For doing a drumkit - 1 sampler for the whole kit, or multiple samplers?

[Orvillain]

I just wanted to put out a thought experiment. If I was gonna make a small drumkit plugin, would it be better to have 1 sampler or multiple samplers?

If we said the spec was something as basic as:

• Ability to switch between different kick, snare, tom, or cymbal drums.
• Ability to load/save a custom selection of drums.
• Ability to have proper hihat open>closed choking behaviour.

To my mind the 1 sampler approach would require:

• Custom function to clear away all samples mapped to a known list of keys for a particular drum.
• Custom function to load all samples required for a particular drum.
• Ability to perform RRgroup assignment as part of this load operation.
• Ability to perform velocity split assignment as part of this load operation.

But the limitations of this approach would be:

• Inability to adjust the routing of multi-mic channels where you have channel mismatches across the drums (kick doesn't have a snare channel for example)
• It isn't immediately clear to me how the choking behaviour would work when wanting to choke keys for a single sampler.

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Whereas the multi sampler approach would potentially be a bit simpler:

• One sampler per drumkit slot.
• Each slot could have custom max and soft limits to bring memory usage down.
• Each slot gets its own envelope, which would be beneficial because not all drums need to have the same super long envelope tails.
• Clearing and loading individual drums become simple calls to the sample map clear/load functions for the sampler.
• Loading an entire drumkit is an array of sampler id's and samplemap names that get processed in a loop. Pretty simple code.

But the limitations of this approach would be:

• Higher RAM usage because of the multiple samplers. Although it isn't clear to me how serious an issue this would be.
• No dynamic allocation of the number of drum slots.

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It is worth bearing in mind that drum sample libraries quite often do not have the same channels for every single drum. Sometimes you don't have bleed channels, sometimes you don't have a cymbal direct channel, sometimes you don't have a specific room channel for a specific drum, etc etc.

Just thinking aloud really, but what do you think would be the best approach??

[d.healey]

Multiple samplers

[Christoph Hart]

Definitely multiple samplers with a reduced voice count per instance (depending on the decay time of the drum, a voice between 16 and 64 should be enough).

Having 8-12 sampler modules is totally fine.