Sensory Percussion 2’s internal sound engine will always be better for hi-hats than sending data over MIDI. There may be some optimizations included in a future version of this template, but there is a lot going on with Sensory Percussion 2’s sound engine that can’t be translated over MIDI to another sound engine. That being said, we are looking at ways we can improve here.
Cymbal choke messages over MIDI will be coming in a future update. For now, choke only works with the internal sound engine.
There will be more documentation/tutorials around the workflow in the future. Currently we have:
We don’t have control over their sound engine. Ours is very responsive and follows open and closed actions in ways that are much more delicate and precise than can be expressed over MIDI.
To be more specific, the issue is really around how the sound engine decides whether or not the beginning of a hit or chick is open or closed. And how it decides how to handle open/closed changes after the hit occurs.
We see a few ways we can improve how we translate this to MIDI that we can explore, but our priority has been developing our own sound engine.
I see. For my use case this doesn’t sound too promising to be honest. I want great, realistic hi hat sounds and articulations that sound great live. I have that now with my current setup. I currently play electronic drums in a small church setting. I run everything through midi and superior drummer 3. The rubber cymbals are the problem for me though. I was hoping for a way to replace them with low volume cymbals and still trigger sd3. To be fair, I haven’t heard the hi hat sounds in the sp2 software yet, but sd3 is widely known as the best out there. It’s going to be hard to beat the quality of their samples.
As much as I LOVE SD3 hi hat sounds, it bums me out that they still haven’t integrated aftertouch dampening or choking from Roland Digital hats. I find myself playing the hi hats from the brain so I get that nuance. I’m excited to see what SunHouse’s hats bring that neither of those options can offer. To be fair my use cases are either home studio or mobile live hybrid so I’m constantly changing it up
@scoTTTimo, yep, absolutely. And just to be clear, I think you could have a great experience sending MIDI over the hi-hat from Sensory to SD3, so I don’t want to discourage you from doing that – test it out and see how you feel and how it sounds! I had a great time the other day jamming with this template triggering SD3 sounds (including the hi-hats, of course). I just like Sensory’s hi-hat instruments better, and we wanted to add that caveat about our sound engine being specifically designed for our system.
But, to answer your question about loading your own samples: you can look at the presets to see how that’s all structured and recreate it. Nothing is walled off inside the Sensory Percussion 2 software, so you can literally navigate all the way down to the individual sampler level to investigate or edit stuff.
While nothing is walled off, we do have internal tools that help us create these kinds of large multi-sampled instrument mappings. Without going into too many details, I will say, without these tools (and honestly with these tools, too, to some degree) it’s quite a tedious process making a highly detailed multi-sampled instrument. For example, a detailed hi-hat multi-sampled instrument in Sensory Percussion can sometimes contain over 1000 samples.
We’re still doing research and testing (we always are) and we may be able to get that number down while still maintaining an extremely high level of realism. But all of that is to say, if you are interested in creating multi-sampled instruments in Sensory Percussion, a hi-hat is a difficult instrument to start with. Again, not to discourage you, just want you to have as much information as possible.
So I did try triggering SD3 using your latest mapping. Gotta say, the cymbal sensors work pretty flawlessly! However the hi hat was pretty bad. SD3 just doesn’t recognize the open/close correctly. So I wasn’t getting anything even close to realistic results with that.
I must say though, I’m VERY impressed with the latency results I’m getting. I’m using a MacBook Pro M2, the Evans portal as my sp2 input, IAC driver as output to SD3, then a MOTU mk3 hybrid ultralite as my SD3 output. I measured the latency at 6-7ms overall. That’s as good or maybe even better than my td27→sd3→motu setup before. I honestly can’t believe these numbers.
Anyway I did just discover the downloadable cymbal packs last night, so I will try those out and see if I can get a hi hat sound that sounds like it could fit with the kit I use in SD3, but I may end up going down the meticulous route of extracting my hi hats from SD3 using SDSE or something, then importing them into sp2…if I can actually make that work. I would MUCH rather just have accurate midi triggering with the hi hats though.
And then yes, definitely compare the presets in the Cymbal and PGB expansion packs with the results you are getting by sending MIDI to SD3.
There will most likely be a difference, but yesterday I didn’t feel the open/close accuracy was bad with an SP2->MIDI->SD3 setup - just not as good as the hi-hats in the Sunhouse library.
The Hi-Hat Pedal Controller is an important ingredient in the sound engine that powers the multi-sampled hi-hat instruments in the Sunhouse Library, but it has more going on than just sending pedal tension values, and it is not ideal for sending MIDI.
The pedal tension value in the template is sent with a special Hi-Hat assignment type called pedal, and that is mapped to CC1, which SD3 conveniently accepts automatically as pedal tension.
@stevenz Tightening the nut definitely helped. It’s much better in SD3 now, but still not amazing. I would agree with you that it’s “not bad”. It’s not perfect in SP2 either though. I can get it to mistrigger pretty easily. I’m used to the Roland digital hi hats though
So now I’m trying to figure out how to manipulate the SP2 hi hat sounds to my liking. They sound very up close and personal to me. Were they recorded only with close mics, or were there overhead mics used that I can “turn up” in the mix somehow?
Have you tried playing around with either a room modeler or triggering ONLY the tails from SD3 to give a further away sound on the SP2 sounds? I haven’t tried that on cymbals cause mine are still on the UPS truck but I’ve done that with their drum sounds to a lot of success.
I could go into detail of how to only sample the “room” sound on SD3 but there’s several youtube tutorials already. Lemme find one and link it here
I can’t find the exact video I used for my template, but within Superior Drummer you can either load up a killer room, or use this video to create a room mic channel with effects. After that, you adjust the ADSR so that SD3 is only triggering the tails of its samples, you want zero transient. Then you can combine that with the close mic audio from another source to create a “fake” room noise
@drewbysnacks I hadn’t thought of that. Why are you doing that instead of triggering full drum sounds in sd3?
@stevenz would it be possible to use a different type of sensor to handle the cc values for opening and closing the hi hats, like maybe a Hall effect sensor? Or maybe a plunger somehow? Could sp2 recognize and use a sensor like that?
Glad to hear it’s working somewhat better now after tightening the bottom thumbscrew. Here’s a recent post by @tenoch going further into some setup best practices that may help further: Troubleshooting Cymbal & Hi-hat issues
To answer your other question about pushing the Sunhouse multi-sampled hi-hats back in the mix:
They were recorded with a close mic. You can give them some more depth by lowering their volume and adding a bit of reverb. You could experiment with settings like this:
The reason I first learned how to do this has to do with the Roland Digital Hats. They have the static sensing for nuanced “aftertouch”, which in Roland modules allows natural sounding chokes and mutes…but SD3 doesn’t have any mute tails on their hi hats for some reason. I found that I appreciated the playability of the Roland hat engine more than SD3 for live playing or direct recording (recording with editing is different)….but the caveat was the different recording situations sometimes clashed. Feeding everything through a room modeler OR only triggering the room tails solved this issue for me.
Is it perfect? No. Does it work well enough for live and even social media level recording? VERY WELL
