External Instrument / Drum Rack

[Jon Mac]

This is driving me nuts and I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong, and I'm not sure if the problem is the external instrument or the drum rack or something else. I've been using the Addictive Drums vst and the Korg Volca Beats to add drums to my tracks. In order to use them with push and generally have more control over the individual sounds, I've mapped them into a drum rack, which seems to work more or less fine. The problem is that each sound doesn't seem to be isolated. When I solo any one sound from the Volca I can hear the whole ensemble playing faintly behind it (If I turn up the volume I can hear it's the full set of drums playing). Because this seems to be the same for each drum sound, panning has more or less no effect and reverb etc almost none. I've just got the Volca Beats so it's annoying me that I can't get the drum sounds to pan, I just have mono drums. Does anybody know what to do about this?

[Richie Witch]

If you're muting the individual drum sounds in the drum rack, that could be a big part of the problem. Even muted, the drum rack is continuing to send MIDI data to that drum voice on the Volca. It's still happily playing along. So I would think you need to turn off the drum's audio at the source.

Not sure how you would implement this with Push (someone here will know), but MIDI CC 40 thru 49 control the volume of each drum part on the Volca Beats. (40 = kick drum, 41 = snare, etc). So if you could send those messages to the Volca, you could turn down the individual sounds and stop them from being heard. Check the MIDI implementation chart in the Volca user manual for the full set of CC commands.

The only other way I can think of to do it is to swap out the Volca with a drum machine that has individual drum outputs, like the DrumBrute. It would be a complicated setup to achieve the mapping you're going for, but with one drum sound per audio input, you wouldn't have all the other drums bleeding through the audio channel on every drum channel.

[Stromkraft]

I've been using the Addictive Drums vst and the Korg Volca Beats to add drums to my tracks. In order to use them with push and generally have more control over the individual sounds, I've mapped them into a drum rack, which seems to work more or less fine. The problem is that each sound doesn't seem to be isolated.

Well, the Volca Beats only have a stereo output, right? So, unless you use samples from it, its stereo output is the end of it.

Addictive Drums, if it supports individual outs and is fully compatible with External Instrument — not all plug-ins are — should work fine, but I seem to recall it has bleeding between channels, so what you are overhearing may be both intentional and possible to adjust internally. Some producers intentionally create bleeding to make drums sound more realistic and dirty.

[Jon Mac]

Thanks for the answers. Addictive drums has overhead and ambient channels too so I can understand why the individual sounds are difficult to mess with. I thought the Volca would be fairly straightforward though. I've tried muting and muting whatever I can but I just can't isolate the sounds. It's true the Volca outputs in stereo but the sound is mono, which at the end of the day is not very useful for recording for me. The only thing I can think to do is run it through an effects rack with some EQ3s and split it into frequency ranges. It's not even nearly adequate but at least I can pan the hats with it.

[login]

It won't be possible to isolate individual sounds from the Volca. But you can do it with addictive drums, each piece bleed to overheads and room and be adjusted, so you can get only cymbals on the overheads.

[mothergarage]

why don't you mute the sounds on the volca itself?
program the beat. solo the sounds on the volca and record them to seperate audiochannels then mangle as you like.

[Jon Mac]

Hm, I guess I could try that. It's getting very finicky just to try and pan the drums, though. Recording each part as audio means I won't be able to use the Volca controls on the overall sound, but it's a start anyway. Thanks for the tip,

[mothergarage]

well, you are not restricted to a one bar loop while recording. record each part for ten minutes while tweaking it's parameters on the volca. then cut and match the parts you like.