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IK Multimedia Introduces MODO DRUM - Modeled Drums

This is from the MODO Bass webpage:
  • The first physically modeled electric bass virtual instrument
  • Groundbreaking real-time modal synthesis technology — no samples used to create sound
Dont fall for the marketing bullshit
There are samples and its very noticeable
 
I love the idea of physically modelled drums - great to see it finally happening. But according to an IK comment on their video, the hats will only have:

Tight Tip
Close Tip
Half Open Tip
Open Tip

Close Shank
Half Open Shank
Open Shank

Foot Open
Foot Close

Jeez, that's a hard pass from me then! Nothing's more important for realism than well-sampled hats, and 3-4 positions is pants.

To be honest the videos were a terrible first impression in general, lots of amazing visuals but I'd like to actually hear the drums properly; those plastic-sounding backing tracks left me cold. So far my impression is of sub-Ezdrummer quality at SD3 prices...

It didn't seem like you could truly design your own kits either, it looked like everything is based around tweaking one of their existing preset models. There's a ton of potential in their tech but that hihat articulation list is worryingly lightweight for something with an RRP of around £420 (!!!).
 
So... since real drum performances are replaced by samples in professional mixes, why exactly do we need more than samples for our music?

For some types of music, you don't. Samples get the job done just fine. But a limited number of drum samples could never recreate the seemingly infinite textures, colors, and dynamics of, say, a Buddy Rich solo. The more exposed and featured a virtual instrument is, the more comprehensive the library needs to be. This is where modeling comes in.

Jeez, that's a hard pass from me then! Nothing's more important for realism than well-sampled hats, and 3-4 positions is pants.

This would make MODO DRUM a hard pass for me, too, unfortunately. If there is any one part of a drum set where modeling could have the potential to beat out all sample libraries, it's the hats. There are not enough samples in the world that can precisely recreate the infinite sounds created by hi-hats in a performance. I was hoping IK Multimedia would have tackled this issue with modeling, but it seems the technology or know-how just isn't there yet.
 
So... since real drum performances are replaced by samples in professional mixes, why exactly do we need more than samples for our music?

I use samples to layer with real drums all the time, not replace them, but even if I did completely replace them it would still retain the feel of a live drum performance. Yes many midi loops are created by a drummer recording midi notes, but it's just not the same thing as having a drummer learn and play a song live. Nothing beats that. With midi loops your searching for something that kinda fits, then editing it to maybe fit better, or writing your bass line and other parts to fit with the existing beats. I hear a lot of awkward drums in music these days. It kind of fits, but something is wrong. Many people that aren't drummers end up making bad choices that an actual drummer would never make.

I guess it depends on what kind of music your making. Most of today's popular music is sampled and quantized, and it sounds like it. No feel, no soul. Most real rock, indie, alt bands (real bands) are still cutting live drums on their recordings because well, real is real and fake is fake and they are authentic.

I'm a pretty good drum programmer (no midi loops). I sometimes sketch out parts with SD3 and think wow that sounds so good, so real (and it does sound good). Then I send it to a drummer who plays for me a lot and have him learn the basic parts, fix what doesn't make sense from an actual drum performance perspective, and add his own ideas in. When I get it back and I A-B it to my original programmed drums which I thought sounded so good and so real, I always laugh because there is just no comparison. In the end it can never complete with the real thing.

If you're writing for libraries or other types of media then you really have no choice as you can't hire a drummer for every track. I use plenty of programmed drums for library music or jingles, but if I'm working on a proper record, I always use a real drummer.
 
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I love the idea of physically modelled drums - great to see it finally happening. But according to an IK comment on their video, the hats will only have:



Jeez, that's a hard pass from me then! Nothing's more important for realism than well-sampled hats, and 3-4 positions is pants.
That really depends on the genre. In general, I'm getting the idea that these drums might be good for metal, where there will be a lot of high-velocity kick and snare hits that need to sound non-identical.

But yeah, having spent hours recording hi-hat samples, I've been thinking about a better way to make a virtual hi-hat work at multiple degrees of openness, and also work properly - if you open up a part-open hat, while it's ringing, it'll stop clashing, for example. I can think of ways to do this, but they'd also be a pain and time-consuming to record. But this is one area where a hybrid approach of a model built from samples could be a real breakthrough. Just to drop an idea, I don't care if somebody wants to steal this one because I don't think it's practical - sample attack transients, open ringing, and hundreds of isolated edge clashes. Then reconstitute a hi-hat sound from those, with edge clashes getting triggered more often when the hat is more closed, and when it's got more energy currently stored up. Every clash drains some of that energy. The model's simple in theory, recording the clashes is also doable, but you'd probably need hundreds, so...

Anyway, that's getting off-topic. I think the MODO drums might help a lot of metal producers, who don't need part-open hi-hats (many real-world metal drummers are so busy with double kick pedals they just have two physical hi-hats - one permanently closed and one permanently open) but who do need a whole lot of hard kick and snare hits which won't machine gun - so sounding convincing at high velocities with randomization that's basically able to give you a whole ton of RRs will solve a problem they have. Also for a lot of pop where everything's highly processed and not all that realistic anyway, though having the ability to also do more percussion elements would help there. If there's another instrument that could use a hybrid modeled approach, it's ye olde shaker.
 
A lot of insight in your post, and I think it's likely that you've captured the primary target and motivation behind this tool. I guess we'll all see once it's released and gets into the hands of a more diverse set of people than did the audio demos.

Yes, hi-hat is the hardest to sound convincing of any part of the kit. When I do drum programming, I've now gotten away from doing my own hi-hats for the most part, and try to borrow ones with many articulations that are played by pros like Bill Bruford and the like. It's better than doing nothing special, and sometimes I just kind of bury the hats and focus more on the rides, but it depends on the song and/or genre as to whether that'll work.

I hadn't thought about how this modeling approach could address the machine gun effect of high-velocity metal playing, but I think that's a spot-on analysis.
 
Thus far, I’ve come across only two drum libraries which, in my opinion, have hi-hats that can really be worked with: Mixosaurus and Handheld MAD. Both include huge quantities of hi-hat samples, which, until the day that modelling gets it right, is still an absolute necessity. Neither of them is capable of those insane Buddy Rich hi-hat solos (of which https://youtu.be/ZQ8A2EBXRiY?t=272 (this) is a good example), but short of that, they both have hats with which very, very much is possible.

Here’s a short example of the https://users.telenet.be/deridderpiet.be/Drums/Re_MXS-HiHats.mp3 (MXS hi-hats). (Of all sampled hi-hats, these are, to my mind, the very best).

Apart from the actual hi-hat sound (which, sadly, most drum libraries get all wrong, to my ears), the thing I find missing most in all sampled hi-hats (except the two already mentioned) is a convincing transition from closed to open. If, for example, a drummer approaches the chorus of a song, he or she will often begin loosening the (foot-pressure on the pedal of the) hi-hat just a bit, increasingly so as the chorus comes nearer, until the hat is almost completely open, but not quite. It’s that whole range between closed and open (which is a very expressive range of the hi-hat that involves quite a lot of timbral changes and which is something that isn’t just useful for those pre-chorus moments) that’s regrettably absent, or certainly under-represented, in all too many libraries.

And another thing is pitch change depending on how hard you press the pedal. I don’t know of any library that includes samples of this phenomenon (partly because, judging by their sound, most sampled hi-hats have been submitted to a much too drastic hi-pass filtering process). A good illustration of what I mean (and what happens with a real hi-hat) can be heard in the opening bars of Donovan’s https://users.telenet.be/deridderpiet.be/Drums/MelloYellowHiHat.mp3 (“Mellow Yellow”): the tighter the two hi-hat cymbals are pressed together (with the pedal), the higher the pitch of the hat. You might say, “good god, what a ridiculously unimportant detail”, but I don’t think it is. An essential part of what the hi-hat is all about, I find.

And finally: what virtual drums are also incapable of reproducing is the ‘self-oscillation’ of ride cymbals. ‘Self-oscillation’ is, technically speaking, perhaps the wrong word, but if you play a good ride for any length of time with a certain consistency, there emerges somethin extra in the sound — a sort of thin, metallic-ringing nebula — which a single or a few ride hits just don’t produce. Again, it’s one of those subtle things, but it’s a big part of the reason why sampled rides never sound like real ones.

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Another newer contender in the brute-force sampled drums area: https://tkd-sound.booth.pm/items/1208913

A small kit with just two toms and two cymbals, but takes up 30 GB in the extreme version. Many snare and hi-hat articulations with 127 velocity layers. If you want that without modeling, this is where things end up. They're also working on a Ludwig kit now, and have also dug into doing a little modeling on top of the samples, such as modulating the attack time when doing cymbal rolls to make them smoother.

And on the modeled side, the old Synth Secrets covered a lot of the theory of how drums work and how they might be synthesized, starting with this installment: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/synthesizing-percussion

That stuff didn't get into things like realistically responding to velocity, or the effects of having uneven tension around the lugs (which would make things very complicated mathematically, but maybe not too tough to analyze a few hits on badly tuned drums and make a simple algo that roughly emulates the differences between them and well-tuned drums), but it's still a good breakdown of what we're trying to do there, as well as the compromises and simplifications that classic analog drum synths made.
 
Dont fall for the marketing bullshit
There are samples and its very noticeable
Wow - so you say they are repeatedly lying in all of their marketing material? And of course implying that I'm too stupid to realize it. Companies of this size have attorneys who go over everything they post in marketing materials. I seriously doubt they they would allow outright lies. Too many litigious buyers out there.
 
I have HandHeld MAD, and have never used it. It was part of a bundle deal. It never occurred to me to investigate it, as I don't like using Kontakt for drums (too cumbersome in terms of mappings and getting an overview of what you have). So thanks for the heads-up that I should give this one a look for the hi-hats!
 
I'll have to check some user manuals when I get back from a wedding in a few weeks (I leave tomorrow so am super-busy with last-minute details), but I'm pretty sure the ride cymbal build-up is dealt with in a few products, as I recall being impressed. Unfortunately I don't even have an inkling which ones, at the moment, but maybe it'll come to me later today. If not the case, then I look forward to this being targeted in modeling work or hybrid modeling/sampling.

EDIT: Possibly it was Straight Ahead Samples! that did something "special" here.
 
it's OK to leave out things like cowbells.
Heresy, I say. HERESY!!!

th


Best,

Geoff
 
I should give this one a look for the hi-hats!

Not just for the hi-hats, Mark. MAD consists of 3 excellent drumkits. Well, one very good one, the Red, and two outstanding ones, the Blue and the White. I agree they're not quite as intuitive to set up and work with as, say, a Toontrack kit, but with a little bit of preparatory work and an ear for what makes drums sound convincing, I believe they're capable of drum-simulation far superior to anything that can be done with TT. If, that is, you're going for a suggestion of a well-recorded, unhyped, natural sound.
Here's the https://users.telenet.be/deridderpiet.be/Drums/PDR_HH_TheWhiteDemo_v2.mp3 (<b>MAD White</b>) and this is the https://users.telenet.be/deridderpiet.be/Drums/PDR_HH_TheBlueDemo_v2.mp3 (<b>MAD Blue</b>).

_
 
I just shut down my audio system a few minutes ago, so will check these out upon my return from my godson's wedding in a couple of weeks. I am definitely open to putting time into HandHeld MAD based on your feedback; Flying Hand Percussion has the best Congas by far (and I wish they had also done Bongos instead of Bongo Cajon). That developer is below the radar but truly understands how to make samples react in a natural way.
 
New video up showing audio examples for those of you looking for a closer look.



So... since real drum performances are replaced by samples in professional mixes, why exactly do we need more than samples for our music?

Physical modeling allows you to have a huge variation in the sounds you are creating without a hefty sample library. This adds to the realism in a new way as opposed to just adding more samples.
 
Well, BFD is very long in the tooth now (as well as having probably the worst GUI of any VSTi I’ve ever used)

What's wrong with BFD3's UI? I mean, it's not perfect of course but I prefer it to most of the Drums VSTs out there, most of them look like toys, including this new MODO Drum.

I have nothing against 3D modern visuals but if devs want to do it that way then please don't make them look so childish, I personally don't feel comfortable using VSTs that make me feel like I'm using garage band.
 
What's wrong with BFD3's UI? I mean, it's not perfect of course but I prefer it to most of the Drums VSTs out there, most of them look like toys, including this new MODO Drum.

I have nothing against 3D modern visuals but if devs want to do it that way then please don't make them look so childish, I personally don't feel comfortable using VSTs that make me feel like I'm using garage band.

#Priorities
 
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