Hi,
Should I use channel 10 MIDI and the GM drum map for Groove Agent SE5 ?
Your choice, you can use any channel you like. The channel 10 thing is just a Roland convention that other synth manufacturers went along with. As for drum maps, again, it’s up to you.
That page states that GM was published in 1991 - 8 years after MIDI. GM is just a set of rules, there’s nothing technical about it. If you don’t want GM, you can dispense with it. Unlike MIDI, which is technologically-based.
In 40 years of using MIDI I’ve never (knowingly) used GM. Hardware synths often have drum patches hard-wired to ch 10, but we’re talking Cubase: my original statement stands, use whatever channel you want, map your drum sounds the way that works for you, and if GM works for you, go for it.
Did anyone say anywhere that your statement was incorrect?
I went and did my homework: I mixed up GM with GS, which was Roland’s. They arrived in the same year, '91.
And Yamaha soon answered with MIDI GX.
Both (GS and GX) are proprietary extensions of the basic MIDI GM. Later, there was MIDI GM2.
Neither GS nor GX became MIDI Association standards, but GM and GM2 did.
If my memory serves me right, the original MIDI GM was very similar or even (partly?) based on the drum sound note number and patch program number assignments in the Roland MT-32, an inexpensive hardware multi-channel rompler module that became very popular with a large community of MSF (midi song file) creators, who (some for money, but many for free) shared MIDI song files of popular pop/rock songs and a good sized community who created MIDI song files of classical pieces, which could readily be played back on an MT-32. The selling of such files was generally on floppy disks and the sharing happened on BBS (bulletin board systems), before the Internet became widely available. Many of the classical music files created during that BBS era are still around on the Internet.
I don’t have HALion 7 (yet), but up to HALion 6, there’s a MIDI GM mode that is designed to work with those MIDI song files.
Using channel 10 for drum instruments is based on that history, and still a widely used default - specially in multi-timbral rompler type hardware, but also for drum hardware modules.
Drum software plugins (including Groove Agent, MDrummer, Stylus RMX) still frequently default to channel 1 being used to select/play different patterns and channel 10 being used to initiate individual drum hits. But as customary in decent software, one can easily customize to one’s own preferences.
This is obviously what my rotting brain cells were trying to remember!
Wow ! Thanks for the info’ So does Groove Agent have a drum map ?
GropoveAgent doesn’t. But Cubase does. You should refer to the manual…
Ok Thanks. Ive used create Drum Mapp From Instrument
If the instrument supports that, it is the best way.