Bug Or Problem: Adding Shakers/Maracas

[JC]

I’ve tried adding the Shakers and Maracas as a new ‘drum’ and it appears in a rounded box at upper left. Good.

However, the default hits are mapped to like D-2, etc. So I then try to map the various hits to something usable on my MIDI keyboard and I’ve run into a few problems:

1. The Interface: The ‘accordion’ at right for MIDI Mapping is simply too tiny, ie. it isn’t tall enough to even -see- all the mappings. PLUS, there doesn’t seem to be a way to expand or move the selected hits up or down within that accordion. This seems like a bug to me. And since the height of this section is so small there’s no way to assign a mapping to more than just one of the hits on each drum. ie. I can assign the 1st hit type of the Shaker but none of the others.

2. Also possibly a bug, when I -do- assign the hits to another MIDI Note (eg. C6), I get a weird ‘ratchet’ sound in addition to the sound I mapped. Happens with Maracas and Shakers.

Total showstopper for these added instruments.

Any ideas?

Topic

[JC]

Anyone?

[Henrik Ekblom]

The future hit instruments are a special kind of instruments, designed to play articulations with transients in the end of the file. This is because playing a tambourine, for example, starts to make a sound when you start to shake it, and a little later – the transient (meaning the accent, the “hit”) is played.

This is why they are called Future Hit instruments, and they require special MIDI to be used. We have shipped pre-made MIDI for those, found in Grooves tab, or auto created by increasing Amount on such an instrument in Edit Play Style. It is a complex MIDI which is using velocity to control what articulation to play – e.g. the instruments can’t be played like a regular instrument.

They do, by default, get note number 2,3,4 or 5 – and we recommend that they use those, so the pre-made MIDI we ship works as intended.

In your case, you want to play it with an external MIDI keyboard. You should then only use the “Shake Hit Immediate”, or the “Shake Back Immediate” articulations – since these are the only regular working articulations these instruments have.

This is one way you can do that:
– Select “Shake Hit Immediate”
– turn off the Velocity Curve and Velocity Gate boxes.

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– select the rest of the articulations
– In Level box, turn volume to Off

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If you now set the MIDI note of this instrument to a MIDI note that you can use on your keyboard, it should be playable!

Please note that we see if we can make the process of playing these instruments with your keyboard easier, and hopefully add this in a coming update…

Henrik Ekblom - User Experience Designer
Toontrack

1

Thanked by: JohnMarkPainter

[Author]

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