Brush Drums please!

With plenty of layers and variations, at least as big as Popsticks library.
Really under-represented area in sample libraries.

Getting all the articulations a brush player uses is quite a challenge, especially to make it playable. natural drum kit (formerly ns_kit7) has several brush kits - they sound great but getting a natural feel from them when playing is tricky! It'll take some programming with good use of release samples, I reckon.

But I agree -- getting a really well created brush kit would be fantastic. (Hope I can get a job so I've some spare cash to spend on toys .)

Agreed on the need for good brushed drums. In the meantime, have you tried the free Pettinhouse brush kit? It's fairly good and comes with some half decent MIDI files to get to grips with what it does and how to achieve it. It's not the be all and end all but it's worth a try. The other stuff is OK as well although you need Kontakt for everything there.

http://www.pettinhouse.com/html/download.html

Interesting site, never really looked around there before. And an, eh, interesting approach to mapping the samples. Here's a very initial attempt at an SFZ mapping for the Brush jazz kit:
http://www.drealm.info/sfz/pettinhouse/Brush%20jazz.sfz

Brushes!

I think enough people have mentioned this and we're definitely going to track one. It won't be at our next session (Aug 2011) but the one after that.

I'd be interested to know if a jazz-brushes kit (along the lines of XLN's kit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wKIpIAnOww) or a country/rock-brushes kit (something like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYhrCsgHa0k) would be preferable?

Eventually we'd like to do both but we have to start with one!

I'm a sucker for the jazz sweeps... That nearly sold me a competitor's product there, Dylan!

For me the ideal set would be just brushed snare and toms (3 toms please). All the brush kits I've heard have been teamed up with a big, too boomy kick and cymbals that sound almost like gongs. I worked with a drummer for years who often used brushes but he just used the same Pearl/Zildjian kit he always did not a different kick and cymbals. Brushes are for more than just jazz surely and the Big Mono kick would be a perfect match IMO.

+1

I would support tweezer's view for at least two reasons:

• that's the logical follow-up to your Splitsticks set
• mapped jazz sweeps are difficult to use in a convincing way, except for very simple patterns

As a matter of fact, even that linked XLN movie demonstrates that achieving a convincing sweep simulation from samples requires it to be programmed instead of played... and this will only be acceptable for a given tempo: the one those samples were recorded at to begin with, since a true swirl can't be properly sliced or stretched without adding unwanted artifacts.

So at the end of the day, it all means extra work for the designer and for the user as well: it's not worth it, in my humble opinion... whereas country-style brushes hits are instantly usable.

Toontrack's jazz extension kit shows just how experienced designers and drummer Roy Wooten felt about this: after painful editing, there are only 3 sweep articulations left, short drag + half and full swirls, with the first one being the sole that can be effectively used...

I guess I have to agree it would be very difficult to get the articulations convincing on a jazz set.

Whatever you do there are always the other two questions:
- Wire or nylon brushes? (Or both! )
- Ability to play brush in one hand, stick in the other? (I guess programmed that would be easy: load two kits... but they need to be the same kit sampled in the same space through the same gear to sound to convincing. Playing on my TrapKAT I'd have to maybe have half the triggers for brushes, half for sticks - that would have the advantage of improving my ambidextrousness...!)

Pardon my mentioning the competition again, but just listen to what can be done with 1 drag + a number of assorted percussive brush strokes:
http://www.toontrack.com/mp3player/jazz_midi/02_Jazz_Midi_-_Jazz_EZX.mp3
okay: perhaps half or full-circle sweeps were actually used, yet with all that buzz from the ride, you can't hear whether they were needed...

Now, this one surely uses percussive brush strokes only:
http://www.toontrack.com/mp3player/jazz_midi/03_Jazz_Midi_-_Nashville.mp3

So... do we really need jazz sweeps?