Template for Ardour and drumgizmo

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Digital Larry
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Template for Ardour and drumgizmo

Post by Digital Larry »

I decided to check out drumgizmo in Ardour as a way of getting drum sounds. Wow is that complicated to set up.

I followed this guide:

https://libremusicproduction.com/tutori ... zmo-ardour

It's a little out of date as some non-default options are needed to get it to behave the way the guide indicates (i.e. you have to turn off Strict I/O and enable Flexible I/O in drumgizmo).

The recommended video tutorial at YouTube is more than an hour long and has no listed index markers. This is not a good sign. How often do you watch tutorial videos that are more than an hour long? I can appreciate that effort that went into making something like that, but it's really hard to consume.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_LZt08 ... e&t=19m49s

Also, Ardour crashed/locked up several times while I was going through this and there's only so much of that I can take.

I notice that Ardour frequently takes a long time to show the first screen after I start it. I don't know if it was always like that. If I run "top" then I see Ardour at 95% CPU or thereabouts.

Since the number of samples seem to vary for each drum kit, seems like a different template would be required for each one. I haven't gotten to the point where I can actually audition any of them with external MIDI triggering so it's hard to tell. I am not the kind of guy who needs a ton of different drum sets. I'd be good with one (I think).

I am using Ubuntu Studio 19, kxStudio repos added in, Athlon X4 740 with 8 GB of RAM.

edit: ah isn't that search feature handy!

viewtopic.php?f=48&t=15946&hilit=ardour+drumgizmo
merlyn
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Re: Template for Ardour and drumgizmo

Post by merlyn »

The guide you linked to is old.

I found Drum Gimzo straightforward to use with Ardour. When you select Drum Gizmo as a plugin there is an option to 'fan out'. Select that and Ardour creates a track for each drum. The kits are big and take a while to load. Once a kit is loaded DG works without issue on my system.
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Digital Larry
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Re: Template for Ardour and drumgizmo

Post by Digital Larry »

I'll probably give it (configuring DrumGizmo in Ardour) a shot some other time. I was in full swing creatively and this was like a brick wall to that process, so I probably seem a bit grumpy.

It's not limited to music apps of course, tons of available tutorials about Linux stuff require reading between the lines. That one particular point about DG's flexible output mode took me about 45 minutes to figure out. Be nice if these tutorials were kept at Github since 95% is accurate and people could make corrections to them as time goes on.
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Re: Template for Ardour and drumgizmo

Post by merlyn »

I agree that up to date documentation would make Linux music easier to get into.

Drum Gizmo is good -- it's worth trying.

The way I have used it is :

Add a MIDI track.
Select Drum Gizmo in the dialogue. I used 'Strict-I/O'.
Another small dialogue appears. Select '16 channel'.
Now the button 'Fan Out' is available. Click it and a light comes on.
Click 'Add'

Drum Gizmo will appear with 16 channels in a group.

Since the article was written the process has become simpler. I think the 'Fan Out' is an improvement from the Ardour side. The article refers to Ardour 3.x, so it looks like Ardour 5.12 is significantly easier to use in this case.
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Re: Template for Ardour and drumgizmo

Post by English Guy »

I use drumgizmo in Mixbus and it has the best drums I have been able to get.

When you get a decent Drumgizmo setup, save it as a template for future use (you can do this in Mixbus and its cousin Ardour). That saves setting it up every time.

I have my drumgizmo setup with channels mixed, reverb setup etc so that all these steps need not be repeated. Obviously that is all tweaked on a per song basis and you will need different templates for any kit you use.
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Digital Larry
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Re: Template for Ardour and drumgizmo

Post by Digital Larry »

merlyn wrote: Add a MIDI track.
Select Drum Gizmo in the dialogue. I used 'Strict-I/O'.
Another small dialogue appears. Select '16 channel'.
Now the button 'Fan Out' is available. Click it and a light comes on.
Click 'Add'

Drum Gizmo will appear with 16 channels in a group.
Well thank you so much, I wish I'd known this yesterday. Compared to the guide, this adds all mono buses rather than setting up 2 stereo ones for ambience and overheads, is that true?

Few observations, before I forget them:

You still need to go through and ID each bus against the drum sound.

I tried soloing a bus, but they all soloed at once. Any way to allow soloing a single bus?

I tried turning down the drum bleed feature, this made it a bit easier to tell what was what.

I don't know why, but the ride cymbal triggered by Hydrogen sounds like it's going through a 1 beat delay. None of the other drum hits sound like that.

I set my Hydrogen pattern up to send MIDI notes per drum hit. This explains why I wasn't hearing anything yesterday - Hydrogen's default MIDI channel for drum hits is "off".

Soloing drum tracks in Hydrogen apparently does not affect MIDI out.

It's not necessary to load a blank drum kit into Hydrogen when using its MIDI for Drumgizmo (as suggested elsewhere on this forum), just don't connect Hydrogen to the mixer and you won't hear it.

A few of the drum note defaults in Hydrogen worked with the Muldj-something drum kit in Drumgizmo, but most of them not.
English Guy wrote:I use drumgizmo in Mixbus and it has the best drums I have been able to get.

When you get a decent Drumgizmo setup, save it as a template for future use (you can do this in Mixbus and its cousin Ardour). That saves setting it up every time.

I have my drumgizmo setup with channels mixed, reverb setup etc so that all these steps need not be repeated. Obviously that is all tweaked on a per song basis and you will need different templates for any kit you use.
Thanks for your observations and suggestions.
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Re: Template for Ardour and drumgizmo

Post by Michael Willis »

Digital Larry wrote:Compared to the guide, this adds all mono buses rather than setting up 2 stereo ones for ambience and overheads, is that true?
Yes, but you can modify the signal routing after the fact. Modify one of the ambient busses to be stereo in/out, route the other ambient channel to it, and delete the other corresponding mono bus. Repeat for the overhead mics.
Digital Larry wrote:I tried soloing a bus, but they all soloed at once. Any way to allow soloing a single bus?
They are set up as a group. You can decide what properties are shared by the group; right-click on the group name, click "Edit Group...", uncheck the box by "Soloing".
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Digital Larry
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Re: Template for Ardour and drumgizmo

Post by Digital Larry »

Thanks Michael, I'll give that a shot.
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Re: Template for Ardour and drumgizmo

Post by merlyn »

The Drum Gizmo website has a list of what the channels are. Here's the Muldjord kit :

Ch 1: Ambience left
Ch 2: Ambience right
Ch 3: Hihat
Ch 4: Kickdrum left
Ch 5: Kickdrum right
Ch 6: Overhead left
Ch 7: Overhead right
Ch 8: Ride left
Ch 9: Ride right
Ch 10: Snare bottom
Ch 11: Snare top
Ch 12: Rack tom 1
Ch 13: Rack tom 2
Ch 14: Rack tom 3
Ch 15: Floor tom
Ch 16: Kick drum trigger signals

I would pan the stereo channels hard left and hard right -- Ch1 hard left, Ch2 hard right, Ch6 hard left, Ch7 hard right.
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Re: Template for Ardour and drumgizmo

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