Exporting MIDI drums as General MIDI

Getting Stuff Done How do I .... ?
#1

Hello!

I have been using Ardour as my main DAW for several years and I love it. I use it to create and record songs so we have a starting point for the band. And later on we use Ardour to record and edit the final versions before sending them to mixing and mastering.

But now we got a new bass player and guitarist and I need to make notes and tablatures for them. I don’t think Ardour has a score or tablature editor (I don’t mean Ardour needs a tablature editor). I found about TuxGuitar and that is a great piece of software for this purpose. So I thought I can just export all my VST tracks as MIDI files and import those into TuxGuitar. So I only need to create the audio tracks as notes/tablatures. This works just fine, except for the drums. The drums use different notes for different parts of the drums. For example, kick drum in Ardour is #36 but in General MIDI it’s #35 (TuxGuitar seems to use General MIDI).

I tried to ask about drum mapping from TuxGuitar:

But from their point of view my exported drum MIDI files are not “General MIDI” and I agree. I could make the TuxGuitar MIDI importer plugin to serve my needs, but I don’t know Java and TuxGuitar seems to be developed using Java. I do now Python and found a library called “Mido” which I can use to convert my drum MIDI files to be “General MIDI compatible”:
https://mido.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

But before I start developing a script for this purpose, I was thinking that maybe someone here has already solved this.

#2

X42 Note/ channel Midi Map may help:

You should be able to put this end the end of your processor chain and change the values of the notes being output.

Cheers,

Keith

1 Like
#3

Ardour also includes AVL Drumkit MIDI Map plugin, though that is somewhat specific to mapping incoming MIDI events (usually from a hardware MIDI drumkit) to AVL Drums plugins.

Then again that plugin is a Lua script, which can be adjusted relatively easily:

3 Likes
#4

Wow, this is very awesome to know and indeed useful to me as well. Great tip, Robin! Thanks.