On Tue, 17 May 2005, Thorsten Wilms wrote: I have a Roland SPD-6 "drum pad", which I absolutely love! Works very nicely for controlling various MIDI drum synths (the internal sounds suck as can be expected so you do need external sound sources, but hey, our Linux computers have plenty to offer :)). It's also relatively cheap (compared to full MIDI drumset at least). I have foot pedals for hihat and bass, and use the pads (with real drum sticks) for rest. I'd be curious to know what other low-budget MIDI-drumming solution people use (aside computer/synth keyboard drumming)...? -- http://www.eca.cx Audio software for Linux!

I also agree with the idea that it's necessary to have a drum pad. I'm sorry, but the "standard-low-budget" MIDI keyboards (e.g. Evolution MK249) don't allow much expression: only a discretized set of volumes, some controller-wheel-triggered effects and pitch crappy modification. I play the guitar (only double price that the MIDI keyboard) and I believe that a string is much better than this because you've got realtime control of a lot of things at the same time (volume, pitch, mute, saturation, kind of attack). Moreover you can only say that keyboard'drums are fine if you've never touched a drum set. You lose a lot of time reproducing the volume changes in every component which IMO is really important to make them sound realistic and you lose a lot of things like where you hit the snare and all this... Finally the snare drum rolls totally suck in all the drum programs I've tried in Linux (you really need a physical model to reproduce them and not a simple sum of samples). So that's it, I'm quite skeptical about all this. I use hydrogen because of the possibility of randomizing the attacks rock for non-drummer players who want to make song drafts to share with other musicians and I use the keyboard to trigger some of them but if I had the money I would definitively buy a drum set/drum pad and take some drum lessons ... so I'd like to know also of a low-budget MIDI-drumming solution ... <!-- And uhm... here it is Yet Another Hydrogen Home Made Demo for the people wanting to listen... http://telefonica.net/web2/mrvinyes/litlnemo/songs/assaig03.ogg (Marc Vinyes, released under the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ license) if there is here any drummer from Barcelona who wants to play with me and replace those crappy drums PLEASE let me know! I'm searching real people to start a project... human's creativity and expressivity rock even if you have to deal with their bad mood, obsessions and real life problems... web site: litlnemo.redirectme.net (sorry, most of it is in spanish...) --> Cheers MarC

On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 03:36:45PM +0200, Lars Luthman wrote: --- --- --- Yes! And it's a great way to get natural-sounding velocities (the volumes of individual percussion strikes). Hydrogen can quantize the keyboard playing to its grid resolution, which later can be "humanized" using Hydrogen's time randomization to move the beats to an adjustable degree of randomization away from the time-grid boundaries. Linux audio enthusiasts and musicians have an incredible wealth of software tools available now--too much to adequately explore in a lifetime. ;-) -Steve D -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Forget and forgive. This is not difficult when properly understood. It means forget inconvenient duties, then forgive yourself for forgetting. By rigid practice and stern determination, it comes easy. -Mark Twain ----------------------------------------------------------------

On Tue, 2005-05-17 at 21:04 +0100, james(a)dis-dot-dat.net wrote: Link is Forbidden..

On Tuesday 17 May 2005 22:04, james(a)dis-dot-dat.net wrote: You can also get it from fun.pictures.hu, at least I think that is where I got it from... And I don`t think Creative is too angry with you distributing commercials for their products. Arnold -- There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. -- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Then Steve D wrote: Well, I tried it. I set one of my MIDI tone generators to "rhythm" mode (which simply means it changes to a percussion kit with various percussion instruments mapped to individual keys of the MIDI keyboard), then used the keyboard to "play" the drums and record it live into Audacity, adding a drum track to my little piece Herky-Jerk. The good news is that I could play with lots of expression and variation in tempo, just like a real drummer. The bad news is that it was d*mn hard! I had to be incredibly relaxed to achieve anything even barely approximating a stable rhythm or tempo, and I have a new found appreciation for drummers and their skills. If anyone cares to hear the rather rough results of this tedious (but enjoyable) experiment, the ogg file is here: http://www.xscd.com/pub/music/herky-jerk-drums.ogg the original, without the drum track, is here: http://www.xscd.com/pub/music/herky-jerk.ogg Best wishes, Steve D, New Mexico US -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Life is full of answers, if you don't care what the questions are. ----------------------------------------------------------------

On Wed, May 18, 2005 at 10:37:44AM +0100, james(a)dis-dot-dat.net wrote: --- --- Thanks James-- ;-) You have no idea how hard I tried and how many "takes" it took and how many progressive versions of just the drums-played-on-a-MIDI-keyboard track existed before the one that's in the file now. But you know, it was kind of fun using my fingers like drum sticks. Of course, I had to pick percussion sounds that were all (or mostly) within finger-span distance of my hands in order to play them fast enough in real time to record. Fortunately, a "dry kick bass," two high-hats that gave me that shuffle beat, a rim-shot snare drum, and two congas were all close together enough on the keyboard that they were directly under each of my hands. All of the drums were recorded at the same time on just one digital-audio track in Audacity. I didn't try to get fancier than that, for this time at least. Using a MIDI keyboard to play drums, whether to create a General MIDI percussion track or record the patches in real time, is definitely a challenge. But it's also kind of fun and I think that a keyboard player could get used to it, although the results would be limited (a keyboard player might have trouble perfectly recreating some of the fast rolls and riffs and fills that a real drummer can produce). -sd -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Each person's only hope for improving his lot rests on his recognizing the true nature of his basic personality, surrendering to it, and becoming who he is. -Sheldon Kopp ----------------------------------------------------------------