Hihat pedal control

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aj
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2005/03/23 10:29:11 (permalink)

Hihat pedal control

Does anyone know a practical way of getting a foot pedal to control sampled drums - e.g the Natural Sounds kit, so that a MIDI-connected pedal could open and close the hihats just like a real drummer would do?. I have an Akai MPD16 drumpad, so what I would like to do is tap on what would be the closed hihat pad and press the foot pedal to switch to open hihat, and have it choke when the pedal is released.

I have two MIDI footswitch inputs on my BCR2000 and have connected one to trigger a kick sample and if the other one could work like a hihat pedal that would be a much more natural way to drum - or, of course, I could use the sustain pedal already connected to my master keyboard to control this, but either way I'll be using a MIDI event to control this. Samplers in use are Kompakt and VSampler, under S3PE.

Of course, if any of the commercially-available drum libraries tackle this, I'd consider purchasing one. I don't think my drumming will ever not suck, but this seems worth trying as a partial remedy. Yes, I know I could buy a Roland drum kit, but space and money are constraints.
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    mlockett
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    RE: Hihat pedal control 2005/03/23 11:33:10 (permalink)
    Most samplers don't support opening and closing the hihats... they only support fully open, or fully closed, and can't changes samples. The only ones I know of are BFD and DFHS (DFHS didn't fully support it till either 1.2 or 1.3).

    Mike Lockett
    http://mikelockett.info
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    jerrye
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    RE: Hihat pedal control 2005/03/23 11:33:20 (permalink)
    You may do well to search this forum for discussions assisted heavily by a forum member whose user name is glennbo. He even has a tutorial which is linked in those discussions, and I recall he addressed your issue.

    Good luck,
    Jerry

    hear my music at
    http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=126274
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    aj
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    RE: Hihat pedal control 2005/03/24 08:37:45 (permalink)
    Ah!, yes. Thank you. I guess it's time to gird my loins and wade into battle with VSampler again.

    I would cheerfully nominate anyone for a Nobel if they've created a Vsampler-customised version of NSKIT that does all these things i.e alternating snare hits, open/close hihat cutoff and ideally my CC open/close wish.

    But, I guess it's up to me. If I get time & it works, I'd be willing to give it back to the community as a single vsampler file - after all, NSKIT is free, so this would be entirely in the spirit of things. Of course, you would need the full version of VSampler but if you had the S3 version, upgrading is ridiculously cheap. (alas that S4 no longer includes it. That is a real shame, and, Cake, you really ought to revisit this. A good bundled sampler would really help Sonar, imho, and although VSampler is somewhat weird, the latest v3.5 seems to be reasonably stable and capable.

    Many thanks, anyway. Good to see that others have done most of the hard work - namely, figuring out how on earth to get something working in VSampler....
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    lfm
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    RE: Hihat pedal control 2005/03/24 11:12:24 (permalink)
    It's fairly easy to do that in Vsampler.

    If you go to the A#1 key(open hihat) meaning mark these samples belonging to that key.

    Then go to Zones page in Vsampler(Edit mode).

    Rightclick in the middle section and choose Extended zones settings.

    There you can set whatever conditions you like to make these samples play. That could be a midi controller in a certain range.

    Do this on both A#1 samples and F#1(closed hihat) samples and set different conditions for them.

    If CC64 is above 64 for one of them, and below 64 for one of them Then sustain pedal can be used to control these.

    The final step is to move them both the the same root key. Maybe moving A#1 to F#1 making both react to closed hihat midi noteons. But they decide which ones are played due to the conditions set and value of CC64 or whatever you used.

    This is basically what I did with DFH1 and controlling 8 levels of openess for hihat with a controller. The expression controller on keyboard was merged with midi from Yamaha DD55 drumpads, and there was suddenly a realistic feel to play the hihats and find the right cooosh.

    My post should be here on Sonar forum somewhere with some mp3s on doing this and a VS3 library for DFH1 to use if you have it.
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