Slate Drums,any one noticed?

Von_Steyr · Oct 14, 2016

Sylenth.Will.Fall said: ↑

M8, every time you recommend something, I have to go out and buy a new hard drive :P
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You`re welcome my friend,haha

Sylenth.Will.Fall · Oct 14, 2016

Von_Steyr said: ↑

You`re welcome my friend,haha
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Pssssst!

If you ask @Pinkman really nicely, he might give BA a shiny new pair of glasses. Just imagine @Beth's Face, if next time she turns up she sees her glasses everywhere

vector99 · Oct 14, 2016

Von_Steyr said: ↑

Any one noticed how much problems Slate has with the Tom drums?
When i say problems i mean,tom drums in any Slate drums version platinum,SSD4,blackbird studio drums add on...they just sound so lifeless,undynamic,like card boxes.
He uses the best drums,mics,studio gear,rooms...yet,still the Achilles` heel of his products.
Any one shares the same opinion?
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i completely agree with you, i own the product, andn the toms sounds lifeless, they sound very bad , i dont know why

zeppo20 · Oct 14, 2016

I use Slate + EZ drummer 2 for toms and cymbals. EZ drummer 2 toms are really god.

Vaijj · Oct 14, 2016

Derkaiz said: ↑

I don't know if it's because of the kontakt engine, if I'm biased or smth else but here I can clearly say the Kick 10/Snare 12 I've been using a lot lacks a lot of power in SSD4 compared to what it was on 3.5 platinum on kontakt, maybe I'm biased because I'm used to the old ones but they sounded a lot more relevant to me.

That being said, even if I used them a lot, They're not my favourites now, I think GGD Halpern Drums and Toontrack Progressive EZX/Foundry really killed the game with how realistic & dry they are to begin with while being so well captured it's a pleasure to make them as big as you would with slate ones, and I've never used SSD alone, explanations below :

Slate in my area of work which is metal music, mixing etc... is a rather niche product you use when you want your drums to sound like on most of joey sturgis early production work & if you you're not into this kind of obviously overproduced drums albums like This is Exile by whitechapel,, Ignorance Never Dies by Your Demise, Grow by Chon & The last two Suicide Silence albums are - while I'm not sure whether SSD was actually used or not on these records - a good example of drum tones you can achieve with only the SSD shells being used either layered on the real natural drum sound or just replacing the shells.

Slate by their own are really meant to be sounding huge clean & loud, they excel at that but that makes them kinda insipid like it doesn't sing at all, what they're really good at is adding their own punch to more natural sounding drums.
The way you can do that in the natural realm is by combining SSD with something like Toontrack Ny Avatar Progressive or Metal Foundry, even GGD, anything that is unprocessed enough to sound like real drums
In your main drum machine you still load shells & keep them in room/oh mics, but then you mute the direct mics, or just lower them, then you load SSD on top of it & load just shells that sounds like they complement well the original drums.
Do a nice routing setup so you have both slate & main OH/Rooms on separate tracks on the DAW, separate out for Slate Shells/Main Shells if layering too, so you can still clean the natural shells a little - but don't do too much because phase and stuff -
In the case of layering while you're done with mixing the raw shells I'd advice sending them together with the slate ones to a dedicated bus for each different shell & then mixing them together from that point, not that this is a must, but it does a nice glue between the two layers of shells

About mixing slate samples themselves :
Kicks & Toms doesn't handle compression really well so you have to soft clip them or just find the right balance, only exception if you want a really really hard/peaky attack on them.

They're not especially friendly to eq's either, some kicks & toms (kick 10 especially) don't handle well at all being thin eq-ed in the early high register, makes them crispy as fuck, you should go reverse thinking here & boost a reasonable large bell in the early high-mid register & in the low/subs register so the hi-spike is smoothed out, it's absurd but works wonders with 'em.

They sound distorted the more you clean 'em, because they are in a smooth way, don't do any cleaning on them that is not needed in the context of hearing the drums in the full mix with the other instruments having their mix done as well, at this point of the mix, on the other hand, they handle very well being scooped where the rest of the mix needs air.

Kicks have lotta low-end, but it's still a lot less than the presence they have, don't be affraid to boost low-end in consequence, hi-passing them is up to taste and can be done very late in the mixing process without breaking the mix too much

Toms can lack a lot of low end but they also have that resonant bass thing that prevents you to go nuts with their low-end, which is why you should go in SSD & set their sustain lower manually

Snares sound really fine by themselves most of the time, would process these snares only when I'm that far in the mixing that the snare got overwhelmed by the bass & guitar (& synths if synths), in the context of layering I'd often not mix the slate snare, just balance it right compared to the raw one then eq the lot

The Rooms and OH tracks can be put very loud in the context of a drum replacement use as they don't make the whole mix too messy or it gotta be really clear that they're too loud

If you're forced to used slate on it's own, you should expect the final mix to sound plastic but really loudness war friendly like it can be both dynamic & loud at the same time "like the pros"
If you don't want to end up insane, don't obsess on how to get these drums to feel different than what they're to begin with, they're really the very drum samples you can't really make sound like it's not them, even worse than Drumkit from hell on that, can't hide it, so building your mix arround, using these specifics at your advantage in your mixing process is all you're left with, that's what they're good at, they sound plastic but used well, if you're not affraid to get cocky with your whole mix, they'll make it sound huge, that's what the hype about them is all about, not the sound of the samples themselves - well t'was true for 3.5, not sure about SSD4 doing it, the hype arround that kind of drum sounds in metal died about the same time it was released -

Sorry if it was long and looks pretentious, I bought Steven Slate 3.5 six years ago and worked a lot with it, had a lot of trouble, I really subscribed to this forum just so I could prevent people wasting as much time with it as I did, It will not sound natural, it's a very good "fake" sound which is very friendly to quick mixing and over the top sounding results and works wonder to enhance natural sounds, on it's own it's plastic, SSD is the Alesis D4 of the digital realm in a sense except it sounds way more realistic than an old D4.
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Such a good post.. informative and for the first time in a very long time i got new ideas on how to approach and look at my drums and sound in diffrent way. And as many other things Von_Steyr has to say i agree. Ocean is a really good sounding lib if you need that "live" sound.

I may be wrong but i havnt seen any post about trading settings with eatch other when it comes to drums like kontakt, Superior etc.. if will gladly share full cubase templates for my drums or internal variations in SD2 etc if someone would care to share theirs..

Anyway.. good post..

Hug each other peeps

Vaijj

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Slate Drums,any one noticed?

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Slate Drums,any one noticed?

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