Drum track mysteries

[sholland]

My collaborator (who lives in a different city) sent me a MIDI drum track that he'd done as three separate tracks, bashing on the keyboard. He's on a PC and his sequencer is Cakewalk. (Yeah, I know.)

He emailed me the MIDI file, and then soon after emailed me again asking if it had "turned into one track."

Well, when I dragged and dropped the file into DP it was one track. And there were some mysterious things about it. The MIDI track was inconsistent in triggering sounds.

I used "split notes" to split each note into its own track. There are 21 such tracks. With the idea in mind that there was a polyphony limit issue, I made three DLSMusicDevices and assigned 7 tracks to each one.

I muted all but one track, and then watched in the drum editor as it played. The wiper would pass over some instances of that note and no sound was triggered. Other instances triggered the sound. (In this case it was a wood block hit.)

The same thing happened with other parts of the drum track. (cymbals etc.)

I seem to remember something about a feature where certain drum parts can't play at the same time; this was to make it a more realistic drummer. I thought this was a feature that could be turned on or off. (I'm remembering from back in the DP 2.7 days.) I've spent a couple of hours farting about, looking for this feature and exploring other reasons why this drum track isn't playing properly. I haven't been able to glean the necessary info from the manual.

Can anyone advise me on why this drum track may not be playing properly?

[Jim]

Is it possible that some of your notes have Velocity values at or near zero?

[Billster]

I'm working on a similar project, but my drummer was using a Roland pad kit.

I agree with the previous post to go look at the event list for notes with very low velocities.

Other things to consider are:

- The response curve of the keyboard samples your partner was using. His samples may respond differently than the module or sound samples you are using.

- There may be MIDI controller information in the track, or velocity splits on the original sample unit your partner used.

If possible, get an audio track of the performance your partner made on his rig. You can listen while the MIDI data scrolls by and identify any controller or velocity information that is making different drum sounds.

[sholland]

I figured something out. For some reason, when the MIDI files are dragged into DP they end up having quite a few hits where the duration is so short the hits don't register. Quantizing seems to help this a bit.