Midi drum stuff for the hard of thinking:

Alan McGuinness

New member
I would place myself firmly at the top of the tree when it comes to midi = brain exploding. But I have faced my fears, and stood up to the beast commonly referred to as midi and low and behold I have only gone and got a fucking result!

You see, I have been messing around trying to get Cakewalk to talk to my drum machine (Zoom 234) for what seems like an eternity. Now having consulted various forms of advice (web pages and this BBS) the advice varied from “rocket science” to “read the fucking manual”.

At this point, if the word midi is a thing of great beauty to you and makes you feel all warm and cosy, you may want to go and read another post because this will probably bore the crap out of you. On the other hand if like me the word midi has you running for garlic and a crucifix this may be of some help.

Setup:
CW Pro 9
Audigy (Internal)
Zoom 234

Mission:
Make a midi drum track in CW Pro 9 play via the Zoom 234 therefore using the sounds in the zoom to record back to wav in CW Pro 9. Plus (this proved to be the tricky bit) make CW play different drum kits from the zoom. The idea being, same drum pattern but change the kit the drum machine plays from within CW.

Warning:
If you’re a midi person still reading this, you are about to have your intelligence well and truly insulted.

Making your drum pattern:
Ok, open a midi drum pattern as normal. Probably opens in track 10, personally I usually drag it up to track 1. (No particular reason, I just like it there) Now at the moment it sounds like shit because it’s playing GM drums but leave that alone for a while and work on it “as is”. Cut, Copy, Loop, Paste until you have a pattern that works for you. A point worth mentioning at this stage is velocity, it really is worth spending some time randomizing the velocity a bit to give it a better feel. Ok, save it (File, Save as, ”Your Song 1” in midi drum patterns folder) Close down what you have in front of you and go and open the one you just saved.

Connections:
This will vary form setup to setup but in my case (see setup above) plug your midi cable into the “MIDI OUT” on your sound card, and the other end goes to (you guessed it) “MIDI IN” on the drum machine. That’s it for now, because we are only going to be listening to the drum pattern with the headphones on the drum machine so we can choose a drum kit we like before recording it into CW. (more of that later).


Language problems:
Now we’re going to make CW talk to your drum machine, and more to the point your drum machine listen and understand the message.

Cakewalk side of things:
Go to: Options-Midi Devices.
Now you have a screen called Midi Ports, (Mmmm don’t like the look of this, last time I was in here everything went to shit and ruin). Don’t panic, we’re just gonna select the port we want to send the information on to the drum machine.
As you look at it, you have:
Input ports on the left: (Feel free to completely ignore this)
Output ports on the right: (This is where we want to be)

Which output port to choose? There will be all kinds of shit in here, but one of them relates to the port you just plugged your midi cable into, that’s the one on the front panel. (The MIDI OUT on your soundcard). In my case its “SB AUDIGY MIDI PORT 11 (DC00)” So select this (It’s now highlighted in blue) and click “move selected device to top”. Ok this and go back to the track view.

In the track view you should double click on the “Source” panel on the track where your drum pattern is. This will bring up “Track Properties” I have no idea what most of this means but this is how mines set and it works.
Source = None
Port = 1-SB AUDIGY MIDI PORT 11 (DC00)
Channel = 10
Bank select method = Normal
Bank = None
Patch = None (Actually this is where you change your drum kits, but more of that later)

Ok, that’s got the Cakewalk side of things doing what we want.

Drum machine side of things:
Now, this is where we enter the world of “suck it and see” because unless you are using a Zoom 234 or similar I wouldn’t even dream of trying to point you in the right direction and sadly you may have to refer to the dreaded manual for how your machine receives information via midi. Having said that, I’m sure there will be people on this BBS, far more eloquent than me who may well point you in the right direction when prodded with a sharp stick.

Here’s what I do on the Zoom:
Turn it on, (Always a good start)
Press “Function button” (bottom right)
Press “MIDI” (Pad # 13 again bottom right)
The L.E.D. screen should now have “INT” showing, you can change this to “MIDI” with the + and – keys directly below the screen (also marked as “solo and mute”)

Now I aint figured this “INT” & “MIDI” thing out yet (and may never do so) but during experiments it doesn’t seem to matter. But I leave it set as “MIDI” for no other reason than it seems appropriate. Also you are supposed to assign channels (Mmm, I know, the hairs on your neck are starting to rise) Well I personally have no idea what the hell that’s all about, but mine are set this way and it works so who gives a shit.
Press Drum A button use the + and – keys till it says 10 in the panel.
Do the same for Drum B.
Apparently the Bass should read 9 which I have done and it seems to work.

Mmmm, man make Fire!
Now if all goes to plan, you should now be able to play the midi drum track and listen to it through the headphones of your drum machine, sounding not unlike a real set of drums because now its playing the sounds you have in the drum machine.

If not, it will probably have something to do with your midi ports. So refer back to “Cakewalk side of things:” and change the port till you find the one that works.

Changing the drum kits:
Now this had me tearing my hair out, I thought OK I’ve got CW talking to the Zoom and it’s playing the sounds from the zoom. But the zoom has loads of different drum kits (some of which are excellent, depending on your taste) and I would like to change the drum kit to suit the mood. Anyway after many trips to the bathroom armed with the Zoom manual (this is where I do most of my best brain work) I figured it out.

You see the sneaky bastards at zoom had kindly put a reference table in the back of the manual explaining the relationship between what setting you make on the PC and what drum kit that plays in the drum machine. I’m thinking now where talking, but the reference they make goes like this: (Hence the expression “sneaky bastards”)

Midi program change # to Drum assign
(Example)
PC # 2 = Kit # 0 = Kit: Live Rock

You see this is where the stupid among us fall flat on our ass, I’m thinking OK where do we change the PC # from within CW? Turns out the bastards are referring to the “PATCH” when they talk about PC # but to the idle observer and hard of thinking this really fucks things up because the patch’s are not listed as numbers but types of instruments ie: Acoustic Grand, Clavinet, French Horn and the like.

So the above should read:

Patch “Bright Acoustic Piano” will play Kit # 0 which is “Live Rock”

So with reference to “The Cakewalk side of things” Patch = None (Actually this is where you change your drum kits, but more of that later). Now you know what I mean.

Recording said drums:
Anyway, now we have that sorted out you can record your drums back to CW in wav via the “line out” on your drum machine to the “line in” on your soundcard. Make sure the mixer settings are OK (record from “line in” and take the time to get the levels right) and away you go.

Fine tuning:
Before recording to wav, you might want to split the midi drum file to individual tracks and record each track to wav separately. To do this, go to Edit – Run Cal – open your cal folder and select “splitnot” (split note to tracks) when it prompts you about destination tracks and the like just OK everything (assuming your drum track has been dragged to track one). Now you have the drum track split down to individual tracks and you can solo each track and record individually to give you real sounding drums, each on there own track which you can then mess around with in the mixer view and add whatever effects (Reverb, Comp, EQ, Ect) that work for you.

As a foot note, I do not claim to knowledgeable on this subject. I had a problem trying to get something done and this worked for me. With any luck it may point others in a direction that gets them away from banging their head in the wall and down to making some music.


Regards

Alan.
 
That was a really nice and informative presentation Alan. Highly educational and as laid back as sittin on the porch after dinner.
:)
 
Alan,

Sounds like you have it figured out!

I don't have CWP9 in front of me right now, but you should be able to double-click on that "PATCH" field and, using a button that says "define instruments" or something similar, set up your own set of patch and note names specific to your Zoom using the table in the back of the manual as a guide. It takes time to figure it out and do the data entry, but the convenience of just being able to select the drum kits by name or to have the right note names displayed in Piano Roll view is pretty rewarding.

OB
 
That was a good explanation Alan. Think it's rare -in these age- someone still wanna make that long helping post like this. Very helpfull for beginer.
 
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