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Steinberg Groove Agent expansions sale 50% off


simon

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I picked up the Simon Phillips packs - but regret it

sounds are reasonably decent but I forget have clumsy groove agent is compared to other drum samplers (superior 3). The downloaded clunky and the interface is pretty poor.  Edrum/hihat support is circa 1997. 

Spend that money on S3 packs ....or (a buggy) BFD3 expansion

just my opinion obvs but file under “things I will never actually use” :(

Edited by simon
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On 1/23/2020 at 2:23 AM, simon said:

I picked up the Simon Phillips packs - but regret it

sounds are reasonably decent but I forget have clumsy groove agent is compared to other drum samplers (superior 3). The downloaded clunky and the interface is pretty poor.  Edrum/hihat support is circa 1997. 

Spend that money on S3 packs ....or (a buggy) BFD3 expansion

just my opinion obvs but file under “things I will never actually use” :(

Hi, i am looking at the Jazz exp. Do you still feel the same way about GA? I just started exploring it. It seems more powerful than NI DrumLab and Abbey Road that I have been using. The 24 bit sounds also sound better than 16 bit in NI.

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7 hours ago, telecode 101 said:

Hi, i am looking at the Jazz exp. Do you still feel the same way about GA? I just started exploring it. It seems more powerful than NI DrumLab and Abbey Road that I have been using. The 24 bit sounds also sound better than 16 bit in NI.

yes - the Groove Agent expansions are not up to the standards of other drum samplers.  I agree they are slightly more powerful than the NI products, although I actually think the NI abbey road stuff sounds ok.

I've quite a few of the GA drum expansions but they never see the light of day.

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It's such a shame Steinberg never sorted Groove Agent properly - I purchased Groove Agent 1 and then upgraded a few times to 3 (I think I gave up at 3!!)

It was such a good idea but there were stupid things like you could not export Midi properly etc. if I remember correctly.

Sounds like there are still issues with V5.

I have a lot of Drum Library products these days but the best by miles is Superior Drummer.

BDF is getting so old these days that it gets no use and I am just waiting ... and waiting....and waiting for an update!!!!

The NI stuff (Abbey Road etc) are OK at best and Slate - well slate sounds OK but is not the easiest to output - to be fair though I did not bother to upgrade to the latest version. Still feel let down by slate - they promise a lot but don't deliver much!!

The one I don't have which sounds interesting is Get Good Drums - anyone got that??

Nigel

 

 

 

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NI drumlab drove me nuts, it kept randomly changing the volume and sound of the samples for no apparent reason and I could never work out why. It wasn't because some humanize or randomize button was pressed. With the NI drummer stuff like Studio Drummer and Abbey road, I can't route the Crash or Open Hi-Hat or the rides to tracks of their own...annoying and you can't change the kit pieces. Groove Agent, I couldn't gel with it, might give it another shot.

It would be nice to have a drum VST for Acoustic stuff where you can choose your own kit pieces in addition to those suggested and has great sounding samples and you can route all the individual drums to their own track in the DAW easily. Some triplets and tasteful slower fills for romantic Jazz wouldn't go astray. Can superior do that? A lot of these VST's are like heavy metal or Rock, with a bat out of hell drummer.

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The only sort of decent offering as of late was MODO Drum, even thought the cymbals were still sampled. I feel like drum VST's are only getting bigger in size with zero important features or things that matter. None of them can realistically simulate cymbals, we still have machine gunning issues, dated sounds....We'll eventually evolve to those plugins being Terabytes in size per drum and still sounding the same as the earlier models which were only hundreds of Gigabytes per drum. I don't see much difference in quality from Superior Drummer 2 (which was 22 GB in size) to 3 (which is over 300 GB in size).

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4 minutes ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

I don't see much difference in quality from Superior Drummer 2 (which was 22 GB in size) to 3 (which is over 300 GB in size).

I see a massive difference - depends on which expansion pack you are talking about  ?  The recent ones are especially amazing.

I don't find MODO drum to be particularly good either ?

horses for courses probably :)

 

 

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1 minute ago, simon said:

I see a massive difference - depends on which expansion pack you are talking about  ?  The recent ones are especially amazing.

I don't find MODO drum to be particularly good either ?

horses for courses probably :)

 

 

The only massive difference I see is the library file size. SD3 is more than 10 times the size of SD2. BFD3 is not too far off SD3 either, except the former has more money invested in marketing, so it seems to be better than the latter.

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8 hours ago, simon said:

yes - the Groove Agent expansions are not up to the standards of other drum samplers.  I agree they are slightly more powerful than the NI products, although I actually think the NI abbey road stuff sounds ok.

I've quite a few of the GA drum expansions but they never see the light of day.

Thanks. I am looking at the Jazz expansion and the Indie one and trying out GA SE that comes with my DAW. So far, it's been a good experience. I also like the idea of the integration with the DAW. What I don't get is the Phillps Jazz expansion has "560 MIDI files, 9500 samples" and the Indie Metro Heights expansion  has "over 17,400 samples". If I understand correctly, I can load up the Indie kit and apply the MIDI files from the jazz expansion.

I am a little confused why there is such a huge discrepancy between samples between the kits. Why the India kit has that many more and costs less while the Jazz and the Nashville kit (~8,000 samples) have around the same. 

Does anyone recall -- were there ever any GA expansion bundle deals? I only see they regularly have the 50% off deal and these expansions are not in Absolute from what I can tell, so they would not be covered in an Absolute deal.

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On 1/22/2020 at 3:59 PM, Paul Young said:

Still no half off upgrade on Cubase .5 release.

With Steinberg, you always buy the upgrade during the sale and then wait to activate it after the release of the next version.

If you activate a Cubase Pro 7 key today, it will give you Cubase Pro 11.

Keys always activate the latest available version, so you should buy these upgrades during the sale and then "save them" until after the release of the upgrade.

They've already had like 2-3 40-50% off sales in the past year.

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On 1/10/2021 at 9:36 AM, telecode 101 said:

Hi, i am looking at the Jazz exp. Do you still feel the same way about GA? I just started exploring it. It seems more powerful than NI DrumLab and Abbey Road that I have been using. The 24 bit sounds also sound better than 16 bit in NI.

According to the Native Instruments site, NI studio drummer and abbey road stuff is 24 bit, not 16. Studio Drummer has a lot of processing already applied (you can turn it all off) and way to much room and overhead mixed in by default, according to my tastes anyway. Sounds shrill and spacey out of the box. Once you tone that stuff down it sounds a lot more solid. Turning everything off and Multi outing to the DAW gets more control over raw sounds and choice of reverb. I don't really like the reverbs that come with Studio Drummer.

Also, if you don't already know, you can turn down the room and overhead and adjust attack, decay etc on each kit piece from the Kit tab, independently from the mixer.

Edited by Tezza
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