If found a very helpful, detailed summary of EZ Drummer mappings. Here it is:
As you can see, the EZ Drummer kits frequently use the full allocation of 128 midi instruments. Many of these are varying articulations of a given piece, i.e. differently struck hi-hats, rides, etc. If you save these as midi from EZ drummer, and then add them to a BB song, you are going to have quite a few unsupported notes. And, while you could add some additional instruments to a BB kit, you are going to run out of space given the BB’s 100mb limit. You surely will not have the range of velocity differences available in EZ drummer.
For those of you looking for the magic bullet that will get EZ Drummer files quickly into BB, you are probably either out of luck, or looking at doing a lot of additional work to massage the files. If you kept your EZ Drummer kit to a minimal configuration, you could probably bring the midis into BB, and then just move the unsupported articulations to supported ones.
Maybe you can record the EZ Drummer files as loops and use the new Aeros Looper, if that’s the route you want to go.
I use the EZ Drummer files for most of my stuff, but there’s a little bit of work to get them right for the Beat Buddy - as you say, there’s no magic bullet. Here’s my steps (it’s been a while since I did it last, so my memory might be a little fuzzy on specifics)…
Use the EZ Drummer ‘tap to find’ to get a beat close to what I want. I also have the BeatBuddy MIDI library in the search too; so if there’s something already in the library, I can skip all the next steps.
Pull the clip into Repear and open the MIDI editor
Look for notes in the wrong spots. It’s usually the hi-hats, toms and kicks. Select the row and use Shift + up/down to move them to the correct Beat Buddy note.
(Optional) Plug in the BeatBuddy via a USB MIDI cable and play the clip on repeat. I usually will also play an original midi clip from the Beat Buddy library as well and A/B between them. This will give me a good idea of how the clip sounds velocity-wise and have a comparison against an original beat. I’ll then make any tweaks - usually it’s adjusting the velocity of hi-hats.
Then I import it into the BeatBuddy Manager. This step is a little tricky. From memory, you have to drag the clip back into EZ Drummer, then use ALT+drag to get the clip into the BeatBuddy Manager.
EZDrummer is an add-on to Reaper. Reaper has it’s own midi editor. Im a bit confused why you would use EZDrummer at all. I have cd’s / dvd’s full of midi’s which I can pull into Reaper and never us EZD at all. Reaper’s midi editor allows for moving entire lines of notes at once to comply with BB’s limited range.
So my confusion is what benefit does EZD add here? Or am I missing something? I’ve been using Reaper since it was released and find the midi editor quit advanced. Reaper of course open source. With that it’s probably within the realm of possibility that one of those guys can automate this process. I’ll be sure to ask in the Reaper Forums, surely there are folks there using BB.
In EZDrummer, you can add all of your MIDI drum libraries (including the Beat Buddy MIDI library). Then use the tap to find feature (and other searching tools) to find beats and fills that you need. In my workflow, I open EZDrummer, use my AKAI LPD8 to tap the beat that I want, have a look at what it finds in the search results, edit it in Reaper to comply with the MIDI mappings of the Beat Buddy then piece it together into a new song in the Beat Buddy manager.