Multiple drum kit playback sample templates.
J
Jesse Rolland
It would be awesome if you had more drum kit template playback sample options. Maybe like 5-10 kits. I would think this would be easy to add. This would be very helpful depending on what kind of music you play. If I’m playing on mor of a jazz kit it would be great to be playing along with a similar kit in terms of overall sound of the kit. The attack and release of sounds is really important. So having a variety of kits to play along with would be very beneficial. Some kit style options I will suggest: rock, jazz, funk, hip hop, metal, house, DNB, EDM, etc. Honestly you could really experiment and have like 20-30 different drum kits based on templates offered in other softwares apps and especially electronic drum kits. Depending on the style of beats you are creating it’s just ideal to hear playback of those beats from the style of kit that is associated with it. I’m big into Drum N’ Bass so I’d love to have playback of a much tighter electronic sounding kit. Same with house music. A funk kit for funk beats. Bright open kit for jazz…etc. you get the point.
Derek Lee
Hi Jesse Rolland and thanks for this feature request! The topic of having different drumset samples has come up informally in discussions with other users, and I'm glad you took the time to create this feature request. Thanks! 🙇🏻♂️
It's great to know which kits you are most interested in and how the style of music would be impacted by having a kit whose sound is in alignment with the music. 👍🏻with
Out of curiosity, how would you use the different drumkits in the app? Would it only be for practicing along to the app when it's playing back your beats? I also noticed you voted for the export audio feature. Would you use different drumkits depending on the audio you're creating? How would you use the exported audio?
Would you want to select a specific drumkit for a specific beat and have the beat remember which drumkit was selected? Or would you choose one drumkit and expect it would be used for playback regardless of which beat you chose?
Regarding your comment: "I would think this would be easy to add," I just want to clarify that this is actually quite a complex and time-consuming feature to implement. Dealing with sets of audio samples is complicated, particularly getting a fully equipped kit with all the necessary samples. Some (but not all) of the many challenges with this are ensuring samples can be licensed for use in a for-sale product, ensuring samples are professional/high quality, ensuring a sample exists in the desired style or timbre for every drum and/or cymbal (and if not, how to patch samples together so they sound consistent), normalizing sample volume across all samples (particularly if they aren't coming from the same recording), potentially needing different samples for different volume levels for each instrument as well as different articulations for each instrument (ghost, unaccented, accented, rim shot, etc), as well as managing the download of all sample data to the device as these files can be quite large.
Not to mention design decisions in the app, some of which I eluded to above, and include but are not limited to things such as how to choose which drumset you want to hear, whether a drumset is associated with a specific beat or not, where to put the settings to change the current drumset and ensure it is intuitive to the user to change and doesn't increase the complexity or decrease the intuitiveness of the app, whether the user has to choose a complete kit or they can switch out individual instruments to create their own kit, whether drums and cymbals come together as a "package" kit or whether different drum and cymbal sample sets can be mixed, etc.
The first step is collecting as much feedback as possible and gaining an understanding of how you want to use it and how other people want to use it, choosing a place to start iterating from, release an update taking a step in that direction, gathering more feedback, iterate again, release again, and repeat.