# How to get an „Army of drums“ eg. with Metropolis Ark 3



## MichaelHo (Nov 21, 2018)

Hi,

I own Metropolis Ark 3, the beating orchestra.

Now I looked at another product „Audio imperia Cerberus“, which allows to stack drums within the VST interface. This is done with round robins i believe.
This results in a sound like an „army of drummers“

My question: 
Can I also create such a sound with my Metropolis Ark 3 sounds? 
Maybe by using a stacking function in Logic pro or Cubase?
MA3 has 10 Roundrobins included,
But i really dont know how to trigger them manually.

Thanks for help and guidance


----------



## shawnsingh (Dec 17, 2018)

You can technically do this, but instead, I think Ark 3 provides multiple versions of each instrument exactly for this purpose, to layer them. Each version of the same instrument is located in slightly different places on the sound stage, and each one has slightly different sound, so they sound more powerful and authentic that way.

If you really wanted to use round robins like this:
1. open multiple instances of the same patch
2. configure them to receive the same midi channel and midi port
3. go to the wrench icon menu, there you have options for how to control round robins.
4. Make sure "Random RR" is off, it probably would be, since it's default off.
5. Set the "round robin reset" to 0 milliseconds so that it never resets. But just before you do this, play the keys that you care to move the round robins to a different position. you can see which round robin was just previously played by the user interface in the wrench icon menu. Then, setting "round robin reset" to 0 milliseconds freezes the round robin position so that it will always be predictable.

The big problem is that you'll need to fix the round robin position uniquely for every MIDI note of the patch. So if you have a drum on C2, the round robin setup will be different for D2 and E2, etc. But since there's only round robin options for the entire patch, you have to somehow carefully set up each key at the same time and it can be a big pain to make sure you froze the round robin positioning exactly where you want it.

And after all that effort - when I tried it just now with the Gran Casa Ark 3 patches, each round robin is edited so that the attacks are almost at the same time. It's actually so accurate that it's not realistic for normal players, and instead of hearing "multiple drummers layered", I sometimes heard some phasing/comb filtering, as if you put a subtle flanger effect on the drums, which doesn't sound good.

So yeah, I would still suggest you create layering by adding different patches provided by Ark 3 at the same time, like Gran Casa 1, 2, 3 and 4.


----------



## MichaelHo (Dec 18, 2018)

Very helpful, thank you
I will try to go for layering of the 4 different types


----------

