bitflipper

You *do* realize that this quote is from this groop's own "Resonant Order" who goes by "Resonant Serpent" over there?

I suspected as much.

The irony is that Reaper is best-suited for traditional recording methods using real instruments, and its most obvious shortcoming is weak MIDI support. But I expect Resonant Whatever's definition of "irony" is what his mom does to his Iron Maiden t-shirts.

You know I always hear "weak midi support", but I can record from *two* midi interfaces to *two* midi softsynths that can be on either different or the same midi channel at the same time, and I can send one midi track to multiple midi softsynths (stacking) by either just dropping a bunch of them in the FX bin (and they all play live too), or putting them on separate tracks and patching sends to them.  Of course both of these are "real time" things that Sonar doesn't do well, if at all and I suppose that the "after the fact" midi editing is what people mean by "weak midi support".

This is ironic!  ->   http://members.cox.net/glennbo/Ironic.jpg

Edit:  Hmmm, my link got botched.  How ironic!

Jonbouy


What's a guitar?

Yesterday at work - I found out my 8th grade (13 year olds) students don't know who Stevie Wonder is .....




Between that info and the state of the world economy.....

I just throw my hands in the air and look for Bapu  

bitflipper


That's what I meant, Glennbo. It's not that you have any restrictions for recording, automating or playing back MIDI, but rather it's the lack of editing features. I know Reaper users have been vocal about the need for it. Once Reaper has that, it will become one powerful composition tool. Throw in some advanced automation editing and I might just join you guys over there.

I guess the editing part never really bothered me, because I do very little editing to both audio and midi.  In fact, in the most recent project on my Jambits page (Infrared), I recorded the drums in one take, first shot from my V-Drums used only as a controller, playing through to Superior Drummer 2 in the DAW.  I did zero editing to that midi track, and if you look at it up real close, you can see that I'm real close, but not dead on the money to the beats.  Still, it sounds pretty much like how it would have sounded if I were using a real set of acoustic drums and recording them as audio where there would usually be little to no after the fact editing done.  Most of my midi edits are simple things like knocking out a flubbed note, or transposing a part up or down to achieve a modulation in the song.

jimknopf


Glennbo, you can help me with a question.

I have recently put up a home studio where I can do complete band rehearsals and sessions (over speakers or with Jamhub), as well as recording and arranging.

As keyboarder my experience with the V-Drums kit in that room is limited, and I would like to know if exactly the scenario you described, V-drums into superior drummer 2 over midi

a) works without too big latency issues on normal quality soundcards
b) requires heavy drum mapping or is rather easily done in one go, using Superior drummers mapping technique instead of Sonar drum mapping

Just give me a hint what I have to expect and how fast it should be done.

I use my V-Drums pad kit as a soundless midi controller, exactly like you might use one of the many keyboard midi controllers out there on the market.  It actually has sound making guts in the brain, but I don't have any audio cables going to it, just midi out.  Same as you would do with a keyboard controller.

Anyway, the midi out from my V-Drums goes to the midi in of my Delta audio card, and from there into the DAW soft.  I run my Delta card on the ASIO driver with latency buffers set to 64 samples, which equates to 1ms one way.  Round trip is something like 2.5ms.  Anyway, it feels every bit as tight as using the built-in sounds on the V-Drums brain, all the way down to extremely tight snare drum buzz rolls.

In my DAW I use Superior Drummer 2.0, which has one of, if not the best audio engine on the planet for drum samples.  It behaves just like the hardware sample engine in the V-Drums brain, meaning that the voice allocation is literally *Superior* to most others.  This is due to the round-robbin assignment that allows cymbal rolls to play smoothly because the first note played, will be the last note stolen for another sample to begin playing.  Most of Superior mapped out to my kit with no changes, and for the three or so pads that needed re-assigning, I used the "learn" function in Superior and had the whole kit mapped in literally minutes.  Where I spent the most time was in tweaking the velocity sensitivity in Superior so that the various samples responded to my hitting forces.  Initially, everything was way too sensitive for my playing, which is kind of heavy handed.  I was instantly into the hardest hit samples, even though I wasn't yet hitting my hardest.  Once I got those dialed in though, the kit began to play as easy as a real kit.

I actually own three different drum kits, and use them all for recording and live, but for recording I use my digital kit more than the others, because I can turn them on, hit record, sound great and get onto the next track much easier than spending 20 or 30 minutes doing some test takes to balance out a bunch of microphones. 

jimknopf


Thanks,
sounds like an easy go: I already had the midi out of the Vdrums connected to the midi in of the soundcard and just wanted to be sure not to run into complicated setups.

One last question concerning velocities: do you adjust how your hitting strength is translated on the input side (V-drums converter) or within SD2 or Sonar?

The drummers I play with will enjoy a ready done setting: they already asked me if I could run the set into good software instead of the Roland module. And I like the SD2 drumsets a lot myself, using them as standard drums for recording.
 

They are correct in asking for that.  The built-in sounds in a V-Drums brain are ok, but not on the same planet as sounds in Superior Drummer 2.

Being the picky drummer that I am, I made adjustments on both to finally get where I could close my eyes and forget that I was on a pad kit.  If you need to get it dialed in quickly, I'd start at the V-Drums brain using the sensitivity control for each pad. 

In the "Voice and Layer Limits" section of Superior Drummer 2, there is a drop down menu with some presets, one of which is "E-Drums" that will get you in the ball park for the layers and sensitivity within Superior.  On the "Mapping" page of Superior there's a drop down menu labeled "Presets" that has some useful stuff for the hihat in the midi selection under "Pedal Correction".  What that does is alter the curve of the hihat so you can get gradual closed to open samples to match your hihat pedal movement.

Mooch4056

Yesterday at work - I found out my 8th grade (13 year olds) students don't know who Stevie Wonder is .....




Between that info and the state of the world economy.....

I just throw my hands in the air and look for Bapu  

When Linda McCartney died I was in a record store on line waiting to pay and some teenagers in front of me were commenting on it and one of them said something like "didn't her husband John play in that Wings band?"

I just shook my head and silently admitted to myself that I am indeed growing old.......

Glennbo


  I have a kid who's 16 and for the longest time was into Guitar Hero.  All of a sudden in the last year and a half though, he's become extremely proficient on bass.  He kept coming into my studio and jamming around on my two basses, so I traded in an old Fender acoustic I wasn't using and got him a Squire P-Bass.  Now he's got a rented cello and is getting quite good on that too, so I guess having a background in Guitar Hero doesn't necessarily mean you'll never get motivated and learn how to play a "real" guitar!    ;)

I have heard similar observations. Guitar hero and the like have introduced a lot of kids to a wider range of music and encouraged many to try real instruments.

I like playing Rock Band with my nephews and nieces. It's a brilliant game. Some of them also play instruments, which is cool. Some of them don't, which is also cool.