lawajava


I'm surprised there are such strong opinions about this. I've been recording midi drums for years with Sonar - with one midi input cable and resulting in a separate midi track for each piece of the drum kit. I just set the midi out for each piece of the drum kit to a different midi channel. I have a midi track set up to receive each incoming channel. Session Drummer 3 is ideal for sounds and I can alternatively use an external midi sound device like a drum machine to fire sounds on playback and/ or live recording as well. Totally doable, I do it on every song.

Can you please tell us how this is possible and what you use to do it? Regardless if you can...if you can't do it with what the OP is using, with all due respect, it's pretty moot.
 
-Danny

I used to use a cal script that splits the notes to separate tracks after recording.  Even that though to me was more trouble than it was worth.

Dan

Hi Jeff, Bapu, Danny and Everyone else,
 
Sorry for not replying sooner. Thanks so much for all your suggestions and expertise. It is greatly appreciated. I will be trying some of these ideas out over the next week or so and will get back to you. Jeff, I think you are right, unless my Yamaha DTXtreme IIs can send each drum pad on a seperate midi channel (seems like you looked this up and it can't) then I may need to look into some gear that can do this by skipping over the Yamaha computer. Thanks again everyone and I'll check in again in a week or so when I've tried out some of these ideas! Thanks so much and again, sorry for the late reply.

Just a thought, but a custom drum map might help.

Load up as many instances of the drum sampler as needed. Each will show as an individual port in the output section of a drum map. Assign kick to one, snare to another, etc.

You'd still end up with all the MIDI in a single track, but the drum map will route the MIDI notes to the various synths.

All - okay so the OP has a one midi channel out. So I agree that's a different challenge and my original post doesn't solve the OP's question.

But for others interested and to reply to mudgel I use a Roland TD-12 drum kit. The brain of that allows setting each pad, rim, cymbal, and cymbal edge to a different midi out signal. So you can play live or record to different midi tracks while playing live. It's great. Obviously this provides flexibility for setting sounds against those midi tracks and for mixing etc.

Hi Roger, The TD8 looks very good. Except that I have downloaded the manual and from what I can see all the drum pads still transmit out on one midi channel only , it is the Parts only that can send on different midi channels. But I am probably wrong of course. Can you run through the procedure of how to set each pad to send on a different midi channel. I am curious. 

Unless various pads can be assigned to parts but then there are only 4 parts that can transmit (plus a kit channel and a percussion channel which could make it 6 parts transmitting on sep midi channels) so does that mean you are only limited to sending out on 4 midi channels at once. 

If this is how it works then it still better than the Yamaha brain. But not as good as the AKAI ME35T which can send 8 things out at once on any of the 16 midi channels. 

It is interesting this because if anyone is looking to buy an electronic kit one should look carefully into the midi implementation to see if it can do things like sending out individual pads on sep midi channels. Sure you may not need it if you are going to use the brain provided to make the sounds but if you are wanting to control a bunch of VST's all set to different channels in your DAW then it will be a feature you will require.

To the OP the AKAI ME35T sold but only for around $30 which isn't a lot considering how powerful and useful it is especially for what you are trying to do. You will find they come up regularly and it would still be the cheapest option rather than changing over to a completely different electronic drum kit.

I don't know about the TD-8 nor the Yamaha DTXreme II, but I own a Roland TD-20 kit and with this it's possible to assign each pad to different MIDI-channels. So with some some electronic kits it is possible. I still don't understand why anyone would like to do this though.

You can still separate the drums onto different tracks audio-wise without splitting the MIDI and this will give you control over each sound, if it's the sound character we're talking about. With MIDI you have great control over the different drums just using one MIDI-track.

Hi there Loptec. It looks as though you are correct in terms of creating different midi channels for each pad and if you can do it on the TD 20 then I am sure the TD 8 should be able to do it as well.

I guess the reasoning here is that you set up VST's on sep tracks for each piece of the drum kit and be able to trigger them all at once with live playing. It also creates sep tracks for each part all at once too which might be a time saver and handy. Is there another way of doing it, that is the question.

  Jeff - I'll provide some details here to answer your question and/or in subsequent messages. Loptec is right of course that you can just use one Midi track if you like. I prefer the control and flexibility of a separate Midi track for each piece of the drum kit/performance. The Roland TD-12 allows for selecting the midi output per pad or cymbal or rim etc. To set it we just hit the drum stick on the target(a drum pad, a rim, a cymbal, or a cymbal edge) and then set the midi output for that particular spot on the display from the Roland unit. In our case, we don't actually use the Roland TD-12 sounds at all, we just use the drum set as an input device and it does that extremely well. We have one Midi Out cable coming from the Roland TD-12, that's it. The Midi Out cable goes into our Midi In port for our studio. In our case, we happen to use multiple external Midi sound modules so I have a Motu Express 8x8 Midi interface when I'm using the DM Pro. When I'm just recording straight to Session Drummer 3, I can use that same port, or if I'm mobile and detached from the studio, I can just use a single Midi input port on my Scarlett audio interface. In Karl's Sonar X2 video he covers one of the less explained spots within Sonar, the Define Instruments section. His explanation is good to understand that. I've Defined the Alesis DM Pro as an external sound module, so I'm able to point to which DM Pro patch I want to use directly from within each drum track. Of course since its an external sound module (the Alesis DM Pro) it also has audio outs which output the sound from the selected patch, and those audio signals route into the audio interface as inputs. I happen to use a couple other sound sources in addition to the DM Pro. I like the ride sound from another device, and the snare rim shot (stick) from another one. By using the Midi track by track break out method I'm able to use multiple external devices either live or on playback to get the overall drum kit sound I'm looking for. When using Session Drummer 3 I can do that all within the one VST itself. Once I have the Midi tracks recorded and or edited to our liking, then I can record the audio onto audio tracks. Once again, I prefer to have a separate audio track each for snare, kick, toms, crashes, ride, hi-hat, etc. It's a breeze to edit drums in Midi if the different drum kit pieces are on separate tracks. From Session Drummer 3 it's easy to freeze the synth and get each of the audio tracks broken out to their own track. For external sound modules, like when we use the DM Pro and others, we solo each Midi track component and one by one record those to their designated audio tracks. Sounds bad, but that's how it is with external sound modules. If you want the sound as an audio track, you have to record it as an audio track. Works fine for us and we like the sound flexibility.

Dont know if this will help you and I wasn't going to read the entire thread so this info could be totally useless as well....

If you record all the drums MIDI into one track, there is a midi tool in SONAR that will create individual MIDI tracks for each note in the original track.... from there you mixing routing  options are many.

Jim