Hi Folks,
 
I am new to this forum and barely new to home recording as well. I am currently working on my solo project for which I have written all the drums and percussion with Cakewalk TTS1 midi drums (standard kit, brush and orchestra set).
 
As I am new to the software I have written the drums by "hand" using the staff view. I do not have a midi keyboard
 
My question is, is there any way I can just replace the TTS1 drum sounds for real ones without having to re-write the drums? I know here is this Session Drummer software that is included but, from what I have seen, it does not allow users to write drums manually and a midi keyboard is needed to write custom patterns.
 
I am using Sonar 8.5 Producer Edition. Any help would be highly appreciated.
 
Thanks,
Luis

Welcome to the forum!
 
You can always write your own drum patterns either in Piano Roll or Staff view, it's not VST-dependant, nor do you need a conroller keyboard (even though it's the practical way).
Once you have written the patterns you just need to output the MIDI track to the soft synth you want to use and have an audio track with that soft synth as input.
 
It's worthwhile doing the tutorials about using soft synths (and the others, too).

There's no limit to what you can do with those MIDI tracks! Replacing the TTS-1 with a high-quality sampler is very easy because the TTS-1 uses a standard mapping that most drum samplers can deal with. It's plug 'n play happiness.
 
Beyond that, you can even separate the instruments into multiple MIDI tracks so that you're not stuck with one sampler's sounds. Use the kick from one kit, the snare from another. Or duplicate the track (or a subset of it) and overlay a second sample, e.g. tambourine over the snare.
 
And don't be in a hurry to discard the TTS-1 entirely. Many of its drum sounds are useful as overlays or for variety. The brush kit is actually quite good on its own. Its kick often layers nicely with acoustic samples. I often turn to the TTS-1 for wood blocks, claves and tambourine.

As bit stated I have a drum map that uses the TTS kick for the "sub", gives some nice low end "thump".
Some of the "percussion" works quite well, the tambourine just as bit said.
I use the piano in busy rock mixes all the time as well, works just fine.
 
Tom

Hi Guys!
 
Thank you very much for you help. I am "outputting" the drums I created through Session Drummer 3 and I just purchased Andy Johns Kit 1. It sounds awesome!
 
One of my tracks uses Orchestral Percussion. I have used the one from TTS1 but does not sound real enough. Do you know where I would be able to get real Orchestral Pescussion sounds from?
 
Thanks again :)

Most of the best orchestral percussion libraries are Kontakt-based, and tend to be a little pricey ($200-$400 typically). Most don't need full Kontakt (example, example), but if you buy Kontakt you'll get some decent orchestral percussion bundled with it.
 
In the meantime, check out what's in Dimension Pro. There are some goodies in there.