Question on Muting

[Tenaba]

Hello all, I thought I'd try to migrate my drum workflow from Hydrogen Drum Machine to DrumGizmo, making a new kit with all my samples in it.

- I'd like to ask how I can mute a single instrument, i.e. grabbing a cymbal to stop it from ringing out. I can't figure out how to do this. I'll be using Ardour to sequence this, if that helps.
- Similarly, do repeated notes from the same instrument mute the preceding note? E.g. If I hit a snare twice, does the second hit mute the first one? And if so, can the decay time of the muted note be controlled?
- I can also see some resources on this "directed choke" functionality, which seems nice to try out later. Is there any guide on muting groups, or the functionality was superseded by directed choke; for instance if I want all instruments in one mute group to mute all other instruments in the group?

Sorry if the answers are obvious, I tried searching online and playing with the parameters using the DSRKit, but I can learn a bit. Thanks very much!

[deva]

- I'd like to ask how I can mute a single instrument, i.e. grabbing a cymbal to stop it from ringing out. I can't figure out how to do this. I'll be using Ardour to sequence this, if that helps.

Muting of instruments can be done using after touch midi events. Sending an aftertouch event with velocity 0 will mute the cymbal.
Some of the kits have explicit cymbal-stop samples which you can also use, but there you cannot control the length of the note before the grab.

- Similarly, do repeated notes from the same instrument mute the preceding note? E.g. If I hit a snare twice, does the second hit mute the first one? And if so, can the decay time of the muted note be controlled?

Normally the samples do not mute each other at all.
You can however enable "voice limit" feature if your system is not able to keep up, which will have an upper limit of voices per instrument playing at once. However this is not recommended.

- I can also see some resources on this "directed choke" functionality, which seems nice to try out later. Is there any guide on muting groups, or the functionality was superseded by directed choke; for instance if I want all instruments in one mute group to mute all other instruments in the group?

The concept of mute groups can for example make a closed-hihat note mute all open hihat notes. Instruments in the same group will mute all other instruments in the same group in both directions. Often this simple behaviour is exactly what you want, and the mute-groups still works.
Alternatively to this you can use "directed-chokes" which can make one instrument mute another but not vice versa. The syntax is more involved so this can be used when mute-groups cannot express what you want.
You can read about directed-choke here: https://drumgizmo.org/wiki/doku.php?id= ... ctionality
And see an example of a drumkit xml file with groups here: https://drumgizmo.org/wiki/doku.php?id= ... xml_format

[Tenaba]

Muting of instruments can be done using after touch midi events. Sending an aftertouch event with velocity 0 will mute the cymbal.
Some of the kits have explicit cymbal-stop samples which you can also use, but there you cannot control the length of the note before the grab.

Thank you for the help, that clears most of it up for me. Though I've been having some trouble with muting individual notes. I've tried using automation in Ardour with the Pressure/Aftertouch control, though I didn't hear any muting, so it seems to be something different. Could you briefly explain where I should be looking to send MIDI events like Aftertouch? Thanks again.

[deva]

If I remember correctly there was a regression error in 0.9.19 that made the directed chokes no longer work.
It has been fixed in git, but we have made no release containing the fix yet.