ableton session & electronic drums with new drt triggers

[John Arkell]

anyone else using/loving this? had any problems?

using them with mesh heads on an acoustic kit... lots of fun... can loop like a crazy man and have massive stereo kits at hand...

anyone else doing similar things? got any tips/ideas?

[bartend7]

what are you running the drum triggers into, a drum trigger to midi interface, or just an audio interface? I have a similar set up, but use an acoustic kit, not mesh heads and a launchpad/korg nano contorl instead of apc.

[dude rancher]

i have been using a similar setup with a drumkat where your alesis is. how did you mount the apc 40? what is your interface for the triggers? i have been using an old yamaha dtx brain into a saffire le. i use standard drum heads with ddrum triggers. i have thought about mesh heads. what kind are you using?

[theophilus]

did this with an alesis dm10 kit a while back. worked great, in fact because session drums has like 6 levels of open/closed in some ways it was better than some of my other, later libraries (ssd and owd)...

don't forgot to hook your hh controller to the hh open/closed macro knob in the session drums patches.... you may have to invert it...

[Observer-A]

Nice! I am running a Roland SPD-30 based kit with a roland snare and hi hat.
I have converted a floor tom into a kick drum and triggered that with a Roland RT10-T.
Session drums enter a whole new level of expressiveness with electronic drums.
I was very pleasantly surprised by the hi hats especially.
I have been hooked on the "Deep Snare Dynamics" kit lately. People always think that my recordings are acoustic when I use that one.

[John Arkell]

hiya, sorry for slow reply to this...

the apc is mounted with the alesis on a home made table/surface... just a piece of wood between 2 old drum stools, with the top arms from a 2 tier keyboard stand clamped on to them.

love the session drums kits... especially mixing them up with the digital kits... glad I forked out... all in stereo too so my rubbish mixing gets a helping hand... and should sound huge on a chunky system... you ca really drive some of the kicks too.

Hi hats... hmmm... i haven't invested in a decent controller yet... and until i do i won't be able to use the full range of the session drums hats... and in turn don't see it being better than the feel of normal cymbals. i have attached a single home made trigger to the smal hats (can hardly see it) made from a roland trigger which i took apart and mounted. this hat ia the only one i use for looping at the moment.
@theophilus ... I may get back to you about the macro control at a later date

i'm running the triggers into a rolland tmc-6. it's mint.

here's our first jam...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJV_GuTTihM

[JuanSOLO]

Killer set up MAN!!!

[theophilus]

for the hihat control... any foot pedal will work, anywhere. before i had the dm10 set (which i sadly had to get rid of... baby got the room i used an e4k with a footpedal into its input, playing the hat on the keyboard and working the open/closed with my foot... worked great... set it up for cc4 (iirc). if it doesn't work (i don't think it was that easy for me!), just set remote on whatever's sending the foot control (maybe the apc40 has an input?), and then midi map it to the macro control for hihat open/close, you may need to invert it (think it's backwards... 0 is open, 127 is closed). the control pad has a hihat switch input too, which will give you basic on/off hihat control... great fun...

[dude rancher]

very cool video. what kind of mesh heads are you using? do they seem to hold up to your playing?

[John Arkell]

I shall look into the hi hat controller... at the moment the bassist is using both of the apc inputs, but I need some more midi ins for the alesis still also.

I'm having major issues looping the acoustic hats, they just don't warp in real time, always behind the beat. so I really need to get something sorted before we play anywhere... then carry on having fun with the beat repeats etc, once I have 2 midi hats sorted.

the mesh heads i use are the pearl ones... expensive but yeah totally durable. strangely 'slippy' at first... it's definatly a different feel/style of striking the drums with these and the triggers... you have to be very 'obvious' sometimes... but i'm finding thats actually helping my playing when I get back on real drums... no mincing about etc.

gonna put up a new video on monday... thanks for watching

anyone heard of svankov? this dude is awesome... check out his you tube performance videos... I'm getting some new tips from him and with some other software I should really be able to go crazy and have more control over this set up

[John Arkell]

new vid ... same set up...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j7kBJYBpAk

[dude rancher]

video removed.

[John Arkell]

ha... sorry man... moved it, had to fix a little rendering problem... glad you had a look anyway!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVOwdGRaYiw

if you have any feedback go for it...

[dude rancher]

i really like the afro cuban 6/8 parts you throw in. damn good man. rock it.

[John Arkell]

number 3 is up now.... simpler drum parts but the mix is a little better i think... enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu6AtV6VIJM