That's why I specified that it was a black box theatre, to make it clearer for those who are familiar with the construction: no proscenium and lots of hard walls, but a high grid unlike a club setting. The space is acoustically very well suited to speech, nothing like a concert space. And, yes, almost entirely classic rock. The subs are deepening the tone, but not providing the real volume, as the unamplified tone is already fairly loud in the space. It gives the performers the tone they are looking for, whether that's a good thing or not. ;-)
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Getting the Best Kick Sound
- Thread starter LiquidMidnight
- Start date
so do you mostly spend your time trying to get the guitar players to turn the hell down?
Well, DUH!so do you mostly spend your time trying to get the guitar players to turn the hell down?
Its a group of 40 or so every quarter doing a concert: two (college) classes. Huge age range. So, every quarter, it's a contest who the loudest guitars will be: stupid kids, or deaf adults. Everyone's trading out every song, so everything is changing constantly. Drummers keep switching between ones who are freakishly loud with kick ass chops to ones who can neither maintain volume or rhythm.
Good times....
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Through my 3 year old rig [that was middle of the road even back then], with high quality, 24 bit samples, all the velocity layers you could ever need... 0 second latency, and less than 5% resource use.
As for your old drummer, or any drummer you come across that wants to use some great samples. I'd highly, highly recommend NDK.
Maybe you think it zero, but actually it is only that you "felt almost like no latency" which mean that it's acceptable for live performance,... because, scientifically, it's impossible to be 0 latency (triggered drum samples).
What a silly thing to say. Of course the limits of the physical universe apply.
That doesn't make a difference to my claim. Whether you would have 20ms, 50ms or 10 000ms of latency; I have less, to the point of it being incalculable. and many others do, too. It's not something that you have to worry about in today's technology. The resources, RAM and CPU usage, are much more important. and even those don't take up a whole lot for some measly triggered samples. =]
The silly thing is to say we trigger a drum sample and say it's latency is zero.
The right/smart thing is to say "the latency is accepted" or "it's almost like there's no latency".
There are people that have no knowledge about things like this in TB, member or guest readers, I don't want to give them false fact about this "latency in digital audio devices" things, although I can understand what you mean by your statement above.
The right/smart thing is to say "the latency is accepted" or "it's almost like there's no latency".
There are people that have no knowledge about things like this in TB, member or guest readers, I don't want to give them false fact about this "latency in digital audio devices" things, although I can understand what you mean by your statement above.
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...in 1995.
Triggers/samplers/drum modules have come a long way. We usually try to get a good sound using a mic, but when all else fails, a triggered kick mixed in with the mic'd kick almost always sounds great.
- Jan 27, 2010
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- Endorsing Artist: Genz Benz Amplification
Sure, and I've done that plenty of times mixing studio tracks that were recorded (poorly) by someone else. But I still think it's overkill in most live situations. Getting a good kick sound is live mixing 101. If someone has to break out the triggers, brain, laptop etc to get a standard rock/pop kick sound I'm going to question their experience.
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I like good acoustic kick sound treated good (good kick, good player, mic'ed and mixed etc).. but I'm not against trigger. I think many (and might be more in the future) experienced drummer/drum tech utilizing that today, including rock/pop drummer. I haven't search the google yet to provide exact list of them, but for sure Neil Peart use them, do you think he's less experienced?
I mean using it doesn't always mean that one way is better than other, also it doesn't always have anything to do with lack of ability to get a good sound, much less unexperience.
I mean using it doesn't always mean that one way is better than other, also it doesn't always have anything to do with lack of ability to get a good sound, much less unexperience.
For us it's as simple as taking a line from the mixer to the rack with the Alesis drum "brain" in it. It's already wired in, so it's very simple. But as I said, we always go for a pure mic'd sound first. Some kick drums just don't sound good in some rooms. All we need to do is bring in some sampled kick and it usually "perks" right up. We are pretty experienced (soundman is a studio owner, has done lots of commercial mastering and recording), but also kinda lazy, not going to spend too much time tweakin' the kick/drum/mic etc. Getting a good kick sound has worked very well this way. It's sort of like a hybrid kick-drum. A DW Prius, if you will!
I have used an old trick I saw a sound guy do a long time ago (pre sampling/triggers). A gate on the kick can be used to trigger another gate which is on a low frequency oscillator set to a low level. Both the gated kick and gated oscillator mixed together sounds pretty good for a kick that is mostly attack and not much whoomph.
- Jan 27, 2010
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- Endorsing Artist: Genz Benz Amplification
That's a good old school trick. If you set the oscillator's gate to a longer decay it's a perfect recreation of the 808 "hip hop" kick drum.
Getting the kick sound should be in relation with other instrument, esp bass....Another noted old trick is 'ducking' effect using a compressor/gate sidechain for kick and bass to tighter them.. Mix Tips For Kick & Bass
Until you run into the limit of what your hardware can do, in which case, you'll have to limit the sample size in order to minimize latency. If your samples are small enough, sure you can have minimal latency. If the samples get big enough, better samples=more latency. Or worse, the whole system hangs up and stutters.
It's been a few years since I did anything with triggering so maybe the power of computers has gotten to the point where this isn't an issue anymore . . . .?
^^^
No, I mean like this, for example:
Say, we take two of same sample snare sounds, same length, same computer, same devices, same DAW...
Sample A is better, has higher sample rate (say 96 KHz @24 bit) while another - Sample B - is worse (say 44 KHz @16bit).
(of course we have to test this at different time with different DAW & device settings for each)...
Now, to be played (triggered) at the same latency - it's possible to play them at exactly the same low latency - the Sample A need smaller buffer than Sample B.
But the computer, has to work harder when to play the Sample A than when to play the Sample B.
Computer power (and other hardware) is the limit, true.
The power of computers has gotten to the point where the high end of them are so powerful, true. But still it's limit can be found.
Sorry my English is not good enough
