Multiple Drum Kits in one Rack

[WFWS]

I'm sure this has been done, but I can't find it.

I have a DrumKat which is a midi drum controller with 10 pads and 30 kits. It can send midi on 16 channels, and has a footswitch that lets me switch between kits.

What I want to do is program maybe 4 kits into drumracks in Live, and then switch between these kits hopefully all in one rack on one Track in Live.

The Drumkat footswitch just changes the channel and note assignments in the DrumKat- I don't think it sends any program change info outbound.

So if I switch kits with the DrumKat, and it sends its new channel and/or group of midi notes, how does the chain know which kit to play? Can I assign each drum kit a separate midi channel, while in the same track?

Too much midi stuff. I just need to be able to switch between 4 kits quickly in Live.

[theophilus]

You could probably do it, but it's really more hassle than you need.
If your footswitch can change the midi channel it's sending on... just create 4 separate tracks, each with their own drum rack, but set each one to listen to a different midi channel. Then changing the sending midi channel changes which drum rack you are playing to.

[WFWS]

Thanks for the reply. I've got it working as you suggest. But my track count is getting messy, so I wanted to figure out a way to stack a set of drumkits in a single rack.

I did it mostly last night goofing around. You can stack drum racks in a chain, and midi assign a rotating knob to select chain devices. Right now, I have to select both the kit in my DrumKat, and the device in the chain. I'm betting that I can reduce that to just selecting the device chain and leave the drumkat on one kit. I use the same layout on the drum pads every time anyway.

What I get in the end is a quickly changeable master drum rack in only one track.

In the device chain I can also drop external instruments and rewire to Reason, which has some cool drum sounds and my fav, Reason Drum Kits. So I can step thru kits in Reason and have them accessible in the same master device that has great Live kits. It works great, and saves screen real estate.

[Dragonbreath]

Im not familiar from your hardware. But from what Im understanding you should just forget about midi channels and concentrate midi note range.

The drum rack is essentially a keyboard sampler optimized for easy drum programming.

What you should try is that your pedal sends a signal to change the midi note range.
Since each of your kits has 10 pads then your first kit can be from c1 to A1 then next one from a#1 to c0, etc...

Checking quickly it seems the drum rack has 10 octaves of 12 notes each, hence you should be able to have up to 12 kits per track (rack)

[Guff Tong]

I made this massive drum rack with chains, fx etc.

127 samples per pad via chain selector, then several drum racks chained also...

Looked good on paper but took years to load!

Never really gave me the 'one stop beat factory' I wanted so tend to make stuff as I go now.

Great practise in rack setting up though. I still use chains all the time but more creatively rather than simply bundling lots of stuff together for 'quick access' (which it is not!)

[WFWS]

Thanks for the replies. Its working, and I did figure out a way to use just a single kit on the DrumKat and have all the DrumChains send the same notes. Since the chain lets me filter out notes from kits that aren't selected, I can have the same midi note numbers from each device.
The Master Drum rack now has both Live drum kits and Reason Drum Kits (RDK) in a chain. It seems to be working fine. Once the notes are mapped, I can save the presets in Reason so I can switch between kits in Reason quickly. In Live, all the kits basically map the same way to my DrumKat, so its pretty easy to switch Live kits.
I'm liking it so far- It does take longer to load Live/Reason initially, but that's not a big deal. I'm watching CPU usage, and I don't quite get how chains use CPU/HardDrive. As I understand it, CPU is used only when an instrument is actually playing. So in a chain, only the devices that are playing are using cycles, right? I'm guessing thats different with memory. If I load this master rack (five kits), these samples are all loaded into memory, or just their disc location?
I'm getting fairly high CPU usage, but that's probably because my computer isn't a dedicated audio machine and is full of junk and bad cookies and cat spit.
Anyway, if you have insights on how Live uses memory/cpu/hard disc in chains, I'd appreciate any info you can share.

[Stan_T]

I used the Trapkat with DrumRack for a few years when playing out. My approach became more stripped down over time. What I ended up with was a few basic kits with several variations to handle specific songs. In other words, "Kit 1 Main" could be identical to "Kit 2 No Doubt" with the exception of a few pads triggering samples needed for a No Doubt song.

I had one DrumRack set up with about 90 samples and the TrapKat did all the mapping.

FWIW, I did the whole thing on an older DualCore PC. It ran bare-basic XP Pro Service Pack 2, was never updated and never online, so it was fast and reliable.