Anyone have a lot of experience with this that can walk me through the easiest and best way to do this?

I'm currently using a Roland TD-6 Brain with a 1x1 midi to usb with a Hart Dynamics Kit.

Problems I'm having...

Last night I changed the notes associated to the drums so that I could map it to an Redrum unit with a preloaded pattern (assuming most of the preloaded patterns have the drums in the same order I wanted the kit to work with them).

The problems I'm having are as follows...

When I hit the high hat pedal, it triggers the snare. I can't assign a note to the high hat pedal, but if I change the actual high hat pattern, it changes what the pedal triggers, but the pedal is still wrong. It seems like the pedal is always a few 'notes' lower than the high hat itself.

When I hit the snare after a cymbol crash, the crash gets choked off instantly. This was after I did some dicking around and made 8 my snare and 9 the crash so that my foot pedal could trigger 2 which I set as my open HH.

Is there some sort of association between 8 and 9 for HH opn/cls purposes?

Last but not least, when I depress the HH pedal, the HH does nothing. When I release the pedal, the HH works.

Long story short, I'm wondering if anyone can tell me a simple way to set up the kit in terms of notes to map easily to the Redrum, and how to work out the HH pedal so it actually works.

I don't mind using NN-XT instead, but if someone could still tell me how to get the HH to work well with it (open close, etc), I'd be thrilled to near death.



Thanks in advance!

I'm going to reply first to my own thread with some other issues and resolution for people that are dumb like me and having problems I've alread solved.

This might not be the best way to do any of these things, but its how I figured them out, and I had trouble finding really dumbed down info for a rookie. I don't have reason on this PC, so bear with me on the menu item names. They'll be obvious.

1). How do I use a TD-6 (or similar) with Reason?

I used a M-Audio Uno which is a Midi to USB. Their site says it doesn't support XP Media Center, but I am using it with XP Media Center with no problem. I plugged in the USB portion. The PC recognized it. I then plugged in the Midi Cables to the TD-6, and the computer saw the signal.

2). How do I get Reason to recognize the signal and not confuse it with my other Midi devices?

I was already using an M-audio Oxygen 8, so I had to set up a 2nd controller. Go under preferences in Reason, and to the Midi tab and surface controllers. It should show up as USB controller, or something like that. I wanted to keep using the Oxygen 8, so I chose to set both up and not have either selected as master keyboard. You'll see this option. The devices you want to use should all have green checks next to them under the midi preferences tab. Mess around with auto detect if they are not shown.

Go then to the next tab (MIDI advanced I think) to set one controller to A, and one controller to B.

Next go back to the rack, and at the top there is a Midi unit. You'll have to expand it to see Midi IN Device. On this device you'll see buttons, A, B, C, and D. These are what you set up on the Midi Advanced tab. A will be your keyboard, B will be the drum kit. You can then hit a key or drum, see what channel lights up (usually 10 for the drums and 1 for the keyboard). You can then lock either device to a unit in the rack using a drop down in the midi device. (the arrow button next to the channel).

3). Why is there a delay, or why am I having trouble keeping the tempo with the clicks?

Latency. Mine was horrible. I could hear a tiny space between the tap and the sound in reason. The weird part was that if I triggered the drum on the keyboard, it seemed instant, but when I triggered the same sound, device, etc, with the TD-6, it took a while. We're talking milliseconds here, but it makes a world of difference when you're playing.

I messed with the TD-6 for hours trying to reduce this because my assumption was that since the keyboard triggered the sounds instantly and the TD-6 lagged, the problem was in the TD-6. Not entirely true.

I went in to the general preferences and reduced the buffer size significantly. It was set very high on mine for some reason. This fixed the problem almost entirely.

If that doesn't solve it. Try downloading ASIO4All. It reduces the buffer a lot, but also bypasses some internal windows crap and makes things much quicker.

4). Why do I hear a crash when I hit the tom, or a click when I hit the snare... how do I match these up to the right sounds?


I'm still dicking with this, but basically I changed the notes associated with each drum in the drum brain (TD-6). Keep in mind that when you use a keyboard to trigger the drums, you hit a C for the kick, etc... the redrum or other sampler is just going to match a note to a drum. Because of the defaults of the TD-6, the notes don't match the right drums. You can change this easily in the TD-6. Check the online manual for specifics, but basically I believe you hit (on the TD-6). Kit, then edit, then --> until you get to control, hit enter, then --> eventually get to the note played. Hit the drum you want to edit, then use the + or - to get it to the right note to match the drum you want. The easist way is to have the Redrum open and set up and then just keep tapping the snare as you scroll through the notes until you hear a snare sound from Redrum.

Hope this helps some completely clueless people like me. I was searching for info and finding info for people that was very very vague, so hopefully this half assed attempt helps someone that searches for TD-6 and reason.

Here's some fixes to your problems:

For the first question about the hi-hat triggering the snare sample, use the NNXT sampler and load the drum sounds in there. Then, on your drum machine unit, find out what note your hi-hat is set to. If, for example it is set to D3, then in the Remote Editor of the NNXT load up the HH sample in D3. If you still want to use the redrum for whatever reason, just change the note that the HH corresponds to so that it triggers one of the redrum channels, C1-G1.

The problem with your Crash choking off is because in the Redrum you have enabled "channels 8&9 exclusive" which means that the two samples in 8&9 will never play at the same time, which is used because hihats, cymbals etc. are usually put in channels 8 and 9 for whatever reason.

I've never used an electric drum kit before but I do know that it has it's own programmable hardware brain. If you download a Midimonitor (google search it) and see what data is sent when you push down the HH pedal, you might be able to change the values in the brain for the pedal going down to channel 8 for CH, but I'm not too sure how this works...

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Thanks for the help. I think I have everything figured out. If anyone ever has these problems in the future, the easy solution is to go with the NN-XT and set up kits that way. The HH plays one note with the pedal down and one with it up. Assign open HH sound to up, and closed to down, and you're good to go.

This is really neat. I'm just getting everything sorted out, but good lord do drums make a big difference in the sound of your beats. They sound so much more organic (obviously), but it really changes the dynamic of the program for me. I love it so far. Highly recommended to someone who is considering it as an option.

Actual I was thinking about saving up, I think I might try, that would be cool to have a kit...

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