previewlounge helps immensely, cheers creating space for the guitars, i hadn’t thought of that … and yet, so essential, nice one. how much should i do, maybe prepare in ableton first and use a parametric EQ set to the rock and roll smile?
With a live drum I’d think nothing of cutting 15dB in a Tom or Kik drum. Obviously with a sample it’s gonna be different depending upon how much work has been done to it before you get your hands on it. Stick a parametric around 800Hz with a narrow Q & boost whilst sweeping side to until you find the worst sounding area then cut & widen the Q to taste. Bare in mind that the working area of your gtrs, even a 7 string, is gonna be about 200Hz - 4kHz. (A is 440 so a 7 string with a low B won’t even drop to half that) On a live console, gtrs will centre around 1kHz, HPF to at least 160Hz & LPF anywhere 8kHz & below. With one act I LPF to 3kHz I kid you not! Gives that lovely warm rich sound & kills all that harsh stuff that makes your ears ring after the gig!
many thanks for the EQ heads up re/ snare weighting at 160 and boost the 5k range
Yeah this is fairly standard procedure, doing the sweep & looking for ‘honkiness’ in the midrange will help keep the Snares tight. Remember a slightly annoying ring in the studio will rattle around a large venue like crazy 
one thing i do wonder about is tuning … tuning of implied pitches across a single kit so it makes sonic sense with itself, but then also with the guitars. and then, does EQ work somehow imply a pitch, or key center, by removing or accentuating…
Yeah freq is directly related to pitch & how important tuning is depends a lot on the sound you’re going for. For short punchy metal drums it’s gonna be less important than say a short Tom that morphs over time into a singing Sine wave. I wouldn’t necessarily worry about tuning to specific scales, just use your ears & tune to taste
currently designing the Machinedrum kits first… then will do more work on making performance one-shot kits for the Octatrack, to be in tune with the Machinedrum’s kits … the x-fader is amazingly creative for live performance tapping, kind of like vinyl beatboxing of parameters.
Have played once with the drummer so far, so it is early days. he used a Genelec Tri-System for amplification, and the breakbeat kickdrum samples certainly carried a long way with the subwoofer making the kickdrums actually sound louder in the room next to the jamming room, strangely enough.
That system is gonna give you a much better idea of what to expect live than a typical bedroom rig for sure. I guess it depends where your gonna play & what you’re playing through. If you’re likely to encounter modern line array systems then you’ll be dealing with Infrasubs that’ll go down to like 27Hz or something so it’s still worth tidying any clutter in those areas. I can’t emphasise just how useful spectrum analysers are when it come to taking electronic stuff to the stage!
If you’re not sending the MD into the OT I would definitely use the individual outs, give way more control!!!
The phenomena you describe about the Kiks sounding louder next door will be down to standing waves most likely. Basically, if the fundamental is 100Hz, then that’s a wavelength of 3.43m. If that sound occurs in a room with those, (or divisible), dimensions, then the wave will bounce back & forth reinforcing itself.
i am only just now importing some of the acoustic drum samples to the Machinedrum, so that will be interesting, to hear how these relatively untreated samples play on the MD, compared to the more electronic samples.
Yeah keep us posted, be interested to hear how you get on
