Changing Individual Drums in Cakewalk or XG

[sweeney]

Hi John! How do you change individual drums in Cakewalk or XG Works. I use Cakewalk for editing but XG for the final mix as there is a wider variety of Midi instruments in XG. Sometimes when a particular file is opened it will have say, a Room Kit and you want to change to the Standard Kit, when you do this the snare dosent change. I messed around with it for as long as I could before getting fed up. I thought it had to do with pitch but I could not work it out...........If you could help I would appreciate it.......TIA ...... ............Gerry

[snowman]

Hi gerry it is quite easy, load your midi and insert the soft synth, now expand the drum track, on the lefthand side you will see the drum kit which is assigned to the track i. e. power ? whatever, now left click on it and it will open up the list of drum kits, just left click on the one you want and job done.If you need to change any drum within the kit, then go to view and click on piano roll, you can then select and highlight what you want and drop and drag, sounds difficult but quite easy. Hope its of help to you.This is only cakewalk do not use XG

snowman

[Jacqui]

Just been reading this post with interest, I was trying to change drms the other day, I don't really know very much about editing in Cakewalk, I have Cakewalk Pro Audio 9, what do you mean by insert the soft synth? and do these instructions also apply to the cakewalk I have.

Jacqui

[sweeney]

Hi Snowman! Thanks for your help I shall have a stab at it tomorrow and let you know.........Gerry.

[JohnG]

Hi Guys and Gals,
Sorry, been away from the laptop fer a while doin' other things. Preparing my lesson for tomorrow actually. Half term is over. I'll be away from the screen for a couple of days, so just a quick post now. If you have an XG device then it's possible to have two MIDI channels assigned to drums. What I do is to load one "set" on channel 10 and another on 11 and use bits of both sets. You have to send a special bank select MSB and LSB to get an XG instrument to do this. I don't have it on the top of my head so I'll check it out and come back to you.

Are you using an external sound module or the XG soft synth? I'm not sure if you can change just a single instrument, but I'll check that out too and get back to you.

Regards,
JohnG.

[sweeney]

Thanks John! I am using the Internal SW1000XG Card I just cant get myself away from it. The sounds are Magic (To my ears anyway).....Looking forward to your tutorial.......Gerry

[JohnG]

Okay, SW1k.
still have one of those plugged into my old DAW. I'll take a look. Back later in the week.
See ya!
IN haste,
JG

[JohnG]

Hi Gerry,

Much as I thought, it is possible to edit the sound of an individual "drum" instrument, but not to swap one instrument for another within a "kit", at least, not as far as I can see. Changing how a drum sounds can be done by issuing one or more of the (dreaded) SysEx commands. All sorts of things can be edited like the individual volume, the "note" that is sounded, i.e. retuning the drum, attack, delay and so on.

If you want the sound of the drum from another kit, then what seems to be normal practice is to assign another MIDI channel to drums. Often this is MIDI channel 11. And we are talking XG here, not General MIDI.

You issue an CC#0 (bank change MSB) with a value of 127 (or 126 if it's an SFX kit), followed by a CC#32 (bank change LSB) with a value of 0. Then the program change that is needed to select the kit that you want. Then you need to cut and paste all the snare hits (from your example of needing a different snare sound) from channel 10 to channel 11. If I recall correctly, with XG, it doesn't have to be channel 11, but is by convention.

Then Bob, as they say, is your uncle.

However, that may not be so easy if you haven't done it before.
Do you need an XGworks tutorial here? Oops, just noticed, CWPA, not so easy to do the SysEx edits in Cakewalk. But should be possible to change kits without problems.

Regards,
JohnG.

[JohnG]

Just a thought Gerry,

When you talk about doing the editing in Cakewalk, are you making sure that you switch the card into XG mode by issuing an "XG on" SysEx very near the start? I'm not sure whether the kit change works properly without it? Really what's necessary is to make whatever edits to the music you need in Cakewalk then tidy the file into proper XG format in XGworks.

Ideally you need a GM reset at MBT 01.01.000 then the XG on SysEx at 01.01.240 then any other voice initialisation, e.g. FX etc. starting at 01.01.360 say. This is assuming the MIDI file is timed at 480 ppqn and with a tempo of 120bpm. As I posted before, it is well worth having a complete setup measure of 4/4 at the beginning of the file, with all the SysExes and channel voice setups properly spaced out. It's in here that you can set any changes to individual drum sounds using SysEx messages.

If you want to send me an example file, I'll take a look and make some alterations if necessary which I can then do a tutorial on.

All the best,
JohnG.