Drum physical modeling
Posted: Sun Feb 12, 2012 6:50 pm
I've long been looking for a way to achieve some of the drum and percussion sounds that I hear in my head. To be a bit more specific, I'm very interested in tuned and semi-tuned drum and percussion sounds -- stuff like cymbals, gongs, tamtams, tympani, xylophone, wood blocks, marimba, roto-toms, metal plates, drinking glasses, clock chimes, etc. I've gone through a lot of conventional drum machines and drum plug-ins, and what I've found is that most of them are a lot stronger at sequencing than they are at shaping and controlling the actual drum sounds. Plus, I don't have much interest in samples of drums. I wan to be able to get at the basic parameters of the sound generation and play with and modulate them.
So I've recently run across two drum physical modeling plug-ins that look intriguing: Drumaxx from Image Line, and Chromaphone from Applied Acoustic Systems. I've listened to the online demos for Chromaphone and they really blew me away. There's one little problem: there isn't a version available to run on PowerPC Macs. So my justified-but-ancient G4 doesn't make the cut. I have an HP laptop running Vista and that's a supported configuration, but I really don't want to get into using the laptop as a sound generator; at the very least I'd have to get a plug-in shell to run the plug-in on it, and then figure out how to sync it to the Mac. There's no room in my setup to physically put the laptop while it's playing. And the HP isn't terribly happy when the CPU is pushed hard; it tends to overheat.
Drumaxx is available as an OSX universal binary, so it will run on my G4. But the modeling capability doesn't appear to be as extensive as Chromaphone, and the online demos are interesting but they don't blow me away like the Chromaphone demos do. So, has anyone used either one of these? Do you think Chromaphone is going to be worth the extra trouble to incorporate it into my setup, or will Drumaxx cover the territory?
So I've recently run across two drum physical modeling plug-ins that look intriguing: Drumaxx from Image Line, and Chromaphone from Applied Acoustic Systems. I've listened to the online demos for Chromaphone and they really blew me away. There's one little problem: there isn't a version available to run on PowerPC Macs. So my justified-but-ancient G4 doesn't make the cut. I have an HP laptop running Vista and that's a supported configuration, but I really don't want to get into using the laptop as a sound generator; at the very least I'd have to get a plug-in shell to run the plug-in on it, and then figure out how to sync it to the Mac. There's no room in my setup to physically put the laptop while it's playing. And the HP isn't terribly happy when the CPU is pushed hard; it tends to overheat.
Drumaxx is available as an OSX universal binary, so it will run on my G4. But the modeling capability doesn't appear to be as extensive as Chromaphone, and the online demos are interesting but they don't blow me away like the Chromaphone demos do. So, has anyone used either one of these? Do you think Chromaphone is going to be worth the extra trouble to incorporate it into my setup, or will Drumaxx cover the territory?