Battle of the DAWs

#21

I see a new “Organic Breaks” sample pack is coming out soon :grin:

#22

And ghost notes are your friend :slight_smile:

In terms of complex drum beats, any decent drum machine these days offer simple midi drag & drop exports. It’s easier to go from there IMO. I don’t work with “static” (understand: recorded/rom-type sample) drum samples/loops, as much as possible, because you can find a few great ones but then it limits you, unless the drum banks you use have many variations.

#23

Oh, man. You know what sucks? I basically tried this and it was an absolute flop. It’s still live right now, but it’s the only pack that I’ve actually gotten written complaints about and all sorts of shit. It’s really my fault, too.

The setup was basically just me drumming on my Alesis Forge (I wish I had an acoustic kit still!), with some kind of rig I was live-jamming with when I had people over. Let’s just say that the live-jamming vibe did not translate well to sample-pack, and I regret ever making it. Admittedly, it was way too rushed.

I really do want a second shot at this one. With your and @morphic’s suggestions, I think I can work up the courage to give this one another shot. You guys will obviously get free codes (I think I still have some to burn in the chamber), and likely anyone else who wants them.

#24

That’s funny, what were the complaints? “Dude, this is way too funky for my techno?” or something like that? ^^

Btw, I really like that you regularly put out new sample packs and stick to it. I started selling presets and sample packs years ago but stopped it since there were some irregularities on the site (it was years ago but something like “Hey, I see more sales in my sale list than in my payout list” - “Ah, let me check - oh, btw. I just found another sale of your pack XYZ somewhere in the data…”). Sadly, I never got back to it so far but I plan to put some of the old stuff and unreleased packs up at some point…

#25

lol! I think it was something along the lines of, “Can I get this pack without all the reverb? It sounds distorted” (weirdly, I think it was just a bunch of Mixbox compressors chained together and nothing else, so if they complained more about the dynamics I’d be able to say, “yes, I fucked up on that one”). Although in their defense, the hits themselves are a bit cheesy, but it’s hard to control it at the source.

Drums are really hard due to their legality, IMO. Even plugins like Punchbox have explicit terms stated where you can’t even use one of their clicks or pops in a pack, which… has led to me removing a pack I already put up after realizing that little detail. Making hits in Vital or something is about all I’ve been able to do otherwise because everyone has such scary terms laid out for their drum synths. “We will find you and kill you if you use these in a sample pack” is basically all I see when I read them. :fearful:

The only way around the fake breakbeats pack that I can really think of is resampling, layering and manipulating the Forge kit into one shots, drumming actual MIDI and triggering the amalgameted hits again with said MIDI pattern. Because, even if I’m using samples from a kit I actually own, they’d at least be highly manipulated and thus probably not worth suing over. Maybe.

If you need any tips on speeding up the process, I feel like I have the whole ‘packaging’ and ‘deploying’ parts on speed dial for the most part, which may be of some use if we do things in semi-similar ways. Which site were you using in the past, by the way? Sounds potentially shady, but I haven’t had any problems with BC or Itch so far.

(and if BC crumbles, hopefully Itch and Gumroad will stay true to the ‘indie’ scene!)

#26

Drums are really hard due to their legality, IMO. Even plugins like Punchbox have explicit terms stated where you can’t even use one of their clicks or pops in a pack, which… has led to me removing a pack I already put up after realizing that little detail. Making hits in Vital or something is about all I’ve been able to do otherwise because everyone has such scary terms laid out for their drum synths. “We will find you and kill you if you use these in a sample pack” is basically all I see when I read them

Serious? I would expect that from a subscription-based plugin perhaps, but not from one you have purchased outright. When you buy a piece of hardware you own it, and you can sell whatever samples you make from that hardware. It should be no different with software. I guess these developers are saying that anything you make from their plugin is their IP…

Realistically though, how the fuck would they be able to tell a click or pop from their synth vs another in court.

#27

Yeah, honestly I think most of this stuff is directed at American customers in order to discourage reuse, because over here pretty much every audio sample that a company (or anybody for that matter, IIRC) has created has their copyright attached to it. There’s a black-and-white distinction between anything created with physical modelling / math / what-have-you versus an actual audio recording, from what I currently understand (and could be very well wrong about, too).

In hindsight, simply making presets for Punchbox, demoing them on YT and then selling them would be perfectly fine though, but you live and learn! It’s also crazy to consider the idea that anybody could just start churning out sample packs based on stock presets of any VST since they can’t typically be copyrighted, and the audio recording would technically belong to the person recording it instead, although I feel like that would be a really sinister thing to do all around. Anyone who does shit like this, IMO, is compromising the integrity of their output and possibly ruining the trust of their consumers, but some people feel OK doing this.

Since almost nobody is ever sued over sample packs though, I guess it probably still just falls under personal ethics more than anything else. Thankfully I feel like most people would do what feels genuinely right to them in scenarios like this (people still ask me all the time if my samples are ‘royalty-free’, as if some goblin is going to come after them long after they’ve paid for a pack and used it extensively), but I really admire how respectful most people are when it comes to things like this. Most artists really respect other artists’ work.

Speaking of IP, UVI also has this laid out in their terms (that you can’t use Falcon for sample pack material, and only music) although they might’ve changed it after the NI acquisition, depending on what they decided to do with it. Again, it just seems like a way to discourage reuse more than anything else, but it’ll work on most.

#28

I mostly use wavetable synths with my own wavetables for drum hits and think that should be fine, but I didn’t really look into the license terms. Imho most synths are ok to synthesize some electronic drums and percussion, Vital should be a nice choice (I often use other wavetablers like Icarus and Serum), but a convincing organic breakbeat might be harder. Maybe try to record a few snares and kicks somewhere and go from there, especially importing those into a wavetable synth. Or just make a wavetable that starts with a noisy part for the drum transient on one side of the wavetable. I made quite a few drum hit presets like that including some factory presets. I guess if you want to collab on a sample pack I could send you some hits - after I check the license terms of the synths I used lol…

#29

Hilariously enough, I have a huge stockpile of hits (and loops I’ve constructed from them) that I feel like I can’t release because they’re just rips from things like UVI’s Drum Designer, Rytmik or other things I’ve found along the way (also sliced up with things like Renoise, Falcon’s slice sequencer and more). With that said, collaborating on a pack sounds like a lot of fun regardless, so I would be into pretty much anything in that territory. Technically if it’s a free release, who could sue us? :smiley:

I had a few other ‘gray area’ ideas that would be a hell of a lot of fun but I don’t know how to execute them tactfully and without being too obvious about the source material, but there are probably ways to do that!

For starters, I might try to rip every hit from the kit (a painstaking process that I’m dreading, but it’ll be worth it) and see how many there are after delving into the kit customization settings and finding everything. Weirdly I think it’s also a synthesizer of sorts (even if they’re just multisamples), so there are a hell of a lot of sounds on there. GULP

#30

So I checked some license terms today and it really varies. Some allow absolutely nothing related to using the synth for anything related to samples and others are pretty open if you use your own wavetables (Serum). Guess that means any future drum sample packs from me using wavetables will be based on Serum then…

Thanks for getting into this topic, I would not have expected that some license terms of general synths are so strict that nothing related to sampling is allowed even if you use your own wavetables…

Also, forgot to respond to you first comment here since I was interrupted earlier today and then asnwered to the second post ^^ Thanks for the info offer, definitely happy about any insight you can throw my way… Gonna write you a pn about the site…

#31

I’m just here to shit on FL Studio, sorry fanboys. Everything about it is horrid :rofl:. It’s like when you get a boner and you want to make it stop, you open that horrendous gaping piece of shit just like thinking about your grandmothers 10 pound bags of sand hitting her knee caps.

Bigwig looks super inviting to me but I’m moving onto Studio One. Love me some Sonar, Logic, and Pro Tools (for certain aspects). Reason was cool way back in the day. Mostly Skream or whatever that distortion plug in was lol.

#32

FL isn’t really all that bad if you’re doing your design stuff elsewhere and need a cheap timeline / arranger. But I’ve still got some gripes myself.

I still hate having to use mathematical formulas just to get macros to work correctly (I guess FL users don’t know that macros don’t all have to operate from 0-127 all in unison, lol), I hate having to ass-backwardly drag and drop presets from elsewhere into the patcher because certain VSTs literally don’t load otherwise, I hate the fact that even certain parts of FL studio are incompatible with others (like the granulizer and patcher) because their codebase is apparently just that fucked up, and the UI is god awful all around.

Also, Patcher really wants to be modular except it’s just fucking not. I wish their stupid controllers would just converge to audio CV like everything else so I could feel like I’m actually piping shit into cool places (as well as using it interchangeably with VM / Cardinal’s CV’s). Or, at the very least, offer some damn conversion tools or a scripting API for the patcher so I can do it myself. You were so close, patcher. So close.

I’ve given up my life on the high seas, so FL is really the only thing I have with a timeline. Thankfully you can bounce and catch your temp files in the Bitwig demo (shhhh, if you ruin my secret I will put a curse on you), but I’m still working on a good method of composing with my more centralized tool set.

#33

Its not the daw its the musician behind the daw.