I use Drumgizmo on all my music, and have 4-5 Ardour templates that I choose from whenever I start a new project. These have different drumkits with their specific channel routings (DG channel to a number of buses).
The annoying thing is when I find I’m not satisfied with the particular kit halfway through a project. It’s easy to choose another kit in the Drumgizmo plugin, alright, but then I have to do all the channel mapping again, since not all DG kits have the same output configuration. For example, channel 3 is hihat on Muldjord but kick on the DRS kit. It’s pretty difficult to experiment with different kits…
Is there someone that shares these problems and perhaps have found an easier way around them?
The only thing I can think of right now is that you make one (big) template with all kits in it (all correctly mapped) and all kits in a different group. This way you can easily de-activate and hide the not used kit-groups. The kit (group) you use is active and visible.
You still have to have a midi-track for every kit so you have to copy the midi-region(s) to other tracks if you activate another kit. Or implement the DG-kits as Midi-Bus so you can aux-send the data of one midi-track to the desired Bus.
You could insert carla-patchbay as a plugin on a MIDI channel, do all the routing and processing inside Carla and save it as a Carla template. If you want to switch kits just use a different Carla template.
I’ve been there a few times - most recently last Saturday
I think the quickest, though not necessarily the most ideal way, would be to add your DG MIDI track and choose automatic for the output. This way DG connects by default to the Master bus. From there you might want a stereo drum bus (or track if you prefer), then route DG to that instead of the Master. This way if you find you don’t like a kit you’re working with, it’s easier to switch it out for another, rather than having to recreate a whole slew of new tracks/buses. The obvious drawback is that you can’t individually add effects or adjust pan, volume, etc. for specific DG kit channels, but it will at least allow you test out kits more quickly.
Once you’ve decided on a final kit, you can then create the tracks/buses for your desired channel routing needs and reroute to those.
Alternatively, there’s a thread on Linuxmusicians for a LUA script to create audio tracks for the official Drumgizmo kits that you may find helpful. I’d recommend reading the whole thread as there are updates to the script and other useful info in subsequent replies.
I fooled around with it only briefly, but it does seem to work for quickly adding tracks based on a DG kits channel outputs.
Thanks, @Belladonna , I tried this out a little, and it seems it would work. A smart and fairly easy way! Will check the LUA script as well.
The obvious issue I hadn’t thought of is that the drums are mapped to different midi notes for each kit (more or less anyway), so there will be a lot of work rearranging the midi tracks.
I believe Drumgizmo could be a lot more streamlined in this respect.
@mylofy: I haven’t yet worked with Carla at all, so this might be a nice way to get to know it @coenplanetc : That might just work. Then you do all the laborious work once, and then it would be easy to switch. The issue with the midi note mapping is still there of course.
The midi-note mapping is probably not a big issue. You could easily edit the xml-files to streamline all different kits to something you think suits you best. Of course there will be differences because one kit has more instruments than the other but I thought they were more or less General Midi compatible.
You’re right, that seems to be pretty straight forward, to remap the midi notes. It takes a bit of creativity to match the different kit setups, but that will certainly be a first step into making the kits interchangeable.
and the template file (it might not work on your box):
The advantage is that (once you have fine-tuned the kit) you can use it in any LV2/VST host. Also, carla has versions with multichannel output (up to 64 channels), so you can still route the instruments to different ardour busses if needed (e.g. for sidechaining). The options are endless, I really love the modular approach of routing plugins this way.
Thanks @mylofy , that looks like something from my day job !
Modularity is our friend, so I will give this a go whenever I could lay my hands on some free time. Soon, I hope!
!