I went the VST route too.. and it works great for me both in the studio and / or when I play with a band and I don't have to be the whole sound and provide the drums. In a band I prefer using them because I find it much easier to control that stuff in real time vs either a workstation ( or at least my workstation anyway ) or an arranger.. Also, NI B4 rocks.. so do the CS80 and Moog modules.. Absynth, Alpha, etc. None of my hardware boards have have quite anything on par with the sounds those babies can produce, nor the depth ( and ease ) of real time editing, so while it might never matter to the audience... I like it... helps makes me a happier player anyway.

But.... in a OMB situation or when playing duet without a drummer, I found using the VST stuff to be way more cumbersome work than I ever wanted to do and I also found that this in itself surely takes away from the performance itself. Lord knows I tried it and found that for me every variation I could come up with simply felt too cumbersome.

I have the T2 here because overall in a live OMB setting I still think it's simply the best option I have right now. The drums are more than adequate in this setting ( for me anyway ). It's simple to operate which means I can put more thought into actually trying to entertain, and when I turn some or all of the arranger parts off ( I like to do this a good bit ) and do "acoustic" covers, there are some very good sounds ( panel voices ) there to work with. Yep.. I know It's vain.. but I love it when someone says, "I can see that was all 'you' doing that ", and can appreciate that I can actually play keys. OTOH, it's also a blast when a good musician ( but one who doesn't understand arrangers ) asks almost in amazement how I can manage to control all of the arrangement parts and still make it all sound somewhat credible.
Of course I have to make it sound way more difficult than it really is.. lest he or she might try to do it too and wind up sounding even better at it and eventually replace me ( just kidding folks.. well maybe..lol )

To put it another way.. ( and plagiarize someone elses thoughtful work in the process ).. I find that the T2 makes a great hammer.. but not every kb playing situation is a nail. I can replace "T2" in this blatantly plagiarized statement with "VST.. Motif Es, etc" ...

Regards

AJ

i appreciate that using VST drums might be more cumbersome in practise when working live with your arranger but up till now i have never heard a comparrison to tell whether the extra effort is actually worth it in terms of the appreciable difference in sound. Thats why i ask for a comparrison demo in a style just as i would hear a T2 or korg drum set in a style. Its really difficult to make a judgement concerning he drums and velocity switching etc if i cant hear a demo. I have the Pax and it has dual velocity switching but the programming of the drums within the style is so good that compared to some of the vst kits i have heard (that have much more accurate samples with 3 and 4 layered velocity switched samples) its hard to tell the difference.I have yet to hear a vst drum kit or higher than a dual velocity switched drum kit in a style (unless i roland do this and i could not tell the difference). Queation ? Does the E80 have higher than dual velocity switched drums as i have played that instrument personally and loved the styles ,some of which are very similar in its live feel to my Pax.

Spalding,

I can probably dig out some tapes ( actually CDS ) of stuff I did live last year, because prior to getting the Tyros 2 I was using a hybrid of the PA80 and my laptop for sounds and styles, but they won't showcase my best drum kits from VST, since I used Soundfonts, Hypersonic 2 or Plugound's Drums for backing drums. I have Jamstix, DR008 and BFD, and I spent a good bit of time setting up and practicing with them in Forte, but I only needed one time to load all this stuff up and go with it ( live ) to realize it was more work than I wanted to do.

I can find some studio stuff we did with BFD and then re record it with the T2. My best kits by far are the BFD / DR008 kits. Maybe a better comparison would be to record something generic on the T2 first and then reassign the Instruments to vst.


AJ

"Maybe a better comparison would be to record something generic on the T2 first and then reassign the Instruments to vst"


Sounds like a good plan !

All of the VST drums have excellent demos on their website. Why do you need US to do it for you? Just Google BFD, or DFH2, etc..

The thing is, none of these EXTREMELY dynamic, real sounding kits are going to sound worth a damn if you play un-dynamic, over-quantized MIDI through them. ANY kit is only as good as the style played into it. Robot IN, robot OUT.....

BFD and DFH2 (plus others, I imagine) all have modes where, if they receive an identical velocity on the same note, they can alternate samples to avoid SOME of the 'machine-gun' sound, but a complete lack of dynamics (as the earlier posted style) won't sound a LOT better.

I have to agree with Diki on this one. If the original style itself lacks any dynamics I don't see how a VST is going to do much. The VST will of course give a better kit to use, but if the style itself lacks the dynamics it'll just sound exactly like the same style just with a different kit. Or am I missing something?

Squeak

Only what I didn't say in my post Squeak. The multisampled styles should have some variation in dynamics right ? Still, I am well aware of the fact that the style created midifiles may not have the desired dynamics. To overcome this I can either use the humanization functions in EZ Drummer or
FL studio, or simply slice the midifiles back into patterns and modify them inside of FL. It's a lot easier to do than it might appear, with FL's paintbrush for CC parameters function.

I won't mind doing it since I'm kinda interested myself in how it will turn out, but yes it's a bit of work so when I get to it.. well I'll get to it.

AJ

the vst demos on the site cannot be used as any form of guide as the whole demo is studio produced. It is almost impossible to duplicate a vst demo in real life once you get the product home. Thats why i want to hear them being used in a style. I am a little tired of these discussons because when we get to the crunch too many times we pull awayh from ever reaching a genuine conclusion. If the VSt or multi velocity switched drum is suposed to sound better , then its supposed to sound better, period. If its too much work to demo this then it speaks volumes to me about the usefullness of the product in arranger use.

Well, spalding....... Amen to it being too much bother. That's why squeak originally wanted to hear if the T2's drums could be made as punchy as the G70's.

It's one thing to have a great BFD drum kit on your laptop, playing away, but what does it do if, in the middle of the style, it receives a PC# for a different kit (quite a few styles change drum-kits for some reason or another). Or if you want to segue from a funk tune to a jazz tune..... How long does it take the laptop to load up a GB-sized brush kit?

There's a lot we take for granted with arrangers, particularly how EVERYTHING is available 24/7. You start going down the VST streaming sampler route, and life can get VERY complicated. And expecting a style, as dynamic as you like, to translate without some major tweaking to another. totally different kit is unrealistic. Even drummers play different kits differently!

Sample vel-xover points, response curves, degrees of hi-hat 'openness', power curves, NONE of these things have EVER been standardized. You are usually VERY lucky to get a MIDI file from one kit to play just as well on another FROM THE SAME MANUFACTURER, yet alone a different one!

I, for one, think that BFD is total overkill for arranger use. It has a pretty high CPU overhead, most of which is going to streaming loads of voices (BFD streams 7.1 surround sound files) for ambience and room mikes that are of little use, live (after all, you are already playing in an ambient room!).

But, if you stream it out to a big SSL in the studio, with a channel for each drum and mike, just like a real kit, and EQ and compress it just like a real kit, only the MIDI file will give it away as fake. The sounds are PERFECT!

But the wrong tool for live, IMHO. Maybe a few more computer generations and it will be OK, but streaming this monster at low enough latencies to be useful live can tax even a beefy computer....

Hello Spalding
It is not that simple to do it yourself, I have been trying for ages to get the posted sounds of my Abacus as good as they sound at home, and fortunately with help from the members of synth zone I am getting there.
As a test, do a recording on your PA1X, post it to a download site, and then email it to yourself and compare it with the sound that you get at home, you will be amazed. (You will wonder if it is the same instrument)
This is the reason why for direct comparisons it needs to be done in a studio by a professional engineer, as then you have a level playing field.
Enjoy whatever you play

Bill