Hihat pedal range tuning

[Bonkers]

My hihat pedal does not report the full range of values from 0-127 on CC4 when it goes from open to closed. I can’t find how to set the target range anywhere. Can this be done somehow without having to figure out some scaling in my DAW (Ableton Live 7)?

Topic

[Rogue]

Hi – yes, choose the ‘HatsCtrl’ articulation and experiment with the soft and hard limit. Don’t forget to enable the ‘edit articulation only’ switch before making any changes or you will affect other Hats articulations.

The Hard value should be self explanatory and of use when the max CC value sent by your module falls short of 127 (with result of no possibility to reach Closed sounds).

Raising the soft limit will ensure that controllers that tend to cram CC values at the low end to correspond to a very narrow travel of the spring allow for all transitions from close to fully open to be audible.

Rogue Marechal - Toontrack
Configuration Manager

[Bonkers]

I still can’t get the pedal to even have any effect on the hi hat sound.

I’ve tried having my e-drums send the closed hihat, hatstrig, and not sure what else, but I can’t get my pedal to go from open to closed. The pedal does play closing and splash sounds, but I think the e-drums are emitting separate notes for those.

What am I doing wrong? I’ve recorded MIDI clips in ableton live to make sure the correct notes are being sent out and that the CC4 curve looks like I would expect. It ranges from 0 when open to 79 when fully closed.

[Rogue]

well 79 is very very low, needless to say. What I don’t understand from your report is that this should give you only open sounds. Unless you mean that you can get a ‘chick’ sound?

Anyway, ALL the notes you can spot in Live except ‘pedal only’ (note 44?) MUST be assigned to HatsTrig (as per manual). Once that is done, try to lower the Hard limit for HatsCtrl (not HatsTrig!) to around 80. That should improve the response somehow although you are essentially crushing the response to 2/3 of the resolution available. And I suspect the CC response may not be particularly linear in Live.

… btw you still have not told us what your e-drum and pedal brand and models are. Perhaps you can improve things athings a little in the module so that a suitable CC range enters the computer?

Rogue Marechal - Toontrack
Configuration Manager

[Bonkers]

I think I’ve solved most of my problems now. I apparently was having multiple problems.

I have a DTXpress III set. I’m using the stock pedal. I think it say HH65 on it. Is there a better pedal than this? This one seems to only output values of about 0, 40, 60, and 79 (I’m not at the drums now so I can’t verify exactly, but it’s something like that). Unfortunately I’m not sure I can scale this in Live at all to the full 127 range, but that seems like it may not matter.

My hatsTrig problem was that I didn’t realize octave numbers could go negative. I thought F#-1 was just another format for writing F#1. Now that I mapped closed and open high hat on my e-drums to F#-1, I get different hihat sounds with different pedal positions.

I’m still confused on exactly what the soft, hard, and limit numbers mean here. Is soft fully open, hard fully closed, and limit fully ignored in every way? Is the open/closedness between soft and hard fully linear? Can I adjust that at all?

Thanks for the quick responses so far. They’ve been very helpful.

[Author]

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