Hi, my drummer and I have been trying desperately to get his Roland TD-5 electric drum kit triggering a LM-4 VSTi inside Cubase 5. It is sounding great EXCEPT the hi-hats. The LM-4 only responds to 3 notes for hi-hat (Open HH, Closed HH, Pedal HH). These of course mute each other when triggering. The problem is that a real hi-hat has a lot of variation when "opening" or "closing". I believe his drum brain uses Control Change messages to simulate this (maybe it's altering the release envelope on a sample??? We're not sure).

Does anyone have any experience getting a realistic sounding hi-hat with a LM-4 or any other drum module?? Do any of the drum modules automatically respond to control change messages the way the TD-5 does?? We are very new to MIDI, so heavy duty programming may not be too easy right now. Any ideas??? Thanks in advance.

Hi Jethro

For more variations, use the desired samples in different velocity zones of your LM-4. Hope this helps.

Pepe

Pepe,

Using velocity zones is one way of adding variation to the sound, but I don't think that's exactly what Jethro means. Even when you hit a hi-hat or drum twice at the exact same velocity, then it still could sound slightly different because you may not have hit it in the same spot. This kind of tonal differences could add life to otherwise lifeless programmed drum tracks. What could help is too slightly vary the pitch of each hit. And perhaps if you put the sounds through a slightly varying filter it could also help. I'm not sure how to set this up, but there might be a few geniuses here who do know.

[ 23 August 2001: Message edited by: Lotuz ]

I think what jethro is talking about is using the CC information from a MIDI hi-hat controller pedal to control either the release time of the sample, or the actual sample being used. That way, putting the pedal down halfway or two thirds would change the hi-hat sound instead of just using the standard GM closed, pedal, and open options.

Yes, Tufif is exactly correct. Although we are still having a tough time recording the CC data, it's supposed to be sent. We're still a bit new to this.

So how about it??? Anyone having success in any way with this? How do you do realistic hi-hat patterns in a software drum module?? I'm mainly curious to know if any of the other drum editors do this better than the LM-4. We do have some nice sounding kits in the LM-4, though, so we'd still like to use those. Anyone????

Right now the only thing that does this well is Gigasampler, with its "dimensions" feature. DR-008 is getting a module to do approximately this (select between different samples with a MIDI controller), unlike Giga it only works in 1 dimension however.

...not really sure about this, but maybe you can use a MIDI translation utility (such as MIDI-ox and the likes) to translate the signals of the pedal to velocity values, that way you can use velocity-layers to switch between several layers of hi-hat sounds. Many VSTi drumunits, including the DR-008, can do velocity layering (I think the DR-008 is the most flexible with its specific modules for this).

quote:

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Originally posted by crimsonwarlock:
...not really sure about this, but maybe you can use a MIDI translation utility (such as MIDI-ox and the likes) to translate the signals of the pedal to velocity values,

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But that way you'd lose velocity control over the hi-hat. Unless maybe you could map the hi-hat velocity to control the sample playback volume while the CC is mapped to control the velocity which would select the different sample (which would playback at the volume selected by the actual velocity data)? This is starting to get complicated.

> This is starting to get complicated.

Oh yeah.

I can imagine a physical modelling tool like "Plucked Strings" just for hi-hats where you can control two things: the stick and the pedal. Would it be so hard to program this? I don't know...

Meanwhile, I extract samples from Steinberg's VST Drum Sessions, load them into different velocity zones...

...and: it sounds really alive.

...and: it starts to be... easy!

You don't have many possibilities to combine this way... but it works for popular music styles. If you are more in Jazz style or something like that, buy a good mic and ask a drummer to play the beat. Or do it yourself and make loops...

I know, what I'm telling here is not very worthy for developers or what Jethro means... but from musicians, maybe.

Doing it the fast way,

Pepe