This is NOT an Addictive Drums promotion site

Buy you may want to check out their offer for February.

HappIndie Holidays!

I love these guys! A Ludwig Vistalite 22x16" Bass Drum... enjoy!

Sonor Designer Snare

I'm a happy owner of the Sonor Designer Snare kit-piece now. :) Get it today for $1!

Sonor Designer Snare Demo

INDIE

Today's hot release from XLN Audio's Addictive Drums forge. So there are 3 ADPaks now which I can't choose from. Life is hard!

GTG DrumSampler II

I was wondering if there is a simple VSTi for your own drum samples. Yes, there is.

GTG DrumSampler II VSTi

Note to myself: Experiment with it if you have some time!

Addictive Drums + Roland TD-9.

So I installed my Addictive Drums on my Mac since my external soundcard got broken. Macs are good for music out of the box with no delay. Since I already put away my kit, I thought I'll try it out with the Roland TD-9 on our stage in the office. :) I couldn't wait until the end of lunch so I went instead. Time flied quickly! =) I played mainly with the Ludwig Vistalite kit. It has a great voice & dynamics which goes really well with the e-drum's pads. After reading the tutorial about the compressors I listened more & played more with the dynamics, that's why I found this kit today as the best. It's really interesting how rich sound you can make with a single Tom!

Ludwig Vistalite in Addictive Drums

Mandelbrot Drummer

I found an interesting software called Mandelbrot Drummer which generates drum patterns based on the Mandelbrot Set. The concept is very interesting and it's probably good for the claimed purposes: to get some ideas for your unique patterns. I found the tool a bit hard to use, e.g. you have to configure a lot of parameters for the individual kit-pieces. I didn't really find the generated patterns very unique either. E.g. usually one kit piece is either increasing or decreasing in intensity then stops.  Then the combination of the kit-pieces result something unexpected, but still they follow the same pattern. It's still fun to play with it for some time.

Mandelbrot Drummer

Addictive Drums (on sale!)

Thursday I went home a bit earlier & assembled my DD-65. I usually don't play at home b/c I arrive late and the sticks are too loud even if I use headphones. But I was early at home so I connected it into the Addictive Drums software I bought in March and played like an hour. I never really played using this setup before; I mainly used my LPD8 because of my neighbors. I had a great time! I enjoyed especially the preset kits with distortion & other back-chained effects. Let me try to explain: when you hit the crash cymbal, it's just a normal crash, but then you hit the kick afterwards, and the kick 'sucks the air' from the crash. Suddenly the crash sounds like if it was put underwater. The toms have similar effects on each other, and since all of them are driven through an overdrive processor each hit lasts long. The end result is that even by playing 8th notes the sound is rich because the different patterns result in highly different voice. So today I ordered the AD Retro extension for my basic Addictive Drums bundle. Thanks to http://www.google.com/shopping I found it on sale! So I ordered it and saved $100 and 40¢. I think it's a big deal. :) I have to wait for my license number until my purchase gets verified on Monday, but if it doesn't turn out to be scum I might buy the additional expansions kits as well. They are on sale too!

Latency

I decided to buy a low latency USB sound card: In Synthesia I only hit the notes 'Barely!' instead of  'Great!' or 'Perfect!' clearly because of the poor performance of the sound card and not because of mine. ;) The other problem was that because of the high latency I could only use my pad controller with my drum kit's built-in synthesizer which is not ideal.

I choose UGM-96 because of its small form-factor and because it doesn't require any external power. The low latency microphone input will be also handy if I ever organize a SingStar like party and the Cubase LE 4 and the free Virtual Guitar AMP it came with were also interesting add-ons: Cubase is the midi sequencer which I used ~10 years ago and some of my colleagues might have fun with the AMP if they ever bring their guitar over.

I also found out that there is a dedicated driver for my E-MU XMidi 1x1 Tab USB midi cabel. It has even lower latency compared to the default Windows driver. Using Cubase's soft synth also eliminated the low performance default midi synth of Windows. Using all of these Synthesia become much more easy to play! I also found out that Synthesia itself has a big latency so using my pad controller with Cubase and using the ASIO4ALL low latency driver with my built-in soundcard has good enough performance for real time drumming. Awesome! :)

ESI UGM96 and E-MU Xmidi 1x1 Tab

Some more hints: The driver for UGM-96 is pretty crappy; it can handle one program at a time only, and the device does not always work in all USB sockets. The free ASIO4ALL driver is much better. You can switch the output device from the laptop sound card to UGM-96 on-the fly without exiting the audio program and the device works in any USB socket without many plug & un-plug of the device and exit & restart of the audio application.

Synthesia hero

As I said I can't wait till next weekend, so this evening I played even more with my MIDI setup. While I was searching for a program to drive my MIDI gear over the weekend I came across Synthesia. It's a free practicing game similar to Guitar Hero except that you are using a real keyboard to play real songs. Its graphics are fairly good so the fun factor is high. The only problem is that I'm more into drumming and not so much into playing the piano. Anyway, this evening I downloaded it just to try it out. It claimed that it's possible to play & practice any MIDI song. If it's true I thought I could hack it so I can control it via a drum controller as they are not so different from a MIDI keyboard.

When I first launched Synthesia it welcomed me with a nicely polished interface. I selected a song from its collection. After that it offered me the tracks of the song to select for playing. There were nice grand piano icons next to both tracks. Then I got suspicious. Instead of starting the game I downloaded a random song which I knew it had drum tracks and opened it.

Instrument selection screen of Synthesia

As you can see it has native support for the drums. =) You can select any instruments you want to play and the ones you want to play along. The only thing left is to assign the same drums for the pads and the fun begins. :) It worked nicely with both the DD-65 and the LPD8. I'm telling you, it's way better than Guitar Hero. :)

Playing the drums in Synthesia