So I finally recorded a tune using Jamstix 3. It was a rough cut for my band to give them an idea of what I was thinking at the time. I’m not going to lie: I’m impressed with it.
There are some issues in the drum line though, and I’m not sure if it’s because of the tweaks I made to the AI parameters. Most notably the snare drums misses some beats entirely. It could be due to a bug in the system where the JS samples are not found for some reason (even though they are on disk) but, like I said, it could be due to a few tweaks I made to the “brain.”
In any case, for situations where you don’t have a specific drum line in mind already this seems to be quite a viable option for realistic, i.e. human sounding, drums.
Yes, I think it’s a great piece of software, although I does need quite a bit of tweaking to get realistic results. I personally export the midi song file into my DAW and then make my amendments from there. It sounds even better with thrid party drum vsti’s. I have a track with convincing drum (imo) track posted in Made by Cubase called Masquerader made with Superior Drummer…
I’ve been using the 3.5 64-bit beta for the last few months, but have owned JS since version 1. I too use it with a 3rd party drums VSTi - in my case Steve Slate SSD4. For me JS does 95% of the work… but it takes time to get to know all the controls, the different drummers styles etc etc. And while you can make manual edits within JS itself I too find it much easier to export to a MIDI track and make final adjustments there. For me JS teamed up with a good drum VSTi is the next best thing to a real live drummer… and actually, in some ways better! (depending on the capabilities and personality of the real drummer of course!). JS does what its told and has no ego
There are some issues in the drum line though, and I’m not sure if it’s because of the tweaks I made to the AI parameters. Most notably the snare drums misses some beats entirely.
This issue has been around for a while. It seems happen when you make adjustments during playback - i.e. it forces a ‘recompose’ of the part and a side-effect seems to be dropped notes. I usually find that by stopping playback, then selecting the affected bar, hitting the ‘compose’ button and then hitting playing forces a clean recompose of the bar/part. Alternatively manually inserting missing hits is another option.
All in all JS would easily be my favourite and most used VSTi. Most people don’t realise its not a real drummer… including real drummers.
And to be honest, they have been ‘working on it’ for so long, I believe that there probably never will be. And the lame a$$ed work-arounds involving a windows VM, or parallels, or whatever, documented on their forum are a complete waste of time.
I have long since moved on, and just tried to learn to think like a drummer and create my own drum parts for demos (including getting an e-kit and trying to play it)
And then use a real drummer with proper skills to record the final article.
I usually find that by stopping playback, then selecting the affected bar, hitting the ‘compose’ button and then hitting playing forces a clean recompose of the bar/part. Alternatively manually inserting missing hits is another option.
