BB2 - Standard, Piano and Bass Drumkit

User Generated Content Drum Sets
1

So I couldn’t leave well enough alone, and I decided to see how far I can push the BB2 and see whether or not the BB2 can be a quick and dirty accompaniment beyond just a drum kit. This is the only thing, in my opinion, that I think really makes the BB2 stand out against the BB1.

And that effort gave birth to a 430MB piano, drum and bass guitar kit.

The kit has 2 octaves of a bass guitar, and 4 octaves of piano, plus the standard drums. I have attached a kit using a free piano, soundpaint’s free vintage piano with some eq/reverb, but I also have a kit with Garritan GFX samples, which is pay-ware, so I can’t share it here. I only mention because the GFX samples sound just amazing and if you own a GFX, the samples from it are the ones to use. If you want it, I can share my GFX kit with anyone owns the GFX. Unfortunately, 430MB wasn’t enough to really get a lot of samples per note and to prevent, what I guess is compression or something that was going on, I had to have 5 velocity layers per note to get a natural sound. They are full 24 bit, stereo, so 5 samples per note was sizable.

I was concerned that the BB2 would throw up trying to play all the things together, or that it would sound just horrible, however, it actually came out pretty good with some fenagling. For those with the BB1 wondering if you should upgrade, this could be reason enough for you to do so. The extra breadth of the drum kits opens some interesting options.

Anyways, I’m not saying this is the answer to any real problem, but I feel like this is kit can be really useful for just having something simple on standby that I can play guitar and sing to. Anything serious still needs my daw to come along, but if you’re hanging with friends, then this will do in a pinch without embarrassing you.

For those without a BB2, here is a direct recording from the BB2 playing Sign of the Times which I thought showcased the multi-kit pretty well:

And here is the BB2 song with autopilot:

Sign of the Times - Harry Styles.sng (44.1 KB)

Piano by itself:

Standard drums, with piano and bass:

EDIT: The full kit had a shaker in A#3, removed the shaker and put the proper piano note there.

Let me know if the links give any trouble.

6 Likes
2

Very, very nice! Piano sounds great.

1 Like
3

@oktronic

That was good, noob here. So how did you do this?

1 Like
4

Thanks!

The problems I had was when using a single velocity layer per note. I thought I would create more samples for a single layer, or even for multiple layers, but I found that the samples were being compressed when the velocity was reduced. I thought they’d just use a lower volume without effecting the sound, but I could hear the quality get reduced, especially with the GFX which has a beautiful wide stereo sound. It would start to get nasally and would lose it brightness. So, I tried multiple layers and that seem to minimize on the impact. 5 layers was the magic number for the piano, though 3 seemed OK for the bass, to give an acceptable dynamic sound across all velocities.

It’s certainly not recording quality, but I hooked my midi piano up to it, and it actually reasonable.

I use reaper to create samples. For the midi-based ones, I have a project that has all the notes and velocities, and I can render all of them at the same time into a parent channel with a VST. I have regions setup for loud, medium, and soft, with multiple midi per region for variation. Then you just have to import into BBMO one note at a time and adjust the dynamic velocities. I used 100, 80, 60, 40, for the piano. Its time consuming and there was a lot of trial and error.

1 Like
5

That’s very good, I shall have to learn to do this. Well done and thanks for sharing.

1 Like