For the past several years my band has been using NI Battery 4 for live drums, triggered by our drummer from his Roland HD-3 kit. As far as sounds go, Battery is incredibly flexible, enabling us to load up his kit with whatever samples we want for a given song. We no longer use any of the HD-3’s internal sounds – all the drum sounds now come exclusively from Battery in GigPerformer.
But lately we’ve been frustrated by a lack of expressiveness in this setup. The most obvious example is the hi-hat pedal: in the kit’s MIDI Out, pedal position data is transmitted using CC# 4 (foot controller). However, Battery only reacts to this controller as either being “on”, “off”, or “foot close”. You don’t get the sound of the hi-hat gradually opening or closing. I’m not a drummer but I’m pretty sure Roland’s internal sounds do give you this pedal opening/closing effect in the hi-hat sound, so I’ve been trying to find some live drums plugins that would do a better job with the pedal than Battery does. The Roland HD-3 also reacts to its own cymbal pads in a better way than Battery does – depending on where and how you hit the cymbal, you get variations in the internal kit sound, whereas Battery only gives you a “bow” sound or an “edge” sound. For another example, cymbal “choke” is supported by Battery, but in a roundabout way that leaves much to be desired.
So far, my search for live drums plugins has turned up nothing better than Battery. My impression is that virtual drums are still stuck with an either/or mentality: either you use plugins to do drum part “programming” in a DAW, or you use an electronic kit (hardware with internal sounds) to play live. For live playing, Roland is the king of the hill, and their focus is clearly on beefing up their kits’ internal sounds, with the higher-end models allowing you to import your own samples. Roland doesn’t seem to care much about their kits’ MIDI implementations – the HD-3, for example, only has MIDI OUT, and some of Roland’s kits only have USB MIDI which, on our MacBook Pro, suffered from note dropouts and pile-ups. Drum plugins, which are great for studio programming, have extensive sound libraries but don’t seem to address the playability needs of a live drummer.
It just seems that there isn’t any real support (maybe not enough demand?) for playing live electronic drums over MIDI only. If you know of any exceptions, I look forward to hearing about them!
Maybe that helps:
In my Band I am using Roland TM-2 and the triggers mounted on Kick Drum and Snare.
But I am not using the inbuilt sound, I am using the Midi Signal generated by the Roland TM-2.
In my 2nd instance of GP I am routing this MIDI signals into SSD5 in the global rackspace.
In the local rackspaces I use different kind of reverb- or room effects.
Sounds fantastic.
By the way: Are you using Round Robin in Battery?
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Yes, we are using round robin. I’ll check out SSD5, thanks! Re TM-2 triggers, we don’t have space in our van for traveling with an acoustic drum kit, and the bars we play in rarely have their own kit. We need some kind of relatively portable electronic kit for the triggers. The HD-3 (Roland doesn’t make it anymore) is the perfect size for our drummer.
If SSD5 requires a physical iLok dongle or cloud connectivity like all of Slate’s other products, I’d suggest considering an alternative like Toontrack’s Superior Drummer 3. It has excellent edrum support. You can use any of the EZDrummer expansions with it, in addition to any of the available SD3 expansions.
Toontrack Superior Drummer 3
Yes I do have Superior Drummer also.
SSD5 is much lighter in CPU usage, Superior Drummer is more flexible and you can get the rough sounds.
SSD5 is highly pre-produced.
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I know there are a number of Melda Production fans here - has anyone used Melda’s MDrummer? If yes, how good or bad is it?
https://www.meldaproduction.com/MDrummer
@therealgps If you are looking to replace your HD-3 kit, the current Roland equivalent would probably be one of the TD1-K variants:
https://www.roland.com/uk/search/?q=td1-k
The expressiveness issue is pretty much down to how the pad is talking to the trigger to midi interface or the proprietary drum brain module and how that is addressing the model or sample bank.
Probably your best solution is to use a Roland VH11 or VH10 hi-hat setup and plug that into a Roland TD11 or newer module and use it for your hi-hat and cymbal sounds. It’s not what you are trying to do but it’s the best solution for what you want to hear.
That module is simply playing different hi-hat sounds (model based) triggered by the position of the hi-hat open/close and what you are finding with libraries is they probably don’t have 127 different samples per cymbal and no easy way to convert CC data into a selection of these sounds, which is what you are after.
I have the same issue with pads as well… Snare and Tom sounds always sound so robotic to me. You never get the same sound twice on an acoustic drum and e-drums are just not tailored to give you that kind of nuance. At best you get 2-3 zones per pad that are assigned to as many samples that only vary by velocity = volume. That’s a poor facsimile to the real thing when you think about it. A real snare drum sounds completely different if you strike it 1" away from center as it does dead center… it sounds different if you strike and hold your stick there as it does if you let the stick bounce back with no resistance. Just some examples.
My hope is between MIDI 2.0 and FSR technology (like the alternate mode DIDI and FSR type triggering surfaces) we’ll open up to a new level of playability with electronic drums but that is a ways off.
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