lowstring

I have been a fan of Motu interfaces since I first ventured into the land of “owning/operating a home studio”. I rocked a first gen Motu 828 firewire interface for probably 4 years and it still worked when I got rid of it! The general thought when it comes to Motu is that they make hardware/software for Mac users right? Well not entirely, when I purchased my 828 it came with cuemix software that only worked on Mac’s! So that left me one option when it came to monitoring; and that was to use an external hardware mixer, in my case a Mackie CFX20. That is not a huge deal, but mixers take up space, and add more cables and buttons to the mix. I used a patch bay to split incoming signals, one going to the mixer for monitoring, and the other going to the 828 for recording. Then I took the 2-channel output from the 828 back into a stereo channel on the mixer for playback. Pain in the ass right? Yeah!
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XLN Audio is fairly new Swedish audio software development company that has recently released the first version of its new drum sampler plugin named; Addictive Drums. First let me get you up to speed with how I produce drum tracks; Roland V-Drums baby! Recording the midi out from an electric drum kit is in my opinion the only way to truly capture a natural drum feel (unless of course you are recording an acoustic kit). You can of course use keyboard controllers, or manually enter midi notes but I am lazy, time is money and that is way to time consuming, so hence the $1k investment in V-Drums. Ok back to the topic at hand, I opened up an existing project I have been working on to try out Addictive Drums. This project already has a midi drum track that I recorded from the V-Drum output, and in this song’s case that track was currently routed to an instance of Toontrack’s EZDrummer.

I fired up Addictive Drums, set the midi output of the drum track to Addictive Drums and hit play. Not surprisingly, the V-Drum midi notes and Addictive Drums did not map well together. A quick search on the Addictive Drum forums turned up nothing, although I did find a post where Lars (An XLN dude) said V-Drum support would be included in a future release. So back to the drawing board; I dug out the V-Drum brain manual, as well as the Addictive Drum midi note list, which you can find in PDF form in the XLN Addictive Drum installation directory. Thankfully both Roland and XNL documented their midi note mappings quite well in an easy to read chart, so creating a custom drum map in Sonar was no sweat. The brain that came with my V-Drum set, can only possibly output around 40-50 midi notes, while Addictive Drums can handle around 90, so using V-Drum’s in my case won’t allow me to utilize everything Addictive Drums can offer. However I am not Neil Pert, and I don’t really need 4 toms and 8 cymbals!
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