Session Drummer 3 and Neil Peart vol.1

I bought the Neil Peart vol.1 the other day and I notice some weird things. I had a midi groove built in EZ drummer so I moved that to my Session drummer track. I noticed I couldn't hear the hi hats at all, so I looked in the PRV. The midi notes were there, but silent. The keyboard on the left side was replaced with the names of the Neil Peart kit, but it doesn't play them all. It stops at the ride cymbal and a few notes below the hi hats. I clicked around and found the hi hat for session drummer on a note named 22. I slowly drew in the hi hat notes. Does anyone have any idea as to why this works this way? Does EZ drummer and Session drummer use a different type of midi? I thought they were both general midi. I don't have much experience with Session drummer at all, So a little help would be most appreciated.

scook has got it - while the core of most drum samplers is based on General MIDI assignments there will be other articulations that do not conform to GM. For example a kit may have the three common hi-hat articulations mapped to the normal GM keys and other hi-hat articulations mapped to other keys.
 
It has to be this way because GM is too limited. This means that patterns for one drum sampler may not work properly in another (or in some cases a different kit in the same sampler). This is one of the reasons for having drum maps.
 
 

Hey thanks guys! I sat down and read about drum maps last night (in sonar x1 power book) and figured that may be want I needed to do. The names for the instruments in the prv looks to be a session drummer thing. I loaded one of the kits included in Session drummer (oldzepp) and the prv looked the same. Good tip Jeff M. I'll try that today. I don't plan on using Session drummer much, but the Neil Peart kit sounds pretty good. It's nice to have a DW kit laying around. Sorry for my ignorance. I've been using Sonar for a little over a year and EZ drummer just worked right out of the box so I never had to deal with this before. I'm slowly learning.

What I would do is take the supplied SD2 Drum Map, add the missing notes from the Toontrack documentation, map them to the SD3 notes and save it under another name. That would save a lot of typing. You might also want to spent a little time with SD3. EZDrummer is a good drum sampler but SD3 has a few features that EZDrummer does not. The pitch of the drums can be changed. MIDI patterns can be triggered by the octave below the drum kit, allowing one to record a track from MIDI loops (and parts of loops) on the fly. You can use it as a simple 12 note sampler by dropping a sample on each pad or build larger kits using sfz files. The samples don't have to be drums or percussion either. BTW, Superior Drummer ships with EZ Player Pro which does MIDI translation too. I know it is on your wish list, thought I would mention a feature you might not be aware of.

Best place to start with Drum Map Manager
Drum maps can be created in a project or stored as presets for reuse. By default, Drum Map presets are in "your user directory/AppData/Roaming/Cakewalk/SONAR version/Drum Maps". The location can be redefined in Preferences > File > Folder Locations.

You can wire everything by hand, or you can let the "Insert Synth Options" dialog handle the Audio+MIDI track creation for you. It is easier to let SONAR do it for you when you insert the synth, especially when just starting with this type of setup. Then all you need to do is add the drum map after SONAR has setup the synth.
 
In the latter case you are probably using a Simple Instrument Track. If that is the case, click the MIDI tab in the inspector and the MIDI output can be set in the bottom of the strip on the left.

Ok I got that kind of sorted out. I know where every thing is now anyway. I notice the cymbals are choking themselves off which could be the Octapad settings. So all in all, I'm getting there. Thanks everyone!

clintmartin
Interesting. Hahaha I don't even know where these drum maps are! I'll find out though. It will be nice to get EZD and SD3 working the same. I have a roland octapad to trigger sounds and it would be nice to use one program for both. Thanks for the links cclarry...I'll be checking those out for sure.

Clint..

This video has a comprehensive review of Drum Mic'a...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2TuymOIBBE