NI Abbey Road triggered by E-Drums

Is anybody using NI Abbey Roads triggered by a pro e-drum set?
 
I'd be interested to find out how well that works. Supposedly it comes with drum mappings for Roland TD-20, so the technical set-up should be straight forward, but how does it sound if played quite dynamically with ghost notes, rolls and cymbal swells ...???
 
 
 
 
 
 

Thanks for your reply, Andy.

I eventually ordered K8 ultimate and quite like the way it sounds. However, it took me until this afternoon to get all the gigs of upgrades downloaded and installed, so I have not gone very far into testing it with the drum kit, but I pulled ARD into one of the current projects, figured out the routing of the mixer and tested it against a MIDI track recorded from the TD-20X. It sounded quite OK on that fast rock track, but that's straight forward playing (no ghosts, rolls, choke ... mostly bashing the hell out of it) ...

Thanks for the link on cymbal choking. I'll let you know how it goes when I get into a "custom" set-up, but that might be a few days/weeks ...

Hi Andy,

A quick update how it goes with NI ARD and Roland TD-20X:
 
I tried to set it up various ways (using TD-9/TD-20 preset vs default preset) and soon had to discover that
(a) the TD-20 preset doesn't properly map the factory settings of the TD-20
(b) you cannot create user presets in all ARD modules (save of customization doesn't work in Modern Drummer)
(c) you would need a different set-up in each ARD module due to different drums (e.g. 2 toms vs. 4 toms, ...)
 
However, using a Sonar drum map the remapping is done once and fits all ARD mods; plus that allows me to switch between using ARD or TD-20X sounds for the same MIDI drum recording just by swapping the drum map. Quite nice once set-up.
 
In terms of using ARD as sound source while recording MIDI drum tracks, I initially had problems that some hits were swallowed (some just weren't played although it had no relation to where I hit the pad), but when I looked at the recorded MIDI track I realized that there are low velocity MIDI notes from faulty triggering (i.e. hitting a tom causes very low velocity cymbal notes to play along). While the TD-20X can cope with that (you only get a very faint cymbal sound that's only audible if toms are muted), ARD didn't seem to take that so well. So I spent about half an hour to RTFM and optimize trigger options inside the TD-20X to get rid of these low velocity notes and now ARD seems to play all hits and can handle a dynamic groove with ghost notes quite well. Latency with a beefy DAW is not an issue; it's pretty playable as long as I remember to keep playing in the center of the snare pad (ARD of course doesn't understand the positional sensing of the TD-20X)
 
So bottomline is: it's worth to go into the trigger / monitoring options of your module and tune that to fit the pads your using (I'm using custom ones from a German company instead of original Roland).
 
The only remaining issue for the time being is that cymbal choking with the default preset works only for the Ride cymbal but not for crash cymbals or AUX cymbals (which I had to remap in the drum map). It may be that choking (MIDI aftertouch?) messages are still send to the original note and not remapped. Maybe you give me a hint what I could try to sort that out? It's not overly critical but it would be nice to get sorted. At the moment I tend to like the TD-20 cymbal more, but that comes from playing the kit solo and may change when mixing the next session ...
 
 

Thanks, Andy.

I'll give this a try. Since I'm new to Kontakt tips like these are very helpful.

No, they have not addressed the issue.  
 
I can only assume that they do not care about people operating e-drums.  The problem is eminently reproducible, obvious on inspection, and easily fixed.  There's no excuse for leaving it in. 

My NI ticket#2013020510001907 (Feb 5, 2013)
 
My discussion on the NI forum:
http://www.native-instruments.com/forum/showthread.php?187606-Cymbal-Choking-Studio-Drummer-from-E-Drums
 
All I could think is that if others opened a similar issue, perhaps it would rise to the level of interest.  I suspect that since there is a workaround, they aren't going to be bothered, but hopefully, I am wrong.