Native Instruments Battery

[alacrity024]

does anyone have any experience with the Battery VST program by Native Instruments? It looks pretty *****in', and it's relatively cheap.. I thought it'd be a good program to throw on my laptop and take to gigs..

[captain54]

Your laptop better be a powerhouse cause its a RAM and CPU sucker....

[alacrity024]

actually, from what I've read, as a standalone it only needs a 300 mhz and something like 64 megs of ram.. I've only got a 266, but I've got something like 192 megs of ram in it, so I'm hoping that'll make up for it.. but we'll see

[juggernaut]

Originally posted by alacrity024
actually, from what I've read, as a standalone it only needs a 300 mhz and something like 64 megs of ram.. I've only got a 266, but I've got something like 192 megs of ram in it, so I'm hoping that'll make up for it.. but we'll see

Yo, whatever happened with this? Did Battery work out for you? I am currently using Battery as a VST instrument in Cubase and it f'n rocks! It even gets the high-hat controller right. I'm very impressed. With cubase set to a latency of a little under 6 ms, I can shred with no noticable delay. Record everything on to a midi track. Swap out drums and cymbals after if needed or desired, quantize any mistakes or just go in and edit the performance manually. Edit the wav files that make up the kit I am using if I want with envelopes and filters etc... Send each drum to a different track in cubase and add effects, equalize etc... Damn! Just like having a miked drum kit without the pain of miking my acoustic drums. Plus you can load any wave file into battery for wierd non-drum sounding stuff.

ANother awesome thing about Battery is for each drum channel, you can have up to 120 layers of velocity. In english that means you could have 120 different wav files associated with one drum pad. Depending on how hard you hit the pad, the software will play a different wav file. This is common with most good samplers as it makes it possible to achieve a very realistic simulation of an instrument, in this case drums.

The thing that really amazed me is the hi-hat controller data sent from my td-6 actually gets interpreted properly by the Battery engine. Works right out of the box on almost all of the standard battery drum kits.

A+ Native Instruments. This software could be a little complex for a midi begginer to set up. I'm pretty advanced and it only took me about 15 minutes to get it working with Cubase. Stand alone is easier to wrap your head around. Once you get it set up it's a cinch though.

[bigswole31]

I must agree. I think you would be hard pressed to find something better at ANY price. Not only does it allow for different samples at different velocities, it also allows you to crossfade the samples for smooth transitions from sound to sound.

It will load AKAI (S1000), .wav, and ,aiff samples. You can also load up LM-4 kits. I use it with Digital Performer, and I have not been disappointed.

I wish it would read my MPC2000 formatted CD-Roms, but I guess you can't have it all.

[juggernaut]

By the way. The basic kit that comes with battery - sounds damn real - with no effects! I recorded a track with them and I cant tell the difference. I doubt anyone could tell I was playing v-drums. It's just a test track, but if I can convert it to mp3 today I'll post it.

-Chris

[juggernaut]

Originally posted by juggernaut
By the way. The basic kit that comes with battery - sounds damn real - with no effects! I recorded a track with them and I cant tell the difference. I doubt anyone could tell I was playing v-drums. It's just a test track, but if I can convert it to mp3 today I'll post it.

-Chris

Check it out if you want to hear me messing around with the Battery Basic Kit.

!Battery Basi Kit

This is using a G4 500...see my sig. And a few instances of Absynth. Excuse the mistakes and repetition. I'm just screwing around with some fills on this track. It's about 2.5 meg download. I encoded it at 190 for good sound quality so you can hear the drums. Listen to the snare and toms. Nice sound

[juggernaut]

Trigger settings

By the way. If anyone has any tips on setting up thier v's for use with battery, I would love to hear them. For instance, your trigger settings; sensitivity, threshold etc... What kind of settings do you find to work well for you? Thanks.


-J

[JeffVA]

What about the LM4-mkII?

I got the LM-4 mk II (from Steinberg) and wonder if anyone has played with it and battery and seen a difference? What I am ESPECIALLY interested in is the controller data from my highhat. Are you implying that Battery could sense a half-opened setting on the high hat and deal with that properly?

If so, that would be INCREDIBLE!!!

Thanks,

Jeff

[juggernaut]

Re: What about the LM4-mkII?

Originally posted by JeffVA
I got the LM-4 mk II (from Steinberg) and wonder if anyone has played with it and battery and seen a difference? What I am ESPECIALLY interested in is the controller data from my highhat. Are you implying that Battery could sense a half-opened setting on the high hat and deal with that properly?

If so, that would be INCREDIBLE!!!

Thanks,

Jeff

Good question. I haven't played with it enough yet to see if it will handle the hihat in that manner. What I do know is that it will detect open, closed. Half open or other values in between I'm not quite sure. I'm going to check it out tonight to see. I'll get back to you.

[captain54]

I resurrected this thread cause I would appreciate some help from those experienced with Battery...

I've tapped out some midi drums on both my V-Club set and a Roland xp-30 keyboard controller.....I've imported each individual midi file into both ProTools LE and Logic Platinum 5.5 for playback thru Battery.....

the playback from the V-Club produced midi is flabby with no balls, even after hiking all the velocities of all the notes up to the max....the playback from the keyboard controller rocks!! it has plenty of punch and balls, and no velocities had to altered.....

can some tell why is this???

[drumnstuff]

What are the quality of there existing kits? I'm very dumb to this so.

[captain54]

that's exactly what I'm saying.....

I'm playing back the "basic" kit in the Battery sample library in both instances...exact same sounds.....

[captain54]

Originally posted by c. jude
What exactly is the result? Is the playing still right on, but volumes just down? Or is what you played not faithfully reproduced note for note on time either? Truly bizarre.

Okay I think I got down to the bottom of this......

I am using a stock V-Club kit with a td-6.....when I crank up all the trigger sensitivities from the factory default 8 to the maximum 16, it equals the trigger output velocity of my Roland xp-30 keyboard controller when I bang out drum parts on the keys...(I must be really banging on the keys when I tap out those drum parts)...

So basically now, what I am doing is playing the midi parts on the Vdrums, triggering either Battery or the Vdrum module......In Logic, I take the object and drag it to the the Audio Instrument that has battery opened...then I duplicate that track, which means I have simply layered two tracks of midi drums together....then I demix by note pitch, which separates my all the parts of my kit....I then do a bounce to disk for each individual part, and the result is seven or so audio files that are loaded back into Logic with all the midi parts deleted...

in ProTools, I record one midi track, open up Battery on an Aux track, and duplicate that midi track seven or so times.....in midi track one, I delete everything but the kick, in midi track two I delete everything but the snare, and so on and so one.....

now my tracks are separated according kit parts....I then duplicate each one of those to layer two kicks together, two snares, together, etc.....I then bounce to disk all my midi tracks and the end result is seven or so audio files with each individual drum part.....

I wish I didnt have to go thru all this and just play the vdrums thru Battery and bounce to disk.....

thanks for taking the time to try and help....if you have an easier solution, I'd love to hear it.....

[iHatePC]

Originally posted by captain54


Okay I think I got down to the bottom of this......

I am using a stock V-Club kit with a td-6.....when I crank up all the trigger sensitivities from the factory default 8 to the maximum 16, it equals the trigger output velocity of my Roland xp-30 keyboard controller when I bang out drum parts on the keys...

I have been trying to figure out this same problem with my TD6, Battery and Digital Performer. The midi velocity out of the TD6 seems week as compared to my Kurzweil keyboard.

I have been searching for a global velocity setting in the TD6 but I can not find one. Does one exist? Boosting the sensitivity on each pad does not seem like the correct solution but I will give it a try.

How are you dealing with the latency when using Battery?

I get enough of a delay when monitoring through Battery that it make it difficult to play. I have very fast computer and a high-end audio interface with a very low buffer setting. I am running Mac OSX 10.3.