[GA4] Only 8 samples per PADs??? Are you serious???

Virtual instruments
1

P’tit lu all…
(Hi there)

What a surprise!!!
I plan to recreate the old NS Drumkit7 (originally made for Battery “von Native Instruments”) by loading and mapping all samples from the bak into some custom GA4 pads…
But WTF?!?! I can load up to 8 samples a pad ONLY!!!
So! What about different velocity nuances? Tell me please!!??

That asking me about the ability of GA4 to make more realistic velocity nuances on other banks from Steinberg…
If you’ll tell factory banks have not the same limitation, I’ll probably asking you many other questions, if you see what I mean…
So?

2

Interesting, I’d not noticed this limit so far and I don’t doubt that such a limit exists (will have to try it here and see). I’ve an idea for a work around if you need more than 8 velocity zones.

I’m assuming you’re using the full GA4 version, and not the light-weight SE version bundled with Cubase?

Would it work if you built parallel kits and set them to the same channel? GA4 lets you load up 4 kits at once. Imagine you need a snare on pad/key C2 with 32 velocity layers…
Would it not work to do:
the first 8 zones in kit 1 on C2,
the next 8 zones in kit 2 on C2,
the next 8 zones in kit 3 on C2,
and finally, the next 8 zones in kit 4 on C2.
???

If you’re using SE version, then you might could ‘stack instances’ to get more velocity zones, and talk to them all at once with a MIDI track using AUX MIDI sends.

3

OK, I just tried my suggested workaround of ‘stacking kits’ in the full version of Groove Agent 4 to get more than 8 velocity layers…

On a quick try I discovered that I can’t set the lowest velocity level of the first sample zone of a pad, or the highest velocity of the last sample zone of a pad. There might be a way to unlock this, but I have not found it yet.

Meanwhile, it is still possible to get more than 8 layers (Up to 26 velocity zones) by putting muted dummy samples in the bottom and top slots of kits that need them to offset the bottom and top samples.

Here is an example work around for around 12 velocity zones.

Kit 1 on Pad C1
Zone 1 - Vel = 0-10
Zone 2 - Vel = 11-20
Zone 3 - Vel = 21-30
Zone 4 - Vel = 31-40
Zone 5 - Vel = 41-50
Zone 6 - Vel = 51-60
Zone 7 - Vel = 61-70
Zone 8 - Vel = 71-127 (Make this a really short silent dummy sample)

Kit 2 on Pad C1 (set to same MIDI channel as Kit 1)
Zone 1 - Vel = 0-70 (Make this a really short silent dummy sample)
Zone 2 - Vel = 71-80
Zone 3 - Vel = 81-90
Zone 4 - Vel = 91-100
Zone 5 - Vel = 101-110
Zone 6 - Vel = 111-120
Zone 7 - Vel = 121-127

On the dummy sample thing. If you don’t have a short silent sample handy, you could just load up any small sample you have, trim it down to just a couple of samples, and pull the gain way down until it’s not audible. That should do the trick.

I’ve also included a really small Dummy.wav file as an attachment to this post you can grab from here:
Dummy.zip (166 Bytes)
It’s just 2 samples of silence in MONO at 44.1khz.

Alternatively, if your kit only has a few pieces with this many velocity zones, and you do not want to ‘stack kits’, you could do this over different pads in the same kit. Simply ‘remap’ the trigger for the second pad in some out of the way pad bank to have the same trigger note:

To remap Agent instruments you’ll first click “User Hardware Control Mapping” icon at the bottom GA4’s virtual MPC pad.

Using this remapping method you could get way more than 26 layers/zones.

4

Nice workaround! Thank you very much.
I’ll try this tomorow becaue it’s near 4AM here in France :wink:…
Need to sleep :open_mouth: :astonished:

5

I tried it out and it worked.

  1. I just hit record on a track in Cubase and counted to 16 into my mic then hit stop (set to 44.1k, 16bit, mono to keep this demonstration file size small). I named the part on my Cubase track “count2sixteen”.

  2. I repeated the process of dragging my “count2sixteen” part/sample from my Cubase project and dropping it onto the top center region of the C1 pad in Groove Agent until it was full.

  3. I did the same thing in step 2 for Pad 1 (G#7) of bank 8.

  4. I dropped four more copies of my counting sample on Pad 2 (A7) of bank 8.

  5. I used the sample editor to slice up my big sample into tiny ones (me saying one number per zone) using ‘trim’ in GA4. Essentially all I did was block select the portion of the large sample I wanted for each zone, and once I was happy with the way they all sounded in preview I ‘trimmed’ each zone.

  6. For the ‘dummy areas’ in zones 8, 9, 16, and 17, I simply found a really short silent part in my large counting sample and trimmed it.

  7. I Divided 128 by 16 zones to determine that each of my velocity zones should have a resolution of about 8, and divided my velocity zones accordingly in the GA4 sample editor.

  8. I remapped the trigger key/pads G#7 and A7 keys in bank 8 to C1.

  9. I exported the kit with samples and came up with this demo kit showing how I managed to make a kit piece with 16 velocity zones.
    16VelExample.zip (447 KB)
    The larger ‘dummy zones’ are just a couple of silent samples…

Note that in this example I chose the method where I do it all in a single kit.
For this example to work, you’ll need to remap pads G#7 and A7 to a C1 trigger note as well.

To remap Agent instruments you’ll first click “User Hardware Control Mapping” icon at the bottom GA4’s virtual MPC pad.

Once the kit is loaded and all the relevant pads are remapped to trigger via C1, you should find that my voice counts off which sample is playing over 16 velocity zones.