Re: [LAU] [LAD] Drums - EDrums - Hydrogen

On Sun, 23 Mar 2014, Sebastian Moors wrote: Wow, that opens a whole can of worms... (in my mind anyway). I am thinking the whole keyboard to play struck instruments fails to some extent, not just in drums, but anything normally played with mallets like vibes or steel drums. The keyboard is the best controller for piano or organ/synth type sounds because they all have a note off event. Because they do, a second playing of the same note will always find a note that has some time in the past found a note off. This is not the case with a struck instrument, though I am sure most synth patches that try to emulate a struck instrument effectively ignore the note off (or set the note off envelope to the same as if the note stays on). I would think on a polyphonic synth hitting the same note again would give a mix of the first note event still fading out plus the same note new event playing the same thing. So it might sound like the player hit a second cymbal sounding exactly the same as the first rather the same cymbal where hitting it a second time would stop or at least modify the sound of the first strike. Maybe keyboards (or synths) already take care of this, but what should happen is that one of them should generate a note off followed by the new note on information. In the case of a cymbal, this would be very hard to emulate, because a crash followed by a ride hit would not completely stop the crash sound, just change it. It may take several ride hits (which on a real set might each sound different in their own right) before the crash sound is not a signifcant part of the sound. Of course making a short span of keyboard (range of notes really) monophonic may work for some of this. If only cymbal sounds from the same cymbal are in that range. This would make a high hat work for example, because in a monophonic keyboard the last note is always cut off by the new one. The problem is you have to effectively have a span of keys for each drum... Well just some thoughts. While I have a few keyboards, I am not a player, I can do some string pads here and there :) I have also played drums, but it has been years since I have had a live set to play and I have not taken the time to think about why the cheap set of pads I have sound so bad... I just expect that since they are cheap. -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net