Hi people
Bought myself a cheap'n'cheerful e-drumkit a couple of weeks back to use mainly as a MIDI controller with Ableton. It's an Alesis DM6 and on the whole (as a singer/guitarist/bassist dabbling with drums) I'm pleased enough with it.
However I had been pretty frustrated by an issue with the hihat (pedal) controller - whenever I used Session Drums, when I'd depressed the pedal once, it would remain as if 'down' and, consequently, play no open hat sounds. (This was in contrast to the Yamaha DD55 I'd been using beforehand, where there were no issues apart from a very sore shoulder).
I looked at the MIDI output with MidiOX and saw that the DM6 only sends out a foot control (CC4=127 (closed)) when you depress the pedal. It doesn't send a value of 0 when you release it, as you might expect. (I think that better units eg DM8+, your Rolands etc, send out a full 0-127 range. When I checked the Yamaha DD55, I saw that that doesn't send out foot controller data at all - only F#1, G#1, A#1 depending on whether the pedal is open/closed or closed without a hit. So there's no 'incomplete' foot pedal data to confuse things.)
So what I did was:
1) Opened up the 'open hat' samples in Session Drums.
2) Covert Simpler>Sampler
3) Click the 'MIDI' tab
4) Set 'Foot Controller' to OFF (was on sample select)
5) Convert Sampler>Simpler again (I assume this uses less CPU?)
6) Do this for both Open HH sample chains
7) Save as a new preset (eg Cold Tight Room DM6)
This seems to have sorted out the problem. I guess I can still map the 'hat pedal' macro to another controller to be able to play around with hat openness later on.
[Incidentally, all this relies on having Sampler, and there are plenty of people without that I guess. What would be another way to stop CC4/pedal data getting to Ableton in the first place? Could something like MidiOX do that, or is there a way to do it within Ableton.]
Right, now to get on with some drums... fun, innit?