PG Music Home Forums PG Music Wishlists Band-in-a-Box Wishlist BIAB PRO!!

Expand BIAB to 10 instruments. Have super DUPER real Drums. Kick, Snare, hi hat,Toms, Cymbals on separate tracks. The ability to build a custom set from those individual tracks. Or just load a SUPER_RD in a style but with the track separation.

Yes thanx Dr. Gannon for acknowledging the wish list.

+1 "super DUPER real Drums"
I thought that sounded familiar - the DUPER must be the newer version.

http://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=254324

There are lots of compressed/lossless compression audio formats now that support multichannel.
In the usertrack forum there are multichannel drums but I think they are just for real band and power tracks.
Maybe if band in a box could load a multichannel audio drum file and use a multichannel file mixer you could leave it as one track but when you export it will split to separate wav files.

Any way that allows auditioning/selecting the separate drum parts in BIAB would suite me. Laying it out as simply 3 or 4 tracks listing the Kick, Snare, (Hi Hat and Cymbals}, and Toms.

Say I want to replace the Kick drum sound, or switch Snare W/O switching the other RD in the style. That would be super DUPER for me.

Pipeline I was not a forum user until 2/22/15 so I didn't catch this post from early in 2014, but elements of the post are almost identical. A retroactive +1 to solidrock

I don't know guys, I'll say the same thing I did at that time.

RD's are AUDIO recordings of a real drummer on a real drum kit in a real studio. You know all the shows and pics you've seen of recording studios or concerts? The drum set might have 10 mics all around it but no matter how good you are as an engineer you are still recording the whole drum kit. You can get some half decent isolation between mics but it's not going to be good enough to use one of those drums in a completely different track.

The snare is sitting right next to the hi hat for example. There's is no way you can get a perfectly isolated snare recording without some hi hat bleeding through. There will be bleed though from the kick drum to the snare to the overheads picking up the cymbals etc, etc. Yeah, the cymbals. How the heck to you get audio recordings of cymbals when the drummer is playing the whole kit?

We're not talking midi drums here and I think you guys still don't understand what the Real Drums are. You're confusing midi drums using a sampler like Jamstix or BFD with a real kit sitting in a real studio.

Just to be clear, this is what I'm talking about:

http://www.politusic.com/music/recording-tips/record-drums/3/

Somebody please 'splain to me how you get isolated individual parts of a drum kit recordings out of this?

Bob

Bob, very well put!

Every time I see a suggestion about the separation of RealDrums in to single tracks I chuckle to myself. That is MIDI drums! If PGMusic had the drummers play a MIDI control drum set then release them as super MIDI drum tracks it might satisfy the request. I know that I would buy them.

If one thinks that MIDI drums do not sound real go to a MIDI drum loop company like
http://groovemonkee.com/
and give a listen. They are real drummers playing on a MIDI drum set and they are not quantized. Actually BiaB MIDI drum tracks are very good also.

Thoughts from a guy who has been using MIDI single drum tracks for years.

It's even better than that Mario. The majority, not just a few but most of the Biab midi drums were done by real players on a midi kit. There's even a symbol in the style that tells you that but I can't remember what it is.

What these guys continually yell and scream about is already there. They just need to plug in a good quality drum module, play some of those and then they'll see.

Bob

The beginning of the article you reference describes the whole process for recording a drum kit. It explains exactly how to isolate each individual drum sound, starting with the Kick drum.
http://www.politusic.com/music/recording-tips/record-drums/

All those Microphones located all over the drum set, have a specific purpose. They are for sending an individual drum signal to the board. The proximity effect alone, allows this to happen. If you place a microphone 1 inch from the bottom of the snare drum, and another 1 inch from the top of the snare drum, you get 2 sounds almost 90 percent isolated from each other. The floor tom microphone is 99% isolated from the Hi-Hat microphone because they are usually 3 feet from each other. The proper GAIN settings on the microphones and the near field properties of drum mics increase the proximity effect. Sticking a Kick drum microphone on the Kick Drum skin, using a low pass filter setting that blocks the frequencies above 80HZ - 85hz allows for almost total KD isolation.

Its totally possible to isolate the Kick from the snare using the proper microphones, even in a live setting. Its even quite simple to separate the snare from the hi-hat. with the proper microphones, as they are creating sound in almost completely different frequency ranges. They do this isolation live and they do this in the studio.

Also, today a drummer can be playing a standard drum set miced, and be triggering samples of the same drum prerecorded in a studio. That trigger data can also be translated to MIDI data, and include both velocity, and release info. The resulting dual track output from the live mic and the sample can be blended at the sound board FOH or in the studio. These 2 signals are sent to different channels and can be recorded on different tracks. The Live drum microphone sound mixed with sampled/trigger sample are 2 full dynamic audio signals, and can easily produce individual drum sound for each drum, and cymbal.

The notion that you cannot separate individual drums into individual channels/tacks during a live or recording session is just not true. Studio engineers work hard to get this accomplished, so in later stages of production they can raise and lower, EQ, Pan, add different effects to the individual Drum parts.

Bob, you could easily get isolated drum parts by either:
1.Using a gate and setting the threshold so that it would only allow the sound pass through at a certain level, or
2. Muting any of the parts that bleed through the tracks.

For the second method you just need at the tracks and find the spots where the waveform has a higher peak.

I'm not requesting PG take their current RD and convert them to 4 tracks, I'm asking them to record/create RD with 1)Kick,2)Snare,3)Hi-hat,4)Overhead Mix as a 4 track Super RD. I've been in studio sessions where the engineer has 6 or more tracks of acoustic drums on separate tracks and there is no problem with bleed. The Kick can be leveled, EQed. Compressed, gated, filtered without affecting the other drums. Likewise with the other drum parts.

This is the flexibility I want to add to BIAB.

Why can't you do what you want with midi drums?"

Look Ma, No MIDI - but if you have a drum vsti it is an easy way to build your tracks exactly how you want them - it would be just good to have a real multi drum set choice - maybe with more pattern choices than just blue or green and 2 bar ending.

In the band in a box mixer there is room for another tab for a drum mixer - in power tracks/real band there is already a multitrack wav mixer for mixing a multi channel wav file - though you would need to be able to add fx.

MIDI drums for 1 is a giant step backwards from PG's real drums. Using MIDI drums for me is an impossibility. I have no MIDI sound sources that come any where near the professionalism of RDs.

PG's Real drums allow for 1,000's of kits to be called up by style with a minimum on 5 variations. I'm just requesting to improve on RD and when recording them split out the Kick,Snare,Hi-hat, and dedicate a track to X-Y overhead microphones.

if you could use multichannel wavs for user track drums that would help, you could generate up and it would split to multi tracks in real band & power tracks.

I found some 13 channel multi track drums that work in real band & power tracks.

http://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=286932&#Post286932

http://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=287017#Post287017

Should PG Music decide to provide multitrack drums in a future version of course I would use them but it is not a priority.

Most existing RealDrum tracks have single hits. You can copy and paste the hits to create a fill, put a cymbal crash where you need it, make a solo, etc. Whatever you create will perfectly match the rest of the RealDrum track because it's the same drums, played by the same drummer and recorded at the same time as the rest.

If you look at music construction sets or drum loops offered by companies like Drums On Demand or Big Fish Audio the stereo mix is standard and drum multitracks are premium add-ons for an additional cost.

Perhaps PG Music will offer the multitracks of a current RealDrum stereo mix or a future release to see how much demand there is.

apparently when they recorded the real drums, they just recorded the left & right channel out of the mixer direct to a stereo track so there were no multitrack recordings - not sure what they are doing these days when recording new real drums - I know other companies record them acoustically and with piezo sensors for a midi track also - just like guitars with midi pickups to give audio + midi ch11-16.
I had to convert a pearl kit over to mesh heads and piezo sensors using a roland brain for gigs where the acoustic drums where too loud.

Maybe I will be more specific, I will state I would like to see a BIAB PRO version with 8 or more instruments for fuller instrumentation. This would not be the standard BIAB, but a PRO version with enhancement. And more up sell $$$ for PG. The use of individual drums or rhythm instruments was one of my suggestions. If other companies offer MultiTrack drums as a premium add-on I think that just proves it is a useful product.[u][/u]

I'm all up to pay more for a pro version !!
just so long as it's not priced like Synfire USD $954 http://www.cognitone.com/shop/index.stml

There is a pro version request here http://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=327412

I think the main problem is they are flat out trying to keep up with the products they now have - band in a box, real band, power tracks and now mac band in a box let alone power tracks or real band for mac.
In the past band in a box and real band were released twice a year now with the mac version it's once at the end of the year - then they spend time fixing bugs - then move on to power tracks for April May release - then they start work on the mac version for mid year release - then fix the bugs in that - then move on to another end of year band in a box real band release.

So unless they hire more programmers there is not enough hours in the day.

Not me! I STRONGLY DISAGREE with the suggestion to add yet another variant to the BIAB packages. They are fairly confusing as it is. And I feel I am already paying plenty for the UltraPlusPak upgrade every year!