Hi, I am fairly new to this so please forgive me if this should be too basic, but I was wondering how to record Roland TD 4KP V-drums via Midi so I can overlay it onto a drum-less track I have and control the indivual tracks from each drum pad. I already have a MIDI-USB interface cable and the connection to my PC is working fine (apart from some latency issues). I plug the PC audio out into the Roland Sound Unit, so that when I play the drums, I have the drum-less tracks on my headphone. So far so good.
The problem is the transformation of the MIDI signal into the correct sounds. I have so far only experimented with some basic MIDI recording software (Prodipe VE), but the problem there was that the actual drum sounds (from the drum kits installed in the Roland Sound Unit) are not known by the recording software, which only had some very rudimentary drum kits pre-installed. So it cannot translate the MIDI signal into the correct sounds as they are created by the Roland Sound module. Does CB have the Roland drum kits pre-installed? And if not, where could I get the sound files from? Do I need an Audio Interface like the UR242 in order to resolve latency issues or how else can these be resolved?
Unfortunately the TD 4 brain doesn’t have a MIDI in socket or individual audio outs (well, mine doesn’t) so you are restricted to either recording the Roland unit’s onboard sounds as (stereo) audio, or using the midi out to trigger sounds from Groove Agent SE4 (included with Cubase), or any other 3rd party virtual drummer type plugin. You might have to tinker with the note numbers generated from each pad to get them triggering the right sounds, The included GA SE4 sounds are pretty varied and you can assign each pad/drum voice to separate outputs internally in GA, and also to separate channels in the mixer. Admittedly you won’t get the same sounds as the TD4 brain produces, but you’ll be able to access a larger range of sounds that are often better… and have a much greater degree of control over them. Of course if you really wanted those TD4 sounds you could laboriously record them and use them as samples that could be triggered via GA 4.
Doing as you do and sending the output from Cubase into the aux in on the Roland brain and using that together with the brain’s internal drum sounds should give you pretty much latency free monitoring while recording. If you have latency issues with the recorded MIDI data then you can just open the key editor or drum editor and drag the recorded part into place.
You don’t say, but it sounds like you’re using your computer’s internal sound card? In which case, yes, using a dedicated interface such as the UR242 will make your life a lot easier and should improve latency issues, as you can run it with dedicated drivers rather than generic ones.