Hi all,
I’ve exported some drumset notation as MIDI, and most of the notes are correct, however the kick drum is being placed down on A0 (MIDI note 33) instead of B0 or C1 (MIDI 35 and 36) as usual. Is there another convention I’m unaware of with the GM percussion map, or is this a mistake?
Thanks in advance!
If you look at the General MIDI percussion map in Play > Percussion Maps, you’ll see that ‘Kick drum (low)’ is mapped to note 33, ‘Kick drum (very low)’ is 35, and ‘Kick drum (low)’ is 36. Try deleting or changing the instrument of the entry for note 33, and you should find that Dorico exports note 36 instead.
Got it! Thanks. I didn’t know I could remap stuff. While I’m at it, right now snare drum rolls (notated with three tremolo slashes) are exporting on the MIDI note assigned to Snare Roll, but as 64th notes instead of a continuous note. Am I missing something, or should it be one or the other? That is—either 64th notes on the normal snare drum note, or a continuous note on the snare roll note?
I’ll look into this – it’s possible that Dorico is ending up playing both the MIDI version of a roll and the sampled version of the roll, when really the latter is sufficient.
Posting a further question here because it’s on the same topic:
I’m attempting to export some drumset notation as GM MIDI. In the relevant percussion map Ride Cymbal 1 is set to MIDI note 51 and Ride Cymbal 2 to 59, as in GM, but both are set to simply ‘Ride Cymbal’ in the instrument box, and so both are exporting on MIDI note 51. As there isn’t a second ride cymbal available in Dorico (with crash cymbals Dorico defaults the GM map to Crash Cymbal 1 = Crash Cymbal (Low) and Crash Cymbal 2 = Crash Cymbal (High), how should I set this up to export the two different rides correctly?
I guess the question is, what real-world instruments are “Ride Cymbal 1” and “Ride Cymbal 2” in the GM drum map supposed to correlate to? Do you know? We could potentially create two different ride cymbal instruments – differentiated by size etc. – in order to correctly disambiguate these two instruments, which would sort this out.
I imagine this would typically be used for jazz setups, in which one ride ride might have rivets or a sizzle chain on it while the other doesn’t. Some people just have two different rides with different timbres.
A quick search on drummerworld seems to indicate at least a reasonable prevalence of multiple-ride setups, including the well-known Cobus.
Perhaps for the time being I’ll go for “low” and “high” like the crash cymbals, if there’s no specific convention that is often used.
That sounds great Daniel—thanks for your understanding!
While at it, is there a way to get Dorico to export two MIDI notes for a certain technique? For example, when the snare roll technique is used, export a MIDI note on 38 (normal snare) AND 29 (Snare Roll) simultaneously? Would it be possible to do this with keyswitches perhaps? I’m not exactly sure how those work in the Percussion Map editor
At the moment I don’t think there’s a way to achieve this, no, because each instrument can only play a single technique at once, and this would require two techniques to be played simultaneously.
Got it. Thanks Daniel. If I set up a key switch in the Percussion map, will this be exported as a MIDI note whenever the technique is used?
Yes it will. I think that you can have multiple keyswitch notes for a technique, but I’m not absolutely sure about that.
Thanks Paul. I’m trying to do this, but at the moment NO keyswitches are being exported in the MIDI. As a test, I tried assigning a keyswitch of MIDI note 2 to the snare drum technique ‘cross stick’, which I have mapped to MIDI note 28, but when I export it it exports on note 28 with no keyswitch. What am I doing wrong?