Some MIDI Effects Racks for Superior Drummer 2.0

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trommelmeister
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Some MIDI Effects Racks for Superior Drummer 2.0

Post by trommelmeister » Tue Jan 26, 2010 12:32 am

Hello! Beware, this is possibly going to become a rather lengthy post ;-) But if you are a user of Ableton Live 8 and Toontrack Superior Drummer 2.0 this might be interesting for you.

I am in principle a happy user of both Ableton Live 8 and Superior Drummer 2.0. Nice tools, nice sounds, nice everything. Nice everything? Not exactly. Since SD2's Avatar library has quite a few sound mappings, there are quite a few MIDI notes needed to be controlled if you want to make use of all these sounds.

Unfortunately, the order in which these sounds and articulations are mapped to the MIDI notes appears quite randomly to me. Yes, I know, there is the GM Standard mapping, and I guess you have to bow to that a little bit, but nevertheless the MIDI mapping is - as I said - more or less randomly. Working with this is tedious, at least.

To say it differently: I am just too old to always memorize that, say, "Hihat Open 3" is mapped to D0, whereas "Hihat Open 4" is mapped to C3, just to give an example...

Always complaining is not a solution, you are right. For that reason I decided to invest some time and make (at least my) life a little bit better.

I have created in total 3 MIDI effects racks which help organizing this chaos a little bit. Each of them can be used in different scenarios, depending on how you work. These Live 8 racks can be used with SD2 and the standard Avatar library. I suggest that you "install" them by just copying the three patches in that ZIP file to your Live library / Presets / MIDI Effects / MIDI Effect Rack folder.

Scenario 1: Just giving names - "Avatar_Named"

This first rack just provides names to all of the ca. 70 notes mapped in the Avatar library. Put it in front of the SD2 plugin, and directly all the notes in MIDI clips on this track are named. Have a look at the following image - left side shows the state before and right side shows the state after inserting the rack. Now all the names of the drum articulations are shown (e.g., BD, SD Center, HH Open 3) instead of a long list of C-2, C#-2, D-2, etc.

Image

The first rack provided names to all the mapped MIDI notes, but still the order of the notes is not exactly straightforward. To solve this, please move on to the second scenario.

Scenario 2: Giving names and re-map everything - "Avatar_NamedAndRemapped"

With this second rack I have remapped all the notes. (Believe me, this was not exactly a fun thing to do ...) If you put this rack in front of the SD2 plugin, then all the MIDI notes appear not only named but also resorted in a MIDI clip.

The following image shows the difference between the first and the second rack. Please note that on the right side all the notes are now sorted (at least in a way that made sense to me). Left side shows the names when using the first rack.

Image

The mapping is done completely in Live 8. The mapping in SD2 is not touched.

Unfortunately, my resorted MIDI mapping is completely incompatible to any standard mapping. So, all the MIDI clips which come with SD2 (the Nir-Z pack and all the others you can get) will not work anymore.

To solve this, please read on to the next and last scenario.


Scenario 3: Having everything nicely named and resorted but still being able to play standard MIDI clips. - "Avatar_NamedAndRemapped_PreProcessor"


In order to get the standard clips working on a track which has the scenario 2 MIDI effect rack loaded, we need to apply some inverse mapping. For this, you have to create another MIDI track and load the Avatar_NamedAndRemapped_PreProcessor rack on this new track. The already existing track with the SD2 plugin needs to have the Avatar_NamedAndRemapped rack loaded.

Now you have to route the output of the new MIDI track to the SD2 track. By doing this, every clip played on the new preprocessor track will be finally heard on the SD2 track. For example, you can now place the Nir-Z loops on the preprocessor track and you will hear the expected result on the SD2 track.

The Avatar_NamedAndRemapped_PreProcessor effect rack just applies a MIDI mapping which is exactly the inverse of the mapping of the Avatar_NamedAndRemapped rack.

That's it. I hope my explanations are clear to you. In fact, I hope that this post is not too long so that at least some of you will reach the end. :-)

I am looking forward to getting some remarks, thank yous, or whatever reactions from you!

Best regards, Martin

theophilus
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Re: Some MIDI Effects Racks for Superior Drummer 2.0

Post by theophilus » Tue Jan 26, 2010 4:14 am

very cool. I think I might make something similar for iMap. I don't have superior drummer, I have some oceanway kits, but the same concepts would apply to both.

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Re: Some MIDI Effects Racks for Superior Drummer 2.0

Post by trommelmeister » Tue Jan 26, 2010 8:03 am

theophilus wrote:very cool. I think I might make something similar for iMap. I don't have superior drummer, I have some oceanway kits, but the same concepts would apply to both.
Ah, didn't know about I-MAP. I have just checked its website - looks like that I am not the only one being slightly irritated about the chaotic note mapping. ;-) Maybe I will change my mapping so that it becomes compatible with I-MAP. Regards, Martin.

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Re: Some MIDI Effects Racks for Superior Drummer 2.0

Post by theophilus » Tue Jan 26, 2010 1:56 pm

I think that's a great idea. I was working on some translators (thread in general forum) to do edrum to Imap, and then Imap to various formats (only have imap to session drums so far... it's somewhat incomplete, but session drums doesn't have everything that's in IMap...). That way I can always work in imap, no matter where the drums come from (nanopad, td3, dtxplorer) or are going (session drums, impulse, oceanway, DM, ezdrummer, etc). I haven't done any real programming yet, only played on the nanopad where it doesn't matter as much, but it's still useful.

Some of those drum maps look like someone had a drunken camel spit on a keyboard and put each piece wherever it landed :) I wish Ableton had an easier way to rearrange the notes in fold mode; i know the feature has been requested but it's not there yet. An easier drum map translator would be nice too, maybe a later release.

i'll look for it, in case you get time to work on this before i do :)

trommelmeister
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Re: Some MIDI Effects Racks for Superior Drummer 2.0

Post by trommelmeister » Sat Jan 30, 2010 10:02 pm

theophilus wrote:Some of those drum maps look like someone had a drunken camel spit on a keyboard and put each piece wherever it landed :)
This is a very funny way to describe exactly what I think about these mappings. :-)
theophilus wrote:I wish Ableton had an easier way to rearrange the notes in fold mode; i know the feature has been requested but it's not there yet. An easier drum map translator would be nice too, maybe a later release.
Phew, it seems that you also have quite some knowledge about this mapping stuff. In fact I was worried a little bit: Maybe I just didn't know that such kind of mappings and re-ordering could be done in a completely easy and straightforward way - only I was too ignorant to know it. But now, after you have confirmed this that this is a feature which was not yet implemented I feel good about having spent these hours.

Regards, Martin

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Re: Some MIDI Effects Racks for Superior Drummer 2.0

Post by trommelmeister » Thu Feb 04, 2010 11:14 pm

Hello! In addition to the MIDI effect racks for the Avatar library, I have just created the same style of MIDI effect racks for the Metal Foundry library.

Download these effect racks here.

Take care, have fun! Martin

mdk
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Re: Some MIDI Effects Racks for Superior Drummer 2.0

Post by mdk » Tue Feb 23, 2010 11:31 am

thats fantastic work. i'll get a lot of use out of these :)
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horseflesh
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Re: Some MIDI Effects Racks for Superior Drummer 2.0

Post by horseflesh » Fri Sep 17, 2010 1:26 am

New here and just found this....

Big thank you!!! Looking forward to playing with this tomorrow

toeman
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Re: Some MIDI Effects Racks for Superior Drummer 2.0

Post by toeman » Fri Jan 06, 2012 2:18 pm

hey how do u automate superior drummer 2 in ableton 8?

I cannot get it to work.

trommelmeister
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Re: Some MIDI Effects Racks for Superior Drummer 2.0

Post by trommelmeister » Thu Jan 12, 2012 2:59 pm

toeman wrote:hey how do u automate superior drummer 2 in ableton 8?

I cannot get it to work.
Yes, unfortunately this makes sense as SD 2.0 does not support automation. I explicitly asked about this once on the Toontrack forum and got this very response from one of Toontrack's support persons. So there is no automation.

IIRC that support person said something like having no automation were a feature and not a bug. I guess they regard their nice software as a real drum kit, and with a real drum kit you also cannot change ... say ... the pitch of your snare drum while doing a drum recording.

Regards, Martin

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Re: Some MIDI Effects Racks for Superior Drummer 2.0

Post by SpeedKing » Tue Jan 17, 2012 7:38 pm

As a new buyer/user of Ableton, I just wanted to thank you for the work you put in for both the Avatar AND the Metal Foundry drum packs. I have both, and use them quite a lot. This will make drum editing SO much more logical and less of a headache.

Thanks again dude!

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Re: Some MIDI Effects Racks for Superior Drummer 2.0

Post by trommelmeister » Mon Jan 23, 2012 10:25 am

SpeedKing wrote:As a new buyer/user of Ableton, I just wanted to thank you for the work you put in for both the Avatar AND the Metal Foundry drum packs. I have both, and use them quite a lot. This will make drum editing SO much more logical and less of a headache.

Thanks again dude!
Thank you for your "Thank you" :-) Obviously, I like the fact that someone else besides myself can make use of these mappings. Regards, Martin

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Re: Some MIDI Effects Racks for Superior Drummer 2.0

Post by mdk » Mon Jan 23, 2012 11:16 am

is the metal foundry mapping included or is it the same as avatar?
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SpeedKing
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Re: Some MIDI Effects Racks for Superior Drummer 2.0

Post by SpeedKing » Thu Jan 26, 2012 3:20 am

trommelmeister wrote:
SpeedKing wrote:As a new buyer/user of Ableton, I just wanted to thank you for the work you put in for both the Avatar AND the Metal Foundry drum packs. I have both, and use them quite a lot. This will make drum editing SO much more logical and less of a headache.

Thanks again dude!
Thank you for your "Thank you" :-) Obviously, I like the fact that someone else besides myself can make use of these mappings. Regards, Martin
Toontrack (or Ableton) should totally ask your permission to include these within their standard packs as optional add-ons or something. If more people knew about this, I'm sure you'd have lots of people singing your praises. :)

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Re: Some MIDI Effects Racks for Superior Drummer 2.0

Post by trommelmeister » Thu Jan 26, 2012 11:30 am

mdk wrote:is the metal foundry mapping included or is it the same as avatar?
Metal Foundry has a slightly different mapping. I already provided the same style of MIDI effect racks more than a year ago ;-) Please just check my comment from Feb 05, 2010: http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php? ... 8#p1075188

Regards, Martin

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