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Voice stealing between pad+rim

Started by charliec, April 17, 2010, 10:00:36 PM

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charliec

Okay, so DsoundTool works great so far, allowing me to quickly create a huge reverberant taiko patch with very wet rim strikes mapped to the rim and boomy hits mapped to the pad...

... which is how I discovered a severe amount of voice-stealing going on in the rim section.  Samples mapped to the rim get cut off by newer notes played on the pad.

This should never happen, really.  Only newer notes from the rim should cut off older rim notes.

I realize that this may have been done out of an assumption that the rim samples will usually be shorter than pad samples, and will most often be played together, so this allows for more pad voices to ring longer before being stolen by shorter (and often less crucial) rim samples... but the pad+rim config is difficult to use for my intended purpose if I must always allow for rim voices to be stolen by pad voices.  I want to use two very different tones on pad+rim, using playing technique to separate them completely, not layering them as you would with conventional rimshot technique.

Can this please be changed?

If needed, it could be a global toggle to enable/disable voice stealing between pad+rim, but I'd prefer it to be always disabled.

Or, should I be creating "Cymbal" .dsnd files instead of "Tom" files?  Is the stealing routine different for the different types of .dsnd files maybe?

Manfred

#1
Hi,

i can't reproduce your problem. I tried it by assigning a crash-sound to the rim and a tom-sound to the pad. Both sounds do NOT cut off each other no matter which one is played first. But these sounds are two different dsnd-files. Did you put rim and pad sound in one single file?

I just ordered two cheap mono-cymbal-pads and want to use them at the input "Tom4" as splash and china. I hope this will work. Until now i didn't create my own sounds. But i also ordered SD2.0 and want to use it to create dsnd-files. Lets see if it will work.

Manfred

fishmonkey

with my kit, i find that occasionally snare sounds are quickly cut off, like they are being gated. doesn't happen very much though.

perhaps you problem is more to do with cymbal choking, rather than voice stealing?

charliec

Mmmm.  Nope, this is definitely four-voice polyphony, shared between the pad and rim, in a sound created in DsoundTool. 

The sound in question is a boomy taiko on the pad and a bright, long, reverby taiko shell hit on the rim.  All samples have huge ambience on them and have been precisely edited so that the booms are exactly 3sec long and the rims are exactly 2sec long, all with smooth fade-outs across the last quarter of the sample.... so these are not extremely long samples.

With all the reverb on the shell-hit sounds it's pretty easy to hear when they cut off.  When playing repeated eighth notes at 100bpm on the pad and hitting the rim once per bar, the lone rimshot rings out until four successive pad hits have occurred, and on the fifth hit of the pad the tail of the rim's reverb gets cut off.  That sounds like four-voice poly to me.

I am suspicious that it has something to do with the difference between the different types of drum voices in the Drumit... for instance, when using DsoundTool you can select Kick, Snare, Cymbal, HiHat, Tom, or Perc, but both Kick and Perc are single-zone drums...

....so what's the difference between the two types of Drumit voices?  Or, for that matter, between Tom and Snare, which are both two-zone drums? 

Are there differences in the way the various drum types steal voices, in their polyphony, number of velocity zones, round-robin routine, or what?

Some more knowledge might help me create the sound using the correct drum type so that this problem might not occur.

FYI the drums in question were created as "Tom" voices for the Drumit.

I made a test version with only two samples, a very soft boom on the pad and a bright shellhit on the rim, and the problem is as pronounced as can be.  If anyone wants to host it so that people can check it out, PM me and I will email it to you, as at 880k even the test sound is too big to upload here.

fishmonkey

hmmm, i suggest you email info@2box.se directly and ask them.

charliec

Anybody know a good free anonymous hosting service that I can use to host some Drumit sounds I made onto the interwebs?

And not just my little example sound, either.... I've been churning out sounds for two days....    :rock:

charliec

Quote from: fishmonkey on April 18, 2010, 09:34:49 AM
hmmm, i suggest you email info@2box.se directly and ask them.

Err, yes... I'm secretly hoping one of the guys from 2box will stumble across this, which is an easier-to-deal-with format than an email blast to the face, complete with large soundfiles attached....   :)

nonoduweb

Hi

I don't know if I will help....

Have you tried to use a single dsnd file on the rim and another file for the tom?

When I use a cymbal sound on the rim, and another one on its pad, I don't ear that the rim'sound is cutted when I bang on the tom.

fishmonkey

Quote from: charliec on April 18, 2010, 10:21:22 AM
Err, yes... I'm secretly hoping one of the guys from 2box will stumble across this, which is an easier-to-deal-with format than an email blast to the face, complete with large soundfiles attached....   :)

most mail servers will handle 10 or 20MB emails these days...

charliec

Quote from: fishmonkey on April 18, 2010, 10:40:25 AM
most mail servers will handle 10 or 20MB emails these days...


yeah, well, digidesign+novation+avid is still limited to 5mb..... but that's not the point.  I'm not putting them on blast yet, I'm putting it out there for discussion and observation.

charliec

Quote from: Manfred on April 17, 2010, 10:36:08 PM
Hi,

i can't reproduce your problem. I tried it by assigning a crash-sound to the rim and a tom-sound to the pad. Both sounds do NOT cut off each other no matter which one is played first. But these sounds are two different dsnd-files. Did you put rim and pad sound in one single file?

I just ordered two cheap mono-cymbal-pads and want to use them at the input "Tom4" as splash and china. I hope this will work. Until now i didn't create my own sounds. But i also ordered SD2.0 and want to use it to create dsnd-files. Lets see if it will work.

Manfred

If you're not hearing the problem, then the samples you're using are either not long enough (so that sample A has ended or faded before you can hit sample B five more times), or they are too similar sounding for it to be noticeable.

Most of the factory sounds are such that the rim samples are tonally very similar to the pad samples, so that any abrupt endings to ambience in the sample A will be covered up by similar ambience in sample B... but this is not the case with the samples I'm trying to use. 

I've been mapping and transferring samples for the last two days.... it is absolutely stealing voices on my rig.  Four successive hits will sound, but the fifth one will cut off any hanging samples.

FYI - no chance of a midi loopback in effect, either... cables disconnected


charliec

Quote from: nonoduweb on April 18, 2010, 10:23:34 AM
Hi

I don't know if I will help....

Have you tried to use a single dsnd file on the rim and another file for the tom?

When I use a cymbal sound on the rim, and another one on its pad, I don't ear that the rim'sound is cutted when I bang on the tom.

No, in this case the voices are only stolen within each dsnd, so it sounds as expected.  As you noticed, a long dsnd on the rim won't steal from a different, long dsnd on the pad.

It's just a bummer because you can't build one-piece instruments that have very different tonal colors AND long ring-outs AND play rapidly without hearing something cut out, sooner or later.  

Small inconvenience, but I thought I'd raise the point in case someone at 2box saw this....  

:patbat2box:

Manfred

Quote from: charliec on April 18, 2010, 11:28:50 AM
If you're not hearing the problem, then the samples you're using are either not long enough (so that sample A has ended or faded before you can hit sample B five more times), or they are too similar sounding for it to be noticeable.

As mentioned above i only tested it with 2 different dsnd-files. If the problem doesn't occur in this case i can't test it at the moment. But if we use the same firmware i expect it will also be there. Two different dsnd-files are an acceptable workaround for me.


nonoduweb

Ok charliec, I have tested the tom and rim with one dsnd file: a long cymbal ride sound on the rim and a snare sound on the pad, and I don't have any problem: the sound of the rim is not cutted when I play on the pad. I can ear the long sound of the cymbal even when I play several notes on the tom ???

What are your settings in the KIT menu for the tom and the rim?


charliec

#14
Here is a test sound I made, with a soft taiko on the pad and a bright shellhit on the rim.  

With this dsnd assigned to a pad, and with NO secondary dsnd assigned to the rim, play sixteenths on the pad and hit the rim a single time while continuing to play sixteenths on the pad.  You should hear the shellhit cut off after the fifth hit on the pad after you've triggered the rim.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/yzgzylntjnj/Polyphony Test Tom.dsnd

And here is an audio recording of the phenomenon in action... first one hit on the pad, then one hit on the rim, then a couple of bars of rhythm to show the rim cutting off while I play the pad.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/zdtijly052u/DrumitVoiceStealing1.aif