Beginner CbB and MIDI-user trying to get SSD5 sampler to play thru a TD-17 and failing.

[Twub]

 

 

As demanded; a new thread.

 

"In Cakewalk's Preferences > MIDI > Devices, do you see your TD-17 listed as an Input and Output device, and does it have a check mark in it?"

 

Yes,  Check marked on both input and output.

Under "Outputs", Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth, which I understand is some relevant aspect of my PCs soundcard, is NOT checked.

Inserting a new MIDI track, arming for recording and recording a series of snare-hits produces a recording that plays that back. 

The track itself under "In/Out" shows "All Inputs" for Inputs and "1-TD-17" for the Output. 

Edited August 30, 2023 by Twub
Copy/Paste commentary from another thread into the new.

[mettelus]

I just looked at the other thread quickly. This thread title seems like you are trying to get SSD5 to play through the TD-17? I just wanted to clarify that (has its own editing issues), and be a more complex routing setup. Let's rewind a bit, since you are new...

First, MIDI is only note information (no sound), and the TD kits (I am familiar with the TD-9) have a MIDI path and and audio one. I think this is why the VST Instruments (VSTi) got mentioned in the other thread. With MIDI, you can record each kit piece to its own track, but if you record the audio output (what you tailored), you get "everything" back as one combined audio track. Seems the hat was too loud so you wanted to be able to edit the individual pieces.

Quick answer to the question is that if you are sending MIDI to the TD-17, you must also be receiving the audio output from the TD-17 back into a new audio track in Cakewalk with the input echo (speaker icon) enabled. MIDI will then go to the TD-17, get processed with your kit setup, and come back to Cakewalk as audio, but as one track rather than separate pieces. (This is a pain, since editing is simpler with the pieces on different tracks).

If you record a performance as MIDI, you can record one piece per track, but would need to then record each track individually (solo each piece, MIDI to the TD-17, and record the audio from the TD-17 back to a new track in Cakewalk). Optionally, you could use the same routing, but record them all into one audio track, but that limits editing options for the audio at that point.

Pay attention when setting up tracks for if it is MIDI or audio, and what the input/output is for each track. Any MIDI must be processed into audio (either by a VSTi or hardware) in order to then be recorded as audio on a new track. Setting up VSTis can be complex unto themselves, so trying not to bury you with information here.

[Twub]

I downloaded the free SSD5.

After screwing up on where I put the files in my hard drive, I eventually got them so that 

SSDSampler5

shows up in CbB under INSTRUMENTS in a folder called DRUMS that it shares with SI-Drumkit.

If I either drag SSDSampler5 over to the Tracks Pane, or optionally double-click SSDSampler5, I get a pop up

 

I hit OK

 

Two tracks appear in the Tracks Pane.

 

 

The top one is an audio track. Although, earlier when I was inserting  audio tracks from the dropdown and recording me as audio, the icon for those looked like a squiggly waveform.

 

The second track is a MIDI track. 

Now, if I click the icons in EITHER of these tracks, I get the SSD5 graphic with the kit shown. 

In the free SSD5 version, there's three kits.

I double click on that kit's title and I watch it load quickly with these counting-up percentage graphics that appear on every piece of the kit. 

At this point, when I hit any part of my Td-17, I see the corresponding piece on the SSD5 graphic highlight in response. 

But I hear the current kit from the TD-17.

Regardless of which track I have highlighted in CbB, and regardless of which track's icon I click on, to show the SSD5 graphic and select a kit, this all goes the same way. 

So, OK. It looks like I need to maybe map this, so I can hear the SSD5 sounds...

So I go to map on the SSD5 screen.

 

A couple hundred hours ago, I made a preset here called MY TD17 but it's identical to the default preset cause I haven't been able to do anything from this point. 

My own kick shows up as triggering the C1 36 "Kick Center" slot on this screen. 

I hear the Roland's Kick. 

I hit the MIDI LEARN button for "Kick Center" and get a pop up that says 

"Hit MIDI Note" and a cancel button under it. 

I hit C1 36 "Kick Center" with the mouse. It plays that sound. The "Hit MIDI Note" pop up dissappears. 

I hit MY kick after selecting MIDI LEARN on C1 36 "Kick Center". 

The Roland's kick plays. The "Hit MIDI Note" pop up dissappears. 

Set as default, load a preset for a TD 30, save preset... nothing changes. 

I would have at least thought that using some alien preset would have at least let me hear the WRONG sounds on my kit, but only the kit currently selected in my module will play. 

I'm missing something critical. Is it how I have the ins and outs for these tracks set? 

 

[Twub]

8 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

Ok, this is all good signs.

Your interface is installed properly, it's selected in Cakewalk, and when you record MIDI to a track, it records and even triggers the sound on your module.

Great!

Hey that other post I just put up was in response to Mettelus. I'm going thru this latest post of yours now. 

Seems I know about as much of thread-protocol as I do CbB. 

[Twub]

28 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

Set the MIDI track input to your TD-17. If you hit a pad now, this should be making the synth make noises. If not, we'll get to that. It'll also be making noises of its own so it might be an idea to disconnect the audio outputs of your TD-17 for now, we only want to hear what the MIDI is playing.

OK, now arm the MIDI track, set Cakewalk recording and hit around your kit - try every pad, play a groove, etc

You should see the MIDI data on that track now. If you rewind and play it, this data is now being sent to SSD5 instead of your TD-17 because the output is set to SSD5.

 

17 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

If you click around the SSD5 kit with your mouse, do you hear each kit piece?

All good info. 

Ok, so after doing that I get a signal to the MIDI track. It's clear there's a signal there. 

Arming and Recording produced a visible recording. 

No sound on playback. 

Put the stereo ins back into the interface for playback. No sound. 

Yes, to hearing the SSD5 over the speakers with mouse clicks. 

Sounds great by the way. Especially the snare, which is a thing I mess with constantly in the Roland.

 

[Twub]

Oh, and no sound during recording either. 

Just sticks on mesh. 

(I won't have to unplug these audio ins to record, will I?) 

Can't I just mute something or other?  Like that fellow who redid his video for me said?

[Twub]

41 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

On that MIDI track you should see all of your controls for input, output, channel, bank and patch in there. If you don't, at the top of the track view you'll see a dropdown box for Track Control Manager.  It may say Custom, which can hide some controls to keep things clean, but setting it to All will show all of the track controls.

On the Channel dropdown control in the MIDI track (the one with a C), try setting it to Channel 1 first of all. If there's no sound when you start playback, try Channel 10.

If neither of these things are getting SSD to play, this is where I'd say it's going to be a mapping thing.

"Tracks" dropdown shows this:

No "Custom" or "All" , but everything in the pop up is checked.  

The "C" dropdown was set to NONE as you see. 

Setting to Channel 1: No sound

Setting to Channel 10 : No Sound.

On this playback, that is. The Roland is loud and clear thru the speakers when I smack something on it. 

[Twub]

26 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

That should open up in the Multidock and tell you about every MIDI note and channel you recorded earlier. Give us a screenshot of that.

 

Looks like there was about two seconds or so that didn't fit this screen

 

[Twub]

Here is 

Snare, rim, T1, rim, T2, rim, T3, rim, T4, rim, Kick, C1 bow, C1 edge, C2 bow, C2 edge, Ride bow, ride edge, HH pedal (I think I did that twice) HH open bow, HH open edge, HH closed bow, HH closed edge. 

I never did hit the ride bell. Sorry. I never use it. I usually just make the bow a bell. 

[Twub]

[Twub]

Yes Ok. 

couple minutes...

[Twub]

oh and remember how I said that the audio track AND the MIDI track open the SSD5 page?

Does that matter which?

[Twub]

To start with, I'm getting my kit to play these SSD5 sounds straight off, with no going to the mapping page. 

I again unplugged both the audios from the interface, and there they are as I play the Roland. 

Went back and wiped that track, and recorded again. 

It's working, but I must say I don't know what happened other than the Roland's audio was obscuring these SSD5 sounds. The SSD5 is somewhat muted, well, it's not as loud when triggered by the Roland. 

The sound in the Roland, like demo recordings and the like, are louder and clearer than that which comes from the pads themselves. Maybe that accounts for this lesser SSD5 volume. 

WOW! 

WHAT NOW?

[Twub]

Ok, that's gonna take some time, and it's probably a school night for you. 

Plus I never even got so far in SSD5 to tailor any kits, so I have to dive into that. 

This is GREAT!

But, ALL the kicks? ALL the snares? Wait, so I get whichever one I go with, recorded, right?

I still have to figure out why that mapper in SS wasnt working, by the way. 

Maybe it was the whole time and i was overriding the sounds. 

There's all sorts of rims and clicks and stuff that have to be assigned. 

RIght now T2 on the 17 is intermittently triggering a crash cymbal for some reason. 

I think that's a sensitivity thing internally. All those sensitivity settings and such still apply to this 17 right?

Ok, but what this sounds like is what I was told days ago WASNT POSSIBLE

- to set up a track in advance, in order to record the next strike of that tracks dedicated trigger.  That's what I'd hoped to be able to do from the very start. Go look at my 1st or second post on that other thread. 

OH BOY THIS IS GREAT!

 

 

 

[mettelus]

1 hour ago, Twub said:

But, ALL the kicks? ALL the snares? Wait, so I get whichever one I go with, recorded, right?

MIDI can be a bit daunting when first learning, but a big advantage to MIDI is that if you capture a MIDI recording, you can modify the sample sounds after the performance during the editing phase. With a VSTi it is as simple as changing/modifying the kit piece in SSD5(swap snares, change the kick parameters, etc.). It is not until you record the audio output that you are "locked in" as it were. @Lord Tim is giving you a lot of good advice here, so I don't want to step on what he is doing. Just keep in mind that you are working with two distinct yet interrelated things: 1) recording your MIDI performance from the TD-17 and it being mapped correctly to fire SSD5 (you can edit the MIDI as you see fit after performing as well), and 2) the audio performance of SSD5 which is quite similar to what you have done to tailor your TD-17 kit.

[HOOK]

8 hours ago, Twub said:

It what this sounds like is what I was told days ago WASNT POSSIBLE

- to set up a track in advance, in order to record the next strike of that tracks dedicated trigger.  That's what I'd hoped to be able to do from the very start. Go look at my 1st or second post on that other thread.

When you get to the end of this you'll see that everything you were told you can do - you CAN do.  You just have no understanding of what you're doing...yet.  When Tim gets you THERE...you see how the puzzle fits together and you'll be sad you didn't know all of this for all the years you've been recording audio off your drum module.

[57Gregy]

9 hours ago, mettelus said:

With a VSTi it is as simple as changing/modifying the kit piece in SSD5(swap snares, change the kick parameters, etc.).

I remember a tutorial from Session Drummer (the original) on how to use SD as your lead guitarist. ?

[Twub]

10 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

The thing to remember is this is where audio latency comes into play.

I'm going to assume you've downloaded the correct Scarlett ASIO drivers and installed them, but if not that's super important. ASIO will give you the best possible performance with this interface. So how it works is you hit a pad, that sends MIDI into Cakewalk, Cakewalk sends that MIDI to SSD5, and then the sound of that goes out of your Scarlett outputs.

Here's a ton of miscellaneous stuff, that needs said. 

Yes, I've had the ASIO driver as soon as I first hooked up the Scarlett Solo. I've heard about latency from the start, but I've yet to experience ANY latency. Initially I thought that having an interface with a direct monitor setting kept latency at bay. 

Understand what brought me to Cakewalk in the first place: Recording songs remotely with the rest of my band, and having the options to apply treatments to our tracks in order to end up with a REALLY polished sound in the final product.  We have about 15 projects going in CbB right now. (just Tracks. We haven't even delved into final mixing and mastering yet) 

And I was recording audio, on my end. We all were, this band of mine.  The Scarlett Solo has two inputs: one XLR and one instrument. They have differing impedances, and I figured I'd fry something if I tried plugging one of my outputs into the XLR, so I'd been going into the Scarlett from my L Mono output. I took the track after I'd recorded it and converted it to mono.  Panning my kit left and right was a thing I never did. Mostly because of gigs. I play clubs  in smallish rooms where the audience is close. Even big club rooms really aren't that big.

I figured if I ever played Wembley Stadium , it might be cool to hear the kit pan from (my) right to left with some big descending fill across the entire kit. (I'm left-handed) but in some smallish room, why would I want parts of my kit more inaudible than others to folks sitting on say, the right side of the room?

But anyway, soon after I started putting out these drum tracks, the old problems surfaced again - how to mix the kit from two outputs. 

For me, most gigs were fraught with fear: Some new soundguy I hadnt worked with yet, was going to have to be told that I was the mix. That I was going to send him an EQd signal to ONE channel, and he HAD to understand that my channel's freqs were to be kept at zero on his board, and how he could tweak in tiny increments, but if he wanted more highs on my snare, and twisted that knob indiscriminately, he was going to frag everything - my cymbals were going to clip high, the works.  And brother, don't EVER even TOUCH the MIDS! On and on and on. I can count on one hand the gigs I played where I thought I actually sounded good. That's a real shame. 

I'd have people all the time telling me I sounded great, but I didn't. Most civilians are incapable of even knowing the differences in sound quality and would clap and dance to a jack-hammer. 

Anyway, Latency, this is what this all comes down to now. It seems I no longer even need my audio outs from the TD-17. But with that said, now the Scarlett Solo with it's Direct Monitoring, which used to be right at the front of the signal path, seems to be at the end of it. I don't know what to expect. 

When those raw sounds from the SSD5 were FINALLY audible to me last night, I detected no latency whatsoever as I noodled about. 

I made that little recording where I first heard the SSD5 and went back and put EQ on the audio track. It sounded very promising. In fact I was (guardedly) thrilled. 

If treatments and effects and alterations and tweaks to the kits contribute to Latency, then I might be in good shape here. I'm a simple soul. I'm not looking right now to do much more than see if I can emulate, say, the fat, wet thuds of Bill Ward's super-distinctive drum-sound, or capture that wonderful organically produced ambience of Bonham's "When The Levee Breaks". By the way, "Nearly Lost You" by the Screaming Trees has just beautifully recorded drums from start to finish. That's all I'm after. 

One good kit, for me, will be sufficient for 70% of the material we cover. All I really expect to do is add or subtract reverb or ambience here and there. Maybe tune a snare up or down occasionally. 

Covering, say, Rush, or the Police? That's coming - that's going to be a different animal altogether. 

And this whole time, I'm hoping that things become EASIER for me with MIDI. Lord Tim's statement about saving the Template, is music to my ears.  I really find that I enjoy the process of tweaking and refining my sound, but I want to spend as much time as possible playing these things and recording tracks, rather than endlessly fighting the " robbing Peter to pay Paul" battle, with my overall equalization and sound.

After 30 years, I deserve it, I think. I paid my dues. 

You guys are just great, by the way. I'm so happy I found you.

Lord Tim -I can't say enough thanks.

So, now I have to go dive in - read and reread all this thread, and encounter the next obstacle, whatever that may be. 

I see there's two new hits on this thread while I've been babbling away here, which I havent seen yet. 

 

[Twub]

11 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

This is why latency is so important - every sound you'll hear will be going through Cakewalk and the synths and effects in it, so if your buffers are set too high, it'll make stuff entirely unplayable.

I don't know what to expect. This PC is very old and that's why it's relegated to the basement. If I encounter unplayable latency conditions, then all this is wasted effort and it's going to break my heart. I don't need a whole new nightmarish battle, with an insurmountable enemy. 

[Twub]

12 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

You'll want to go into Cakewalk > Preferences ? Audio > Driver settings and get this as low as you can before the audio futzes out. How low you get it will depend on how powerful your computer is for a start, and generally how good the ASIO driver is for your interface.

 

 

A quick look at that setting shows me that I'm here: