Know thy enemy (a drum map bends to my will)

[Starship Krupa]

Watchers of this space may be familiar with my fear and loathing around Cakewalk Sonar's drum map system, which I have been beating my head against since Cakewalk by BandLab shipped 7 years ago.

Usually I've just wanted to display the drum kit piece names over on the left and use the drum grid to compose/edit and have been amazed at the obstacle course of hassle and confusion I've faced on the way to that (simple, I would think) goal.

This time, I took on something much more involved and that makes deep use of the utility of what drum maps were originally designed to achieve. And in the spirit of fairness (as well as gloating), I'll tell the tale of how I used a drum map to accomplish something really useful that might not be possible with other DAW's.

That is, the mapping of  a given MIDI note to whatever you wish to map it to, to and from a hardware unit and/or virtual instrument. The function that when I've ranted about the hell I've gone through just to get note names to display with a drum editing grid, certain beloved users would sound off with protestations of "drum maps is the most magnificently awesome way of being able to use my original Roland Octapad to drive the brain of my Casio MIDI drum kit!"

Which. Wasn't. What. I. Was. Talking. About. At. All.😡

"Of course I don't use drum maps just to display the note names, for actual programming and editing I use an instrument map and the normal piano roll view."

Yes, of course you don't, because IT'S A MISERABLE HASSLE.

🤦‍♂️

But this time, what I wanted to do, were I able to pull it off, would use the note mapping function to map MIDI notes

Background: "why would I deliberately inflict this on myself" tl/dr:

I've been a fan of A|A|S' products ever since the DAW I was using 10 years ago started including a bespoke 2 soundpack version of their A|A|S Player, which is a synth that allows you to use A|A|S synth preset packs ("soundpacks") without having to buy the full synths the soundpacks are designed for. There is absolutely no control of any parameter, delay and reverb (often too much for my taste) are baked in and will be there until you buy the synth(s) that the soundpacks were designed for.

Most of the soundpacks include up to a dozen drum/percussion single hits. Kicks, snares, hi hats, toms. I've never quite understood what I was supposed to do with these. Load up an entire virtual instrument just to get one note out of it? At least I determined that multiple instances of A|A|S Player share the same already-loaded engine, so overhead isn't so bad. Although these single hits often sound as compelling and complex and unusual as I expect from A|A|S, I've tried making multiple MIDI tracks (kick, snare, hat, tom) and it was too clumsy to have 4 separate MIDI tracks for drums, and it also makes it harder to visualize what the patterns are. Also, it's not really feasible to use Step Sequencer to program patterns if there are 4 different MIDI or Instrument tracks.

But what if there were some way to have 4 synth tracks driven by a single MIDI track for simpler editing? And what if I could use the drum grid and even Step Sequencer for editing?

Turns out my hunch was correct: it IS possible, and a custom drum map from scratch is the answer.

Rather than starting with a GM or Default or even "blank" drum map as I normally would, I started a completely new one, for the first time following the "New Drum Map" menu selection to the letter. I created entries for note 36 (GM standard for kick), 38 (snare), 42 (closed hat), and 50 (hi tom). I loaded 4 instances of A|A|S Player into Synth Rack (a feature I never use for anything but troubleshooting) and named them AAS Kick (huh huh), AAS Snare, AAS Hat (huh huh huh), and AAS Tom.

Then I set the Out Ports for each of these notes to the appropriate synth instances, and lo and behold, it worked:

Maybe I could get even fancier with it and have the drum map send patch selection info to the synths. That's for another time.

At the moment, I'm just having too much fun opening the different instances of A|A|S Player and trying different sounds.

I still need to load the 4 instances of A|A|S Player before applying the drum map, so I'll make an A|A|S Beat (huh huh huh huh) project template with everything loaded up and ready to go.

[David Baay]

Yes, that's a classic use case. Historically the multiple synths would have been hardware synths - and probably different ones -  but it's equally applicable to multiple instances of the same non-multi-timbral soft synth.

I love making Sonar (and other softwares) bend to my will which is why I actually relish challenges like this. Sonar can do all kinds of coos things that may never have been specifically envisioned by the developers. The complexity may stymie new users on occasion but it can do magic in the hands of an experienced user. With complexity comes power and flexibility.

4 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Maybe I could get even fancier with it and have the drum map send patch selection info to the synths.

That's going to be difficult unless the synth instances can be be configured to respond to only one channel so you can channelize the program change messages in the event list which is the only way to differentiate them. But then you'd have to channelize the note events as well which would defeat the purpose of being able to sequence MIDI freely in a single track without thinking about which synth is going to respond. And if you channelize the drum map, you'll just be back to sending all four program change messages to each synth on their respective channels.

If it were me, I would use CodeFN42's MIDChFilter VST to distribute note events from a single drum-mapped MIDI track to the 4 instrument tracks, and use the Patch widget (or program change events if necessary) on the each Instrument track to set the patch. The Instrument tracks will also give you a place to do individual automations, velocity offsets, etc.

[Starship Krupa]

2 hours ago, David Baay said:

I actually relish challenges like this. Sonar can do all kinds of coos things that may never have been specifically envisioned by the developers. The complexity may stymie new users on occasion but it can do magic in the hands of an experienced user. With complexity comes power and flexibility.

Drum maps is a powerful, complex feature that's hard to get one's head around. But it can allow you to do neato things like this.

And I like a good challenge too.

What I dislike about Cakewalk's drum maps feature is that it's also necessary to employ it to perform what I believe should be a simple task. To my thinking, needing to go as deep into it as one must in order to display the drum editing grid with the names of the instruments you're using....it's as if you had to write a .CAL script in order to rename a clip.

I'm reminded of this when I see how often another DAW I use tells me in its update dialog that it's adding new drum maps to the program's library of them.

In that DAW, to use a drum map/drum editing grid, when you're in the Piano Roll, you click on the Scale selection button and there is a vast list of available drum maps you may use. This is actually kind of a step backward; it used to have a button in the PRV header marked "Drum Map."

Imagine being able to apply a drum map from the Piano Roll, the actual place in the program where you use a drum editing grid! Rather than having to go to Track View or Console View.

I'll never forget helping out a longtime Cakewalk user who started using this other DAW as a secondary and was befuddled as to how and where to apply a drum map. He couldn't find it because it was in the simplest, most obvious place for it to be. He was probably expecting it to be somewhere in a track header or console strip.

But y'know, the reason that this other DAW is now my secondary where Sonar is my primary is Sonar's versatility. Routing and so forth. Also, I've never tried doing note remapping in that DAW, I'm not even sure you can do it.