Session Drums (Multimic, Studio, Club) Differences?

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
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icedsushi
Posts: 1652
Joined: Wed Jan 12, 2005 8:36 pm

Session Drums (Multimic, Studio, Club) Differences?

Post by icedsushi » Sat Sep 14, 2013 12:42 am

Session Drums Multimic
Session Drums Studio
Session Drums Club

From the descriptions it doesn't seem like a big difference between them all. It doesn't tell what kind of drums are used or if all three packs are just the same kit recorded differently. Session Drums Multimic is the largest one, is that the main, most comprehensive versatile pack when it comes to using your own effects on each drum?

I see that Session Drums Club includes room ambience, well OK, but Session Drum Studio doesn't really say much that sets it apart from the other two.

These are pretty large packs so I'd like to just install the most useful one(s). I guess I could install them all & try them out, then uninstall anything redundant or that I wouldn't use. But it would be nice to hear from anyone who uses them & knows the difference.

TheNobleNemesis
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Location: Earth, Virgo Supercluster

Re: Session Drums (Multimic, Studio, Club) Differences?

Post by TheNobleNemesis » Sat Sep 14, 2013 2:41 am

Honestly, I think all of them are a bit overrated, In total you're not getting many drum kits, and it expends dozens of precious gigabytes which slows down your hard drive. Sure; Ableton meticulously sampled all of these kits, but because of the way they sampled these, it requires a lot of effort on volume control and EQing.

Honestly though, Session Drums Studio seems to be the one with the more useful things, in my opinion. That's just my opinion though. Try 'em out for yourself, see what fits your music.

icedsushi
Posts: 1652
Joined: Wed Jan 12, 2005 8:36 pm

Re: Session Drums (Multimic, Studio, Club) Differences?

Post by icedsushi » Sat Sep 14, 2013 3:22 am

Yeah I just bought some other packs too and I've been going through them. I just started with The Loop Loft HipHop right now and it doesn't seem like a whole lot there I can use. Most of the sounds I already have something similar or better. There's only 6 small kits of individual hits in there & from what I can see the samples are once under those artist kits and another time in the drum hits folder (the same sounds duplicated with slightly different name) but arranged by type of sound. Then the rest is the loops for chopping that seem just OK to me. It seems a lot easier to just make something from scratch in Maschine or Geist. The effects racks included are nice & kind of creative though, that's probably the best part.

I'll have to download one of the Session Drums & try it then, which is the best one to start with?

theophilus
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Re: Session Drums (Multimic, Studio, Club) Differences?

Post by theophilus » Mon Sep 16, 2013 1:58 pm

studio/club and multimic are fundamentally different things.

studio and club together were the 'stereo' kits from the original session drums. basically, you get each articulation (say, 'snare hit', 'snare rim', and 'sidestick') as a single (stereo?) channel. they are usually a bit processed but not heavily (these are not steven slate), so you can still stamp your own signature on it, and there are presets with more processing. there are about 17 different kits iirc. i don't know how they chose some for 'club' and some for 'studio', but they're just different kits, mostly different drums afaik, some processed a little differently. some of them are pretty good. i found the hihat control to be pretty decent when i had an e-kit, better than a couple other (older) drum libraries i had, in general they are pretty playable.

multimic are a little different... for each piece, you get multiple mic channels. for instance, for snare, i think you get snare top, snare bottom, room, and overheads. this is for each articulation, so you get this for snare hit, snare rim, snare sidestick. these are more or less completely unprocessed, but if you want the most control over how the drum set is mixed, these are the ones you want. i think these are a lot of the same kit pieces as above, but just sampled differently and less processed.

you can mix and match kit pieces in either mode, with other similar kits, which is nice.

when looking at the wav files, don't be deceived - there may only be one file for 'snare' for instance, but it contains many samples in it, and all the different velocities simply point at a different part of the file. usually there are 30-40 velocity layers per hit.

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