Well, it looks like my next CD will be done entirely by myself since my band is sort of coming apart at the seams (after 12 years!)

I have EZ Drummer and of course Session Drummer, but I'm looking for something with even better sounds. Suggestions?

What about great bass samples? Guitar?

Can anyone recommend?

thank you.

Hey blue, whats wrong with EZ, i think it sounds great. have you tried the expansion pack DFH, there awsome. Anyway have you ever thought of doing online colaborations if you cant play everything, real instruments are way better than any sampled stuff.

CJ

Great BASS samples:
EastWest Quantum Leap Hardcore Bass XP - http://www.soundsonline.com/Quantum-Leap-Hardcore-Bass-XP-pr-EW-156.html

Junski

Thanks, Junski.

CJay - Of course real instruments sound better. I used to have a band and we released 3 CD's but the bassist just quit and now, the new group just isn't good enough. It's very painful and at this point, I just want to do everything myself!! Not that it will sound great, either, but I have to do it for me.

EZ sounds ok... It's just not real enough sounding for me.

BFD is good for realistic-sounding drums. I've played around with Steinberg's virtual bassist a bit and it seemed pretty cool-- the controls were more useful and versatile than similar products I've seen.

I have never in my life heard a really convincing distorted electric guitar sound come from anything other than a real guitar. I've heard some pretty good results with clean-tone from Musiclab software, but unless you exclusively stick to big, open, sustained power chords, sampled electric guitar just seems to sound flat, 2-dimensional, fake.

Cheers.

What's BFD?

BFD:

http://www.fxpansion.com/index.php?page=1

according to fxpansion, BFD is big, and it's drums, and they haven't decided what the "F" stands for. It is a huge, resource-consuming multilayered sample library.

The idea with BFD is something like this: When you trigger a snare hit, BFD plays back the sample from the snare mic(s) PLUS samples of snare recorded through the OH mics, PLUS samples of snare bleed through all the other kit-piece mics, PLUS samples of snare recorded through the room mics, etc and ouputs all these virtual mics to different tracks that you can send to your host (eg Sonar) or mix internally through BFD. So you end up with the actual tracks as though you had recorded a real drum kit in the room, and you can control the amount of room sound, and the distance of the mics from the kit-pieces, and so on and so on. Anytime you trigger a drum in BFD, it's actually playing back like 20 different velocity-layered samples. For every drum.

BFD takes up a lot more system resources than a typical drum machine, but it provides a very realistic simulation of working with real tracks of a real drum kit recorded in a real room. And it's definitely big-- it comes on two DVDs and takes up like 10 gigs of HD space (you'll want a fast, dedicated hard drive).

Cheers.

I know what the F stands for



aww that's not what I was gonna say

I was gonna say:

flamadiddle

puh-ching!

thank you

something a little less resource intensive than BFD but that I think still sounds pretty darn realistic is Reason Drum Kits

and I agree with Yep - I haven't found much in the way of realistic guitar sounds. Reason has a couple of sampled acoustic guitars that sound pretty good if you're doing finger picking type stuff, and if you really want to finagle it (another find F word, Larry) you can get some good chords. There's a couple of others that are the same way, but you want to, for example, lay down a lead guitar riff, I haven't found anything worth a darn... I just think its too hard to get the nuances of a live performer from MIDI data... or maybe I'm just too lazy....

ORIGINAL: serauk
... I just think its too hard to get the nuances of a live performer from MIDI data...

i think that's it-- the nature of distorted electric guitar is that the amplification process brings up EVERY little squeak, adjustment, and pressure change in the player's fingers and makes those parts of the sound almost louder than the actual notes. The instrument is so expressive and uncontrolled, and the nonperiodic performance gestures and incidental noise and nonlinear distortion are such a big part of the sound, almost like the human voice.

But who knows, someone may find a good way to model all that, or may have already found it and I just don't know about it...

Cheers.