I guess I would benefit from learning more about mixing drums. Basic EQing and balancing/leveling the different mics is not the big problem, but I find it very, very difficult to work with dynamics. I tried many times but I have a hard time to get compression right and actually hear and evaluate the effect of the different parameters, especially ratio and the release time. And „the sound“ of different compressor types remains a mystery to me. Every time I watch some YouTube videos about comparisons of different software or vintage hardware, optical, FET or VCA compressors, I just can‘t tell the f*****g difference. YouTube guy plays two sound clips that sound 100% identical to me and goes „Oh, the hardware clearly had a much smoother release than this plug-in emulation, but apart from that it sounds more snappy than the Confessor666 plug-in from company xy I tried yesterday.“. Me: WTF is he hearing?
Yeah, compression is tricky, it's like the phantom effect and you really need to experiment with them on your own to figure out what's really going on. I was in the same boat for a while with watching videos, not hearing any differences between compressor types or ratios. Now a lot of times when I'm mixing, instead of adjusting volume levels I'm often riding a compressor's output or making an EQ tweak.
Dynamics can be a bitch until you figure out where you prefer getting your dynamics from; the performance/programming or automation. since we're talking MIDI/programmed drums, I'll put the time into programming the dynamics in and that's the most time consuming part of it because it usually takes me a few days to get a whole drum track done. I prefer doing it that way so I'm not automating the hell out of things in Logic and just the nature of drums, a drum being hit with a high velocity doesn't sound the same being hit with a lower one, so it's more important to get the dynamics coming from the drums themselves rather than automation/compression just from that perspective.
A good little experiment you can do is to just take a single snare sample of one hit, then play with a compressor's settings to see where it's having the most effect; a fast attack/release with mainly effect the initial hit of the snare, but if you slow down the attack and extend the release time, you'll catch everything that happens after that initial hit and you can get the body/resonance of the snare to ring out more.
I only ever work with the raw samples, just not a preset guy as I’d rather tailor the sound to fit my needs. I don’t think the sound of these kits is to do with them being any more raw than other libraries - the tonal uniqueness is more down to the tuning, head choice, mics and positioning etc.
The stock SD3 library has some odd choices in those regards and I uninstalled it pretty quick. There are other libraries that are tuned and set up much more to my tastes, but 90% of the sound of the drums is down to the drums, tuning, heads and room.
Of course, what I'm saying is the starting base, before any processing occurred on their end, they set out to make some very raw sounding samples, so the way they tuned them, the heads they choose, mic placement and how the dude hit them was all based off the intent to make a raw sounding SDX. Going over the presets last night, there's not a lot of EQ on them and when there is, there's no steep curves or cuts. Even EQ'ing the sh*t out of these, they probably wouldn't be my first choice if I were going for a slicker/produced sounding kit, unless I wanted to put the time into tuning every single drum and going nuts with the internal mixer. I'm not a fan of tuning them because they never react the same way an actual drum reacts when you tune it differently, I'm assuming this is just a digital pitch change and not samples of drums they changed the tuning of.
It's hard to phrase this in a way that doesn't sound like I'm taking a swipe at Toontrack, but it sounds like someone just finished their first semester at recording school, had access to a studio but the only drummers he knew were Norwegian Black Metal drummers who haven't learned how to tune their drums yet, with the bonus that all the heads are fresh instead of 1 new one, 3 from last Christmas and 2 "oh, just hit it on the edge so the stick doesn't go in the hole".
I've still only altered the presets, I haven't built a kit from scratch using these yet. I'm really hoping with these rooms mics I can make a killer rock kit with this.
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