DM8 Alesis With Sesson Drummer3 Any HELP Tutorials?

  Hello, I'm going to look stupid again. But I read the manual and it's confusing to me. I'm still using Sonar X1 Producer. Here's the things I need to find out. I can Trigger Session Drummer 3 with my Alesis Drumkit the Dm8 Pro. I cannot trigger the Session Drummer high tom only the mid tom. I have horrible latency from the time I hit my drums and the Session Drummer playing it's drum sound out my speakers. How Can I use the drumset in my Alesis kit to be the sounds Session Drummer plays? I have know Idea how to make it use my sound patches from the Dm8 module. What is Drum Mapping? I'm just running my Drumset to my pc with a USB cable. I think that could be why there is no Sound bank because Sonar recognizes The drumset as a USB audio Device. Thanks for any links to tutorials or anything, If someone knows any that would answer these questions! :) Paintscraper

Hi

You ask a lot of questions there, but, let's deal with the main one.

Firstly, what driver mode are you using with Sonar? Ideally you would be best using the ASIO drivers. Go into preferences and check your mode. 

If you are using ASIO aready, open the control panel for your fast track and reduce the buffer size to something that gives you a round trip latency LESS than 10ms. Alternatively  If you are using WDM drivers <which is also fine> slide the slider in Preferences to give you a round trip latency LESS than 10ms.

This should mow give you a playable drum kit. That SHOULD be all you need to do to get the latency low enough to play. It's definitely low enough for my Roland kit.

OK,

The next problem,many a little more tricky is to get it sounding right.

Off the top of my head I don't know what midi note triggers the kit pieces in Session Drummer, the help file for session drummer should help you here. however, that is the problem you have, your DM8 is transmitting a different note to what session drummer recognises as a hi Tom. Once you find out the midi note require for session drummer to to play a hi Tom,  you need to change the note in your DM8 brain. Use your owners manual to do this.

Personally I don't ever uses session drummer for MY drum sounds I use 3rd party software, but, I have had to Map my whole drum brain of my Roland to the drum notes of the software I am using. This is now saved as a preset in my drum brain so I can call it up every time I need it. Most drum software uses different midi notes for their kit pieces. So if you are to change to a third party program it is something you will quite likely have to do again. 

I hope that helps get you going.  

EDIT I just noticed I quoted swamptooths sound card, what sound interface are you using? If you don't have a dedicated sound card you are going to struggle getting your latency down low enough to play your drums.

The alternative is to Download ASIO4ALL it will allow you to use your existing onboard sound card and get it down to acceptible latency.  

Drum mapping is relatively straight forward. In simplest terms each line it takes an incoming MIDI note and translates that to an outgoing note.

That note can be the same as the incoming one or different. Each line can be sent out to any MIDI port of your choice. There are a whole load included or you can write your own. A very powerful tool that could do with an interface update.

Paintscraper

 I'm thinking in order to use the sound bank that my DM8 Brain has I will have to actually get a midi interface and use that. 

The sounds from the DM8 can't be recorded via MIDI. You will need to connect the line out to the line input of your interface.
This is an audio signal. Audio and MIDI are very different things.
As for triggering SD3, your DM8 should have an option to transmit General MIDI(my DM6 does). This will map your DM8 pads to the GM standard, and should trigger the SD3 drums correctly.