drums FUBAR (spelled i n c o m p e t e n c e )

[D-Tuned]

Here's another mess in midiland: the GM drum kit is a standard that goes into channel 10, but if you feed a GM drum track staff to Hydrogen then most of the notes will play nothing. And then there are the dozen or so other drum-kits hidden away in obscure patch banks that even if you find you will never find again. Oh boy.

Long story short, I took out my 2017 effort to do me a Mohicans-Promentory backing track for some rework. The good part was that in that early work I had just fed different drum tracks to I can't even remember which drum-kits in an act of ultimate disrespect that should have resulted in disaster. But didn't. It gave me what I thought was a not bad alternative in lieu of the other drum tracks around that were over-dones anyway.

Problem is that while I have tons of rosegarden files in an 'evolution' folder I cannot for the life of me redo the beautiful drum tratracks that I had done the first time. IF any drummers should have some of these drum tracks just hanging around I'd sure like to try them.

I've uploaded 3 mp3's and a drumtracks midi:

The old piece foo which I've lost the midi/rg file:
--- the intro sucks, drums are not bad from a few stumbles ---
https://trixtar.org/3/music/LastMohican ... stmidi.mp3

The new piece I redone from midi bits & pieces & from memory:
--- poor show all around except a corrected intro and even that LIMPS ---
https://trixtar.org/3/music/LastMohican ... newbad.mp3

The old piece with the fromnt of the new one:
--- intro is ok, the rest is bad drums ---
https://trixtar.org/3/music/LastMohican ... wfront.mp3

The drums tracks and the lead midi of the new bad one:
https://trixtar.org/3/music/LastMohican ... -drums.mid

Any one who does drums will take one look at the midi tracks and spot the mistakes blindfolded. I'd like to use Hydrogen for drums and Yoshimi for the lead but will adapt to whatever suggestions I may get.

TIA

[D-Tuned]

To clarify, let's say I create a piece with nothing but 16 hydrogen drum tracks; how in hydrogen or rosegarden do I see & set the individual volume for each?

[Impostor]

You can feed H2 midi over a single channel or over all 16 them. There is no separation of audio relating to the midi channels you feed it note data over. Audio is separated by instrument, and H2 includes a mixer you can use for mixing. You can also route the audio of all instruments separately, or bundled into stereo, to other applications. And of course you must load the exact drumkit for which the midi was created, otherwise you may get instrument mismatches, or silence. And "input mode" should be set to "drumkit".

If you insist on having audio separated by midi track for whatever reason, you could route their respective instruments into separate audio groups in a DAW. Or if different tracks play the same instrument, use multiple H2 instances and use different midi ports. I don't see the benefit of doing this over just using the H2 mixer, but whatever.

You could also set up a midi map for controlling the H2 mixer settings via midi CC if you want to control it with a hardware controller, and it has enough sliders and knobs. You can assign multiple settings to the same slider if you so desire..

[D-Tuned]

You can feed H2 midi over a single channel or over all 16 them. There is no separation of audio relating to the midi channels you feed it note data over. Audio is separated by instrument, and H2 includes a mixer you can use for mixing. You can also route the audio of all instruments separately, or bundled into stereo, to other applications. And of course you must load the exact drumkit for which the midi was created, otherwise you may get instrument mismatches, or silence. And "input mode" should be set to "drumkit".

If you insist on having audio separated by midi track for whatever reason, you could route their respective instruments into separate audio groups in a DAW. Or if different tracks play the same instrument, use multiple H2 instances and use different midi ports. I don't see the benefit of doing this over just using the H2 mixer, but whatever.

You could also set up a midi map for controlling the H2 mixer settings via midi CC if you want to control it with a hardware controller, and it has enough sliders and knobs. You can assign multiple settings to the same slider if you so desire..

Thank you for the time taken to explain. As a drums and especially H2 greenhorn I would also like to illustrate just how far that is over my head by fielding vague notions of research subs exploring the wreck of the Titanic

I use rosegarden and in the "old piece for which I've lost the midi/rg file" at about 1:13) the cow bell is struck extra loud. But I know of no dynamic mixers in rosegarden or H2 that allow me to program sounds to be "keyframable" as it were (such as for video in kdenlive) so what I probably did was use a drum track executed either by Gen-Midi or H2 and then another louder track with only the cowbell hits at that spot (actually repeated later as well). I've done this kind of cannibalism with other sounds in rosegarden (which I use exlusively, supported by other music apps at the staff-composition level without midi controller editing) when I want accent, an alternative for which is taking just the track into Audacity for dynamic volume enveloping but that methoid is full of hoies.

Let me provide another example of that for which I'm fishing. I can insert in a rosegarden file two (or more) tracks assigned to ZASF-dssi #1 (Bass1), an octave apart. By adjusting the volumes in rosegarden's internal mixer I can get the effect I want with or without selectively chopping notes or sections out up either track.

If I use two or more H2 tracks in the same rosegarden file it seems like I'm hearing different volumes for say kicks or cowbells but I cannot figure out how to control those i.e. how do I get the H2 mixer to work on a track-by-track basis?

[Impostor]

If I use two or more H2 tracks in the same rosegarden file it seems like I'm hearing different volumes for say kicks or cowbells but I cannot figure out how to control those i.e. how do I get the H2 mixer to work on a track-by-track basis?

Each midi note has an associated velocity setting, which for drums translates to the force you hit an instrument with. Moreover, hydrogen drum kits often contain velocity layers for their instruments with different samples for each layer. (Eg. a soft snare hit does not sound the same as a hard hit with decreased volume.) So one explanation would be that the different tracks contain notes for the same instrument with different velocities.

Notes, regardless of the midi channel they are sent with, are bound to specific instruments in your H2 drumkit. If you send note C-2 over either channel 1 or 2, both play the same instrument on the same audio channel in H2.

In H2 itself, you can only control the volume per instrument in the mixer. If you want to adjust note velocities, you should do that in Rosegarden. Or, if you desparately want to control H2's mixer via midi CC from Rosegarden, you could set it up so that a single cc controls the volumes of all instruments belonging to a single Rosegarden midi track, but I really think that's complete overkill. And if certain instruments are played on more than one midi track, you'll run into trouble anyway. You should clean up your midi file first then.

[D-Tuned]

If I use two or more H2 tracks in the same rosegarden file it seems like I'm hearing different volumes for say kicks or cowbells but I cannot figure out how to control those i.e. how do I get the H2 mixer to work on a track-by-track basis?

Each midi note has an associated velocity setting, which for drums translates to the force you hit an instrument with. Moreover, hydrogen drum kits often contain velocity layers for their instruments with different samples for each layer. (Eg. a soft snare hit does not sound the same as a hard hit with decreased volume.) So one explanation would be that the different tracks contain notes for the same instrument with different velocities.

Notes, regardless of the midi channel they are sent with, are bound to specific instruments in your H2 drumkit. If you send note C-2 over either channel 1 or 2, both play the same instrument on the same audio channel in H2.

In H2 itself, you can only control the volume per instrument in the mixer. If you want to adjust note velocities, you should do that in Rosegarden. Or, if you desparately want to control H2's mixer via midi CC from Rosegarden, you could set it up so that a single cc controls the volumes of all instruments belonging to a single Rosegarden midi track, but I really think that's complete overkill. And if certain instruments are played on more than one midi track, you'll run into trouble anyway. You should clean up your midi file first then.

Very little time to absorb paradigm upsets

I cleaned the drum tracks up a bit but there's still a very long way to what I'd call a wrap...

http://www.trixtar.org/3/music/LastMohi ... ntory.html

Addendum
Sorry, removed the mp3 in the above due to copyright concerns raised in another one of my threads

[D-Tuned]

I put the draft up on youtube ..for now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP-eWBDB6lQ

[D-Tuned]

Finally got the drums almost right, this level of no-perfection will have to do for a jamming track, it wil be a lobg tim ebefore I work on it again.

http://www.trixtar.org/3/music/LastMohi ... ntory.html