Playing electric drums through pc.... help!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bonzai
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Bonzai

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Hey guys,

My drums have been driving me crazy and I just can't seem to figure it out.

All I want to do is connect my electric drums (Arbiter XTD - 102) to my pc and record that way.

I have Reason 4.0 and Cubase SX3 and man.... I'm not getting this to work, this is what I've setup so far.

I have a midi cable running into a MIDI to USB converter to my pc. Now I've tried setting up my drums to play though Reason and Cubase and even both toghter, but I just can't hear my drums when I play.

When I'm in either programs, if I select a input I get the option of a "usb sound device", so the cable is being picked up, but as I said if I hit the drums there's no sound at all.

I'm not expert in either programs, but know they are more than cable of doing the job.... question is just damn how!

Any replies appreciated.

Bonzai
 
It sounds like your problem is not with the track input, rather the track 'output'.

There's no sound, but is there any signal? (i.e. .. if you activate the track to record, do you see the meter moving when you hit a pad or something)?

If it is getting a signal.. set the midi 'output' to something to generate sound. This could be.. umm.. GM Wave synthisizer, or a plugin (I send mine to a jamstix VSTi). For me, the jamstix generates the sounds being sent from my drum pads. I use Cubase LE, so the interface might be a bit different, and i can't tell you exactly where to go.

Also.. you will need to map the midi notes to the appropriate drums. There should also be a place you can select 'Drum map'. The default one usually works,.. unless you want to change it.
 
Oh yeah.. if you get this figured out, .. the big problem for me was latency.

I had to throttle down the latency settings on my interface wwaaaaayyy down.
 
The important thing to understand about midi is that you aren't sending music to the pc. You are sending instruction to trigger a sample or vst. In other words you can't use midi to play the drum sounds off of your module, well you can but its kind of a difficult workaround (information is in the link I posted). It took me a while to grasp this concept, but its the first step to understanding midi. Basically you need something like a VST to be triggered by the midi in order to get any kind of sound, you can get a reaction from the meter, but will not get any sound.
good luck
James
 
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