The electronic drum-kit I used on Only Way Out is now ready and more useful. For years I’ve worked on this project in VCV Rack but it has some disadvantages. It takes a lot of CPU which gets problematic if I need the kit with bigger music projects that already require a lot of CPU in DAW. Also partly related to this issue it has generated many glitchy artifacts on playback making the kit a bit unreliable. I solved these issues by making the kit into sampled version. Now I can use it the same way I already use my acoustic sample-based drum-kits.
Thankfully I learnt quickly how to use Ardour’s stem export with ranges. Eventually I had to deal with 384 sample files. My vision has been to make an electronic drum-kit that is actually dynamic (unlike many one-hit samples found on the internet). My kit has 16 velocity layers for every instrument and the kit is also made with General MIDI compatibility in mind. So, most of the 24 instruments align with GM mapping format and I can easily add more percussive instruments too.
Dynamically programmed filters and other parameters already worked in VCV project but now they are canonised into fixed files and a Hydrogen drum-kit. It’s been a lot of work but now my long term goal of self-made synthesised electronic drum-kit is now ready to use without any hasslehoff or whatsoever. In Daemon I aimed to synthesise every sound by myself but with drum sounds I had to rely on samples I had found elsewhere. With layered dynamics this meant many compromises.
Aeroll 