Hey there! I’m trying to add a djembe percussion line and running into the following issue:
Djembe is an instrument with 7+ tones (Open/closed bass, tenor and slap, plus ghost notes and some extended techniques). However it only appears on the score as a single line instrument and plays back as a single tone. I don’t seem to be able to change it to a 5-line staff or a grid. I was able to create 3 djembe lines and combine them into a kit, but I can’t figure out how to change the playback tones. When I play different keys on my MIDI keyboard I can hear several different tones very nicely, but they do not input onto the score; it only allows me to actually write notes with one particular key, which plays back as one particular tone.
Is it something to do with the percussion map? I would love a tutorial video on how to work with percussion maps.
Thank you!
-David
Maybe you can say more about what Djembe instrument you are using.
I use percussion instruments from Kontakt. I play the keyboard and record to a midi track that outputs to Kontakt. The midi track records the different notes I play and those get played back as recorded.
If you open the midi editor do you see different notes or just one?
The score will reproduce the info on the midi track.
Unfortunatelly I have not had the need to see what it looks like if I open the Score option for the percussion tracks, but I bet it will depict exctly the notes I played.
If you need to create a specific drum score I cannot opine. But it appears that even without looking at a score your track is not recording the different notes you play on your keyboard and that is weird.
Hopefully you are not playing rhythmic loops instead of single samples, sometimes VSTInstruments have both.
All the best.
Hey, thanks for the response! It’s just the Halion Library Djembe patch that comes with Dorico. The actual sound is fine and the computer is registering the MIDI notes because I can hear them when I play the keyboard, but something about how it’s decided Djembe should be scored makes it not recognize them when trying to write to the score. Are you actually talking about Dorico? It sort of sounds like you might be talking about Cubase or another DAW? But my question was really specifically about Dorico’s notation. Thanks!
This looks quite similar to a thread opened by excellent Robby Poole about snare drums. You might find it interesting!
Thanks! Will check it out!
The Djembe patch in the included HALion Sonic SE 2 library only really provides two tones as far as I can tell: a kind of open tone pitch-shifted across the whole range, plus a sort of stopped tone on MIDI notes 60 to 63, also pitch-shifted but obviously in a much smaller range. You can certainly create a percussion map in Play > Percussion Maps to access these sounds, but I’m not sure how useful or representative they really are.
If you have access to Kontakt, then this looks pretty good, and it seems very reasonably priced: Magic Djembe.