I have a song project I use DrumGizmo for. DG Outputs 16 channels, and each one corresponds to one microphone in the drums recording setup. I have configured the session to output DG channels to Audio mono buses, and then all those 16 buses to another Drums audio bus.
In my session, the channels do not correspond to the real channels explained in the loaded drumkit (aasimonster2 in my case). If I create a new session from scratch I haven’t this problem at all. (the following screen capture shows the setup: https://i.imgur.com/cd8pvbs.png)
To be sure, I have re-extracted the drumkit into a directory. I also have deleted the plugin, and even deleted its state folder in the session. I realized then there was two state folders, so I was optimistic this was the cause of the issue, but no
I don’t want to restart from scratch, because I have made a lot in this session, and reimporting and placing regions in a new one from the existing one would be tedious.
Indeed, that’s my problem. I don’t know why the mapping is different. I use the mapping.xml from the drumkit. And moreover, I use the same mapping file for the other new session that has the right channels distribution.
What you see on the screenshot is what I have guessed from the output sound, to show the problem.
That maps MIDI notes numbers to drums. e.g. which MIDI note triggers a hit on the Snare. This is mainly to support various e-drums that use different notes.
Last I’ve checked, the microphone channel mapping was fixed.
Yes I realized afterwards that midimap.xml did not have anything to do with my problem.
I use DrumGizmo 0.9.18.1, with Ardour 6.2.0. When you say the microphone channel mapping was fixed, was it a bug in DrumGizmo or in Ardour?
I have no clue on where to look at…
It’s not a bug. It’s just how drumgizmo works. You get (up to) 16 outputs that correspond to the mic setup that was used when the kit was sampled. Different drum-kits lend themselves to different mic setups, so the channel-mapping is also different for each kit. e.g. https://drumgizmo.org/wiki/doku.php?id=kits:drskit used the first two channels for Ambience (not overheads).
Drumgizmo focuses on the workflow like you would record a real kit: There is bleed, and delay, and different sound characteristic depending on the mic-type and positioning.
Actually I just realized (how I couldn’t see that before…) there is something weird on how audio buses are distributed. See when I hit the snare: https://i.imgur.com/LARwYRe.png
On DrumGizmo output, the right channels are triggers (3-5) as I have set bleeding to 0%.
But on audio buses, that’s what I have identified as snare channels (11-13).
And my routing seems ok: https://i.imgur.com/KLXw4LA.png
I will surely cross-post on DrumGizmo sub-forums of LinuxMusicians, maybe to get help from someone having the same issue the me. but it seems to be an Ardour problem.
Ok I finally found out what the problem was: On the Drumgizmo midi track, I fan out outputs to audio buses, and the fader set by default with a track had to be bypassed. It was the fader messing all.
That had the advantage of making me doing a test session to check all drums, and now I will know
P.S.: I can’t edit the topic to mark it solved, is it normal ? (it’s my first time on discourse)
I still may say that my issue was not a bug, but a lack of knowledge. And maybe that’s what is missing to the Ardour community, a kind of knowledge base, from users to users. Good practices, pitfalls to avoid and so on.
There are so many different possible workflows and working styles when using a DAW that attempting to distill things down “best practices” is an extremely hard problem. There are multiple ways to do almost everything, and successful audio engineers and musicians who do things in very different ways from each other. There are also no “right” answers, only “not bad for XXX” answers, which if you’re not doing XXX can be misleading or worse.