Short MIDI notes from Alesis D4 do not reliably trigger Dimension Pro

I am a huge fan of the drum kits in Dimension Pro and have used Project 5 to hand-construct drum tracks. Recently I added an Alesis D4 with drum pads in order to create drum tracks faster and that sound less robotic. THe intent, of course, is to capture using the Alesis D4 + pads and then use Dimension Pro as the playback instrument.

The problem I ran into is that the MIDI events captured in Sonar (Sonar 5 Producer Edition) are so short that they do not reliably trigger Dimension Pro. The velocity is high enough, but if the event is short it does not play back.

Is there a way to make Dimension Pro trigger on shorter MIDI events? I have searched the manual and the options have not found an answer. I also looked at the Alesis to see if it can generate longer events but didn't find an answer there either. I know that the D4 is a common drum module so am hoping that one of you may know the asnwer.

Thanks in advance.

Jeff

are you sure this is a note length related problem? lots of MIDI drum tracks have extremely short note durations (i.e. one tick), so drum samplers have to cope with this. Also, the Dimension Pro drum sfz files are in one_shot mode which means that the sound is triggered simply on a Note-On event and does not pay any attention to the note-off event.

What happens if you create some notes manually in the piano roll view, some with short lengths and others longer? Do you get the same playback issue?

I am a huge fan of the drum kits in Dimension Pro and have used Project 5 to hand-construct drum tracks. Recently I added an Alesis D4 with drum pads in order to create drum tracks faster and that sound less robotic. THe intent, of course, is to capture using the Alesis D4 + pads and then use Dimension Pro as the playback instrument.

The problem I ran into is that the MIDI events captured in Sonar (Sonar 5 Producer Edition) are so short that they do not reliably trigger Dimension Pro. The velocity is high enough, but if the event is short it does not play back.

Is there a way to make Dimension Pro trigger on shorter MIDI events? I have searched the manual and the options have not found an answer. I also looked at the Alesis to see if it can generate longer events but didn't find an answer there either. I know that the D4 is a common drum module so am hoping that one of you may know the asnwer.

Thanks in advance.

Jeff

I had the same problem with my Yamah drum pads, You can quantify the notes and make them all longer,
You can also adjust the velocity on the notes
Change them to 16th notes or such

Please record a small MIDI file with your controller, and email it to rene at cakewalk dot com. I'll check it out.



-René

ORIGINAL: jeffj35290
They look the same length as the ones coming from the drum module but I can't see how many ticks long they are.

There are a few ways you can see the note durations in SONAR:

• You can right-click a note in the piano roll view and a properties windows will appear showing its duration.
  
• Select the note in the piano roll view and look in the Event Inspector windows in the toolbar (you need to make sure the Event Inspector toolbar is selected).
  
• Open the Event List view and you can see all note durations in a column in the grid
  

René: I tried sending you the file from my gmail account and I got a receive failure. I double checked the spelling and I can't find my error. Would you please send a quick email to jefflj at gmail dot com and I will then reply.
Thanks,
Jeff

ORIGINAL: jeffj35290

Thanks Mark,

Interestingly enough, when I view the properties of the events that don't play are shown as having a Duration of "0". They show up visually in the UI and have a velocity of 127. If, in the properties tab, I increase it to duration "1" it will properly trigger Dimension Pro. So my challenge appears to be how to prevent the events from having a Duration of 0. The ones that do sound have values between 1 and 5. I wonder if this is a function of the D4 drum module, a Sonar setting, or something else?

Thanks again,

Jeff

I have the same problems with some malfunctions like scrub etc not working in Sonar when recorded from pads.

I modified a CAL program to extend duration of notes to 40 ticks.

So create a file mindur40.cal or similar with the content below.

Here it is below.

---start mindur40.cal------------------------------------------

;;Skall fixa minimum duration för t.ex trummor från pads
;;
;; Prolog
(do
(dword endtime 0)
(dword lasttime 0)
(dword thisdur 40)
;; (getTime From "From?")
;; (getTime Thru "Thru?")
)
;; Body
(do
(if (== Event.Kind NOTE)
(do
;; (message " scanning measures " (meas Event.Time) ":" (beat Event.Time) ":" (tick Event.Time) "")
(if (< Note.Dur thisdur)
(= Note.Dur thisdur)
NIL
)
)
NIL
)
)
(pause " Done: press <enter>")
;;epilog
NIL


------------end cal------------------

ORIGINAL: jeffj35290

Very cool. I've never delved into Cakewalk Application Language before so thanks for the intro. It works great as a post-capture process. It would be helpful, however, if Sonar added a MIDI capture option that would force a minimum Duration for events.

With your CAL I can now listen to the audio out from the drum module when recording; run the CAL on the recorded MIDI data; and then work with it in SONAR and Dimension Pro.

Thanks very much!

Jeff

Your welcome. Glad it came to use.