Vernon Barnes Posted January 12, 2020 Share Posted January 12, 2020 Over the holidays I was resisting GAS. I was really close to buying another Toontrack SDX. I decided to spend some time with the ones I already had and delve deeper into the features while I was going through a dry spell writing wise.. Previously I had simply routed the individual drums and mics to channels in the DAW. Now I started to route internally to busses, setup sends, play with the builtin effects and get creative with the bleeds etc. Then route the busses to individual channels in Cakewalk and save a number of track templates. in All quite satisfying and it showed me I have a lot more than I thought I had. Of course looking at the differences in mic setup in various SDXs does increase ones curiosity about some of the other packs. Oh well. Next I decided to look in detail at the big EastWest kits in composer cloud. The Spike Stent and Joe Ciccarelli libraries. I had only given them a casual glance before but they are really rather good. They appear to be designed to sound good "straight out of the box" with a large range of presets covering many styles. There are plenty of good MIDI grooves too. The mixer has in/out kick mics, top and bottom snare mics etc. there are room mics and bleeds so the whole thing is more versatile than I had first imagined. The mixer channels can of course be sent to separate channels in your DAW. All in all there are some very good options here for expanding the percussion pallet. Looking at the kits in other EW libraries like Ministry of Rock 2 or Fab Four it appears on certain kit pieces can be active in an instance at one time. You select these in the mixer tab. As a result several instances will need to loaded into Play to get a full kit. There are some useful sounds spread across various libraries once you realise the odd way things are setup. And finally, following the sad death of Neil Peart I went back and visited the older Sonic Reality library "Neil Peart Drums" for Kontakt (it used SR's Infinity Player as a licensing vehicle so Kontakt Player could be used.) Listening to some of the NP solos on Youtube that have been posted in the last couple of days I think SR had the tone of the drums, particularly the toms accurately done. Using Kontakt of course is a bit of a pain compared to dedicate drum samplers but the multis do a good job of routing in the Kontakt mixer so setting up individual outs is pretty easy. I enjoyed playing with this again and made a track template for future use. So the best deal may be something already sitting on your hard drive! P.S. I must give addictive Drums another try one day. 4 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarine Posted January 12, 2020 Share Posted January 12, 2020 20 minutes ago, Vernon Barnes said: So the best deal may be something already sitting on your hard drive! It's safe to assume that's almost certainly the truth at this point. Abundance of tools and stimuli can be a detriment to creativity. If I want to draw I usually have to shut down everything else except the drawing app for at least one full day. Likewise, when making music it more often than not takes me a good while before I find creativity, and it almost always follows actively shutting yourself off from stuff rather than actively going through the stuff (in desperate search of a creative spark). It always requires labor and tunnel vision, which is the exact opposite of the mindset reflected in the habit of obsessively trying to acquire all the stuff out there. It's a symptom of cultural AD/HD. Good for generating ideas but not for cultivating them. Count the stuff that you own in every category - what are the chances, statistically, that the next thing you buy will be a... game?changer. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kitekrazy1 Posted January 12, 2020 Share Posted January 12, 2020 (edited) 57 minutes ago, Vernon Barnes said: So the best deal may be something already sitting on your hard drive! Oh c'mon we all know that's nonsense. ? I've come close to buying something twice and accidentally made a second purchase. Unfortunately it is always something with flexible licensing. BTW your statement really is the best deal. Edited January 12, 2020 by kitekrazy 1 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jude77 Posted January 13, 2020 Share Posted January 13, 2020 5 hours ago, sarine said: Count the stuff that you own in every category - what are the chances, statistically, that the next thing you buy will be a... game?changer. Whoa. That's a good sentence. However, if I can just get one more reverb . . . . 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kitekrazy1 Posted January 13, 2020 Share Posted January 13, 2020 Imagine my estate sale If all of my plugins turned into hardware. It would take up city blocks. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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