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.

There are some differencing in MIDI mapping. From the EZDoc
Furthermore, if GM compatibility is important to you, you should always program your tracks using notes between 36 (C1) and 60 (C3) only. This is to ensure accurate playback on GM compatible devices (cymbal chokes notwithstanding).

Technical note: all notes in the range 35 to 60 are GM compliant with the following exceptions -
39 (clap), 50 (hi tom 2), 54 (tambourine), 58 (vibraslap), 60 (bongo).
 
If you want to use MIDI made in EZDrummer in Session Drummer, you are going to need to follow these instructions or make a Drum Map to translate the EZD MIDI track to SD3. If you are going to do a lot of EZD MIDI for SD3, creating a Drum Map preset is the way to go. It sounds like the Neil Pert kit may already be loading a drum map, if so, add the EZD to SD3 note translations to it. Or is it just the keyboard display in the PRV showing the drum names? Sorry, don't have the kit so I cannot be more definite about whether you are already loading a drum map.

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.
 
 

Rather than redraw the hats, you could have clicked on the MIDI Note (the keyboard/note names on the left side), which would have selected all the hits, hold down the shift key and drag them all to the new MIDI note (22 in your example) in one shot.

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.

clintmartin
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.

Clint,
 
Some Drum Samplers include the option to re-map their drums to that of a another Sampler..
Drum MIc'a, from Sennheiser and Neuman (which is free by the way and includes the FREE Kontakt Player) does this.  It includes the option to remap
the Drums to Addictive Drums, EZDrummer, Superior Drummer, GM, BFD, V-Drums TD-12/20 and V-Drums TD-3/6.  It's just a plain drum kit, but 
it has nice velocity layers and you can select between several High End Mic's for each piece in the kit.  It's nothing spectacular, but it's free and worth
having IMHO...

You can get it here free

http://de-de.sennheiser.com/service-support/drummica

This is a nice feature, as it avoids the editing phase (which is really no big deal - just a minor inconvenience)

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.

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.

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.

Ok so I insert a midi track and click the output and see bunches of drum maps. So now I choose (for example) session drummer 2. Now how do I actually launch Session drummer 3 from this track? In my little test project I inserted Session drummer 3 first and clicked the output, but it doesn't have the drum maps option. Just master, bus or whatever. I go to preferences and there are none listed.