automatic drum simplification?

[John Bradley]

So, the cover tracks I produce often serve a dual purpose: standalone hunks of music for my own amusement, and backing tracks/teaching tool for my band. (Which granted, hasn't been an issue for 6 months, and may never be again, but I'm an optimist. Or possibly an optometrist.)

Currently, I use Session Drummer 3 for nearly everything. I'd like to use Addictive Drums or the freebie version of SSD or whatever; something with more hi-hat and snare articulation, at least for some 'real drummer' songs.

BUT, for the purposes of programming my real-life drummer and/or producing notation, I'd also like a way to flatten such complicated MIDI down to standard GM MIDI drums (e.g., all the snare hits become note #38, all the various types of closed-hat hits become #42).

Anyone know how to do that automatically? Note that I don't care how good or bad the resulting midi sounds, it's for looking at, not listening to.

[antler]

I suppose you could use something like this

https://codefn42.com/notemapper/index.html

If you set it up and route it properly, you could do a live MIDI bounce to get all your snares/hats onto their respective single notes.

[msmcleod]

I guess the "official" way to do this is via a Drum Map, then bounce the output to a new track.

However I used to use a CAL script for this when doing exactly the same thing from XG/GS drums to my Alesis DM5.

Copy/Paste this into Notepad and save it to you CAL scripts folder as something like SimpleDrums.CAL .  You'll need to copy / change the note numbers as appropriate.

You can then bind it to a key mapping if you want within preferences.
 

;; XGDrums.Cal
;;

(do
	(forEachEvent
		(if (== Event.Kind NOTE)
			(do

				(if (== Note.Key 36)
					(do
						(= Note.Key 35)
					)
				)


				(if (== Note.Key 38)
					(do
						(= Note.Key 40)
					)
				)

			)
		)
	)
)

[John Bradley]

Thanks for the advice. Both solutions look like they'll do the trick nicely.

Gonna play with that Notemapper thing first, as that looks like it could solve several other problems I didn't know I had! And the CAL approach appeals to my past life as a C programmer, two careers ago...