Splitting drum kits in Halion Sonic2 into individual channel

Virtual instruments
1

Hi all, this is my first time posting on this forum, hope I’m in the right place.
I’ll try and explain and be as specific as I can.

I have a question about splitting drum kits in Halion Sonic2 and/or Halion5. I am on Windows 8.1, with Cubase Pro8 64bit.

Let’s say I load “8o8 Studio Kit” into the rack. The drumsounds is now mapped out to the different keys.
When it’s loaded this way, I can’t alter the pitch of each individual sound when recording, by tapping on my budget Axiom Air32 midikeyboard. What I want to do is to split each drumsound to it’s own channel, and have each sound mapped across the whole keyboard. That way i can record,EQ,set FX, and pitch on each drumsound on it’s own.

Is there an easy way to do this ? Alternatively, are there any midicontrollers out there that can do this “automatically” ? I was playing around in a friends studio with Ableton Push, and I’ve been thinking something like that could be what I should be looking for. Are there any similar controllers for Cubase ?

Thankful for any help or tips.
Cheers.

2

I would like to know this as well.

3

As workaround:

  1. Load kit in HALion5
  2. Arm audio track for recording, linked to HALio5 source channel, and play desired key while recording ouput.
  3. Drag created wav file in new instrument in HALion5 and set up it’s behavior as desired (ie± stretched over Kb, one hit/ sample loop/ etc)

Works as magic on retro sounds, but can be problematic when working on high def sounds due to loss of fidelity…

My 2 cts…

4

thats a serious workaround and perhaps for too much work in principle for me to spend time doing this for the price of the software.

It’s also a potentially clunky way of working, even though you may end up with lots of options later, it feels like a bottomless pit. In my experience a drum kit should not be a science project lol

5

Are you using CuBase as the DAW?

If so, use a MIDI track insert called “transformer” on each track.

Here’s an example of a simple filter that takes any note-on event coming into the track and changes it to C0 when playing back.

If you need to record lots of stuff in one pass over 16 different channels, set up several tracks to record at once (click record on all of them), but add a ‘channel filter’ to the transformer on each track.
I.E. (this is just the logic, not the actual commands…you’ll use the transformer interface to build the logic)
if (event != channel 1) then (delete event)
else If (event) == (channel = 1 and event type = note) then [transform(note value 1 = target-value)]

Note, transformer is a real-time insert. The recorded event will be whatever you played into the sequencer. In this example above, any note coming in gets changed to C0 on playback/output. If you want this transformation permanent on the recorded track, you’ll want to select the track and all the events on it and use “Freeze MIDI Modifiers” in the MIDI menu.

Note, you could also add to the transformer logic and do more interesting things like:
Higher velocity when playing higher keys. Change panning depending on which key is used to trigger the drum, etc.

If you’re using HALion with some other host/DAW/sequencer, check your manual to the third party host, as they probably have a similar method to edit a MIDI stream in real time. If you’re using HALion stand alone, or your host can’t transform MIDI easily, you could check out something like Bome MIDI Translater to get the job done.

6

Oh, I almost forgot…

If you’ve got HALion 5 and the drum kit preset can be edited, you could add and use “vst note expression” instead of MIDI channel data to do things like pitch bend, expression volume, and panning on individual kit pieces.

See the sections on “Note Expression” in your HALion 5 manual.

With CuBase/Nuendo, if you need to turn live MIDI Channel events into VST Expression events…again, transformer inserts, or a global transformer module can help you out.