How to discern which notes are mapped to which conga (e.g.)?

[mhschmieder]

OK, I'm perplexed. This has bugged me for some time, but I didn't want to ask on the forum until I felt I had taken enough time to read through the entire manual. Maybe it's there and I didn't look up the right topic.

How can I tell which conga sound correspopnds to which note? This is just one example of many, for instruments that are not melodic but have different sounds at different notes.

Certainly it doesn't correspond to GM drum mapping.

Trial and error takes too long; especially when trying to find a correct combination for tumbadora, conga open and conga slap (the three conga kit sounds that are part of the GM drumkit standard and therefore are the most common when porting legacy projects, whether my own or from others).

For now, I have reverted to Battery 3 for conga kits, so that I can more confidently assign the correct part to the right note. I have also split my MIDI parts up into single-note parts, as the note order is rarely the same in other kits either, so it is easier if each member of the conga kit and each articulation is a separate MIDI track. Especially as there might be more than one option on offer for each.

I have a similar issue with agogos, bongos, and other latin percussion, and probably also other similar categories that I haven't gotten around to tracking yet using Ethno.

Of course I can do this by ear, but that takes a long time, and unless I take a lot of time to chart out what I discover on my own into some spreadsheet program, I won't necessarily remember what I found out the next time around. I am used to products giving full detail on such stuff, or at least making it easy to query within the app (and maybe it is but I just didn't figure out what category it would be under).

[Dwetmaster]

You can do the dirty work once and then assign everything to a kit in the Drum Editor.

[mhschmieder]

That's a good suggestion. Maybe I should make up a GM kit for when I'm working with legacy products vs. creating new content. I don't always want to take the time in those cases to take full advantage of additional articulations and voicings that are available with a more full sample set.

Of course I still have that initial stage of just having to trust my own ears to identify which note is assigned to tumbadora open, conga slap, etc. As each virtual instrument, ROMpler, and sample library seem to have tuned their kits differently before the sample session, it isn't always trivial to discern.