Electronic Music 411 - midi drum maps in live

03/21/08 + minisystem

i asked this of live 5 a couple of years ago and eventually gave up but i've just upgraded to live 7 and with drum and instrument racks and the external instrument dodad i kind of feel like this might be possible now:

what i want are cubase style midi drum maps. i have lots of external drum machines and when i sequence them with midi i want a drum map that displays the drum hits as 'kick' and 'hi hat', etc as opposed to just a standard midi keyboard layout with 'C0' and 'D2' labeling the notes.

impulse looked hopeful but you couldn't route the midi to anything but the sample.

anyway, i feel like i'm close but just wondered if anyone's done this already???

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03/22/08 + celibacyclub

you could make a drum rack of external instrument modules.

theres a simpler way... what is it.. hmm.

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03/22/08 + minisystem

yep. took me a while to figure out the MIDI routing (that's what stumped me the first time), but that's how I did it, and now have cubase style named midi drum maps (sort of). now i can build a mother drum rack with all my drum machines mapped out on it.

VERY NICE!!!

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03/22/08 + beliefmask

I remember standing in your (old) studio and staring at you gear and having no idea why such a simple thing couldn't be implemented through live.

Welllll...if at first you don't succeed. just wait a handful of years!

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edited: Mar 24 2008 + minisystem

yep i set up those darn drum maps and used them with a midi'd 808 in a set last night. i think i just might be able to finally convert my whole life over to live 7.

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03/25/08 + dkarma

can you post a quick rundown of what you clicked on to get teh midi maps set up in the first place plz thx

03/25/08 + yghartsyrt

just equip the drum racks with external instrument-plugs.
there you go.

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edited: Mar 25 2008 + minisystem

yghartsyrt sums it up well, but there's a bit more of a trick for it, at least their was for me:

(doing this from work with no live 7 in front of me so it'll be a little vague - i can clarify when i'm sitting in front of my music computer)

create a midi track and drop a drum rack into it. then drag the 'external instrument' plug in into the window beside the drum pads (you can drag them onto the pads as well if you want to make that pad the midi note that will trigger your external drum sound). one external instrument is for one drum sound. you will need an instance of the external instrument plugin for each drum hit.

this is where i got stumped, because by default there's no place in the external instrument settings to set the midi note send and recieve, but over on the left of drum racks at the bottom there's a little icon you can click that will expand the external instrument settings so you can then change the send and receive midi note settings. for example, receive on C1 but transmit on D#1. This is nice because you can load up multiple external hardware drum machines on the same drum track, even if the drum sounds are triggered by the same midi notes.

Set the note you want to receive on (this places it in the corresponding drum pad) and then set the note you want it to transmit on, corresponding to whatever drum sound you want to trigger from your external drum machine. rename the instrument to that drum sound. '808 kick drum' for example.

Create a new external instrument for each drum sound you want to trigger and set its midi notes and rename it accordingly.

Now, for each external instrument you need to set the midi port/channel to the port/channel that corresponds to the midi connection to your drum machine. This is done on the next panel in drum racks, the external instrument settings.

Now pick any of them, but only one, and in the same panel select the audio input for the drum machine. Assuming your drum machine is connected through only a single mono input (or linked stereo inputs), you only need to do this for one of the drum hits. If you do it for more than one then the sounds start doubling up. This confused me for a while because as I set each audio input for each drum sound the whole track kept getting louder and louder. This applies, of course, only if you're running more than one drum hit through the same audio channel. If you're running your kick and snare through separate channels, then obviously, you need to set the audio input appropriately.

Anyway, maybe there's an easier way, but once this is set up then you can put all of your drum machines on one track, if you want. Most importantly, for me, it allows you to name the midi notes with the drum sound making editing the midi clip pattern much easier.

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03/25/08 + dkarma

thx a ton I'm gonna set that up for my bent tr 505 and 707. I really wanted something all along that I could map to the new sounds because when you hit a switch the snare sounds like another inst. and what used to be the toms is now a crazy droning...