Virtual Instruments for Kits with Bass, Piano, etc

BeatBuddy General
1

Hi,

As background, recall that extended kits which have bass, piano, etc. are accomplished by distributing the samples for drums, bass, piano etc across the range of note numbers (on a single channel) so that the drums are in one area (e.g. C1-C3), the bass is in another area (e.g. below C1), the piano is in another area (e.g. above C5) etc.

Thus MIDI information on one channel, divided into different pitch areas, can trigger the whole band.

Now, this is contrary to the normal organization in a MIDI file, or the way people generally work in a DAW, where different instruments have their information on different channels and/or tracks.

So, consider a BB part which has drums, bass, piano (as described above). If you drag that part out into your DAW, you typically have a munge of information on a single channel and it will not (without serious editing) play back as intended (sounding like drums, bass, piano).

However, if you had a sample-based virtual instrument in your DAW set up with the same sort of sample layout as the kit in the BB then it WOULD play back correctly. Follow me so far?

OK, so my question is, has anyone developed any sample-based virtual instrument presets using any sample-based virtual instrument environment (e.g. HALion, Kontact, UVI, etc.) or any DAW (e.g. Cubase, Performer, Studio One, Bitwig, etc.) such that you can drag out a BB part into it and have it sound correctly?

IOW, has anyone created virtual equivalents of (any of) our OP BB drum kits for any external environments?

I ask because having same would make it MUCH easier to take a BB OP song, drop it on the DAW, cut it up while listening to it, and then re-arrange for the full BB treatment of Intro, multiple Parts, and Outro.

I’ve found that I can do this process in Cubase pretty straightforwardly wrt. all the dragging/dropping in both directions, and wrt. the part editing, however, I have to constantly re-export back to BB Manager to do audio checking to see if the cuts and edits were made correctly.

If I could confirm the cuts/edits directly in the DAW (Cubase) then the process would be quite a bit more efficient.

So, if anyone has “been there” and done the setup to allow such, please kindly chime in.

Cheers!

2

Yes. I have done exactly what you propose for some kit in the Logic Pro X ESX24 Virtual Instrument.

3

ESX 24 is a sampler. If you have a sample based instrument in Cubase, you should be able to build an instrument which matches a drum kit used in an OP. I posted several collections of samples in Resources. They are listed as “roll your own” kits.

4

Just adding my version to the conversation - I found I needed to learn enough about REAPER in self defense and with access to a few sound files from basic/free Kontakt (Native Instruments) isn’t too RAM intensive for my MAC laptop. With help from Persist and others I export existing .sng from BB as MIDI files, select and delete parts, rename each remaining part as an individual component to bring into a new project as a separate manageable channel.

Since we are dealing with bass, piano, organ and drums (at most) not too labor intensive. I crafted .txt files to align the notes/drum parts in REAPER based on the information thoughtfully supplied by folks like Phil Flood who crafted the drumkits.