instant but it would probably be much faster
There’s no magic here — although I would point out that GP’s predictive loading is allowing you to perform a live show even with huge RAM requirements. How would a standalone help you? You’re still going to have to load each kit
I don’t think I was aware of GPUserPresets, I’m still very new to GP and hasn’t come across that it anything I’d looked in to as a fix so I will take a look, thank you.
The need for so many kits is purely down to one single project I do for 1 week each year! Long story, but I do a theatre production for kids to experience doing a stage show. It’s usually a dozen or so sections, each for a different age group, so the music ranges wildly from Latin to pop to electro to show tunes! There isn’t one kit that would sound acceptable for every song in every section so I create an individual kit for almost every song and try to just trigger each kit from my drums. Historically, I’ve used EZDrummer2 in Reaper with multiple tracks - each having a different instance of EZ open - then just a foot switch to progress thru the tracks. This year there were more songs than Reaper could handle (assuming because EZ loads everything, not just the one kit I want!) so I looked to GP as an alternative.
Do you have predictive loading on? If so, maybe try it with it off?
For that theater production, I would think you would know beforehand the order in which you would need the different kits. So, you could use Predictive Loading for this one show.
So, even if it is too much to load all the kits (which would be the case if you did not use Predictive Loading), with Predictive Loading GP would automatically (in the background) load the next one or two kits for the next song or two (depending upon the number of rackspaces you select in Predictive Loading)
I do use predictive, yes. The show itself isn’t that much of an issue as predictive does its job quite nicely, it’s just the practices which are, ermmmm, numerous!! The kids all come and go at random times so we get a “song 6, section 3” the moment the kid singing song 6 from section 3 is there and that’s go time!
