Does anyone want a bulk dump of my R8-MKii setup?

[Chadivision]

I've always loved the R8-MKii drum machine's sounds, but I hate programming my drums into it as patterns/songs and having the rest of my sequence in the sequencer. I always hated having to remember that pattern 17 is the one with the crash cymbal on the downbeat, and pattern 18 is the one without, etc. I prefer to have my drums in Cubase along with everything else.

I also hate the general MIDI drum map. It's got a police whistle and a cuica (neither of which I use), but some of my favorite R8 sounds aren't on it.

So I finally got around to going through it and picking out every single sound that I like, and assigning each one a MIDI note number. I also set up a Cubase Drum map with readable names for all of the drums ("Brush Cymbal 1" instead of "BRCM_1", etc.).

This map spans the entire MIDI note number range, so even with my 88-key keyboard, I have to transpose to get some of the notes. Because of this, I'm planning on making a few of other Cubase maps that remove some of the sounds and scale it down to a range that will fit on a keyboard.

Anyway, I've spent several hours on this, and I'm wondering if this setup would be useful to anyone else. If so, let me know, and I will post a zip folder with the MIDI bulk dump, Cubase maps, and a spreadsheet showing the setup (in case you use something other than Cubase, so you can make your own maps by copying and pasting the drum names instead of typing them).

I'm sure that no one would like my exact choice of sounds, but if you're looking to do something similar you could use this as a starting point and save yourself a lot of button punching and typing...get your carpal tunnel the old-fashioned way, by practicing your instrument.

 

[azw1]

Wow, thanks for the generous offer. Yes, please post!!

This would be extremely useful for me - I have the exact same issue, but I'm too busy/lazy to deal with it properly as you have. Do you happen to have the 808 and 909 kits mapped? Anyway, I would really appreciate this as I'm sure it's better than my current setup. Thanks and hope you get this post...

PS the whistle is hilarious

 

[Chadivision]

I'm glad it will be useful to you. I'll try to post it as soon as I can. It might be a little while though because I'm going on a business trip soon. I'll try to get to it before I go, but it might be after I get back.

Posting it isn't a big deal, but I want to convert everything to more generic file types (standard MIDI instead of Cubase, CSV file instead of Excel, etc.) so anybody can use it no matter what software they've got. The only thing that won't convert are the Cubase LE4 maps (you'll have to make your own maps if you use something other than Cubase or use an incompatible version), but you can still use the MIDI dump and then copy and paste the instrument names from the spreadsheet files into your maps.

Sorry, I didn't include the 808 and 909 sounds. I've never cared for them personally, but I guess it really depends upon what type of music you're doing. What you'll probably want to do is to load up my setup as a starting point and then swap out the sounds you don't want and swap in the 808 and 909 kit sounds.

 

[azw1]

Awesome! No rush at all, I'm just thankful for anything better than my current mess.

btw, I'm using protools LE 8 but hopefully that will work for transmitting sysex.
oh yeah, for electronic music, the R8 has excellent reproductions of these drum machines and in general heaps of good sounds for all kinds of music.

i'm less keen on using the sequencer now because, like you, I prefer having complete control of midi through software.

anyway, looking fwd to your key assignments!