Transporting V-Drum Beats via MIDI

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tripp13
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Tripp13

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Hey folks. Let me give you a brief setup and see if you can guide me. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I am heading to the recording studio within the next few months to lay down a new album. I have access to a set of Roland V-Drums. It would be WAY less expensive for me to record the V-Drum MID patterns in my own time and transport them to the studio for assigning samples to each pattern. Can this be done??

The studio uses ProTools of course. I want to be able to record the MIDI info in the comfort of my own home, take it to the studio, dump it into ProTools there, and assign samples to each piece of the drumset in addition to being able to adjust all individual pieces of the set independently for final mix. If this is possible, what's the cheapest way to go about recording the patterns from the V-Drums into my laptop, saving them, and transporting the files to the studio? Thanks in advance!

Tripp
 
One thing you should make sure of is that the studio you're bringing the midi data to understands what you're doing.

The V-Drums have pretty good range of sounds for different velocities. Your midi data is only going to have limited range compared to the sounds you hear from the kit. By this, I mean that for maximum realism, you're going to want multiple samples for each peice of the kit (layers) so that when the midi note is a lower velocity, you can actually have a lower velocity sound rather than just the same sound at a lower volume. You'll also want to alternate various(but really similar) snare and kick samples, especially for faster songs, rolls and double kick. If you don't take these things into consideration, your tracks aren't going to sound much better than a simple drum machine.
 
Forgot to mention that if you have the resources to record the midi data in the first place, it really wouldn't be too much more difficult for you to assign the samples yourself and save even more time and money.

FL Studio comes with a drum machine plugin called FPC.

This doesn't look like the newest version, but it's pretty much the same:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb1WyEUYQAE
 
A major problem you'll have is that the MIDI output of a V-Drum performance does not accurately reflect the audio version of it. For example, you can get nuanced hi-hat control while playing the kit, but the corresponding MIDI that will be transmitted will only be full open or closed.

Discussion here:
https://homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=269583
 
Whale Bone said:
A major problem you'll have is that the MIDI output of a V-Drum performance does not accurately reflect the audio version of it. For example, you can get nuanced hi-hat control while playing the kit, but the corresponding MIDI that will be transmitted will only be full open or closed.

Discussion here:
https://homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=269583
Click to expand...

That's pretty much what I've explained in my posts. I'm not 100% sure, but in the hi-hat situation from your example, my guess would be that the v-drums would have seperate midi channels for the different hi-hat sounds anyway, so he would just have to assign the varied samples to the midi channels.
 
I Got Riffs, I wasn't ignoring your comment. I thought we were discussing different issues. In the case I mention, as far as I can tell the midi info for the performance simply does not exist. While the varying velocities of drum hits are transmitted via midi, the fact that the hi-hat pedal is halfway up isn't. I recorded all the midi (omni) from a performance and inspected it and didn't find any pedal (additional controller) info, just a change between open and closed hi-hat notes. But the V-Drum module obviously makes the distinction. In this regard, I do not see a way past this problem.

In your case, along the lines of what you went on to suggest, I figured you could use a more sophisticated drum synth that would map different samples to different levels of velocity.
 
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