Recording electronic drums - Roland Vdrums

[scottydrums]

Hi there,

I need some help badly please We have an urgent need to transcribe into Sibelius some percussion parts. For this we need to live record from the MIDI OUT of a Roland TD-12 Vdrum kit into Sibelius.


By changing the MIDI note outputs to match the drumset instrument on Sibelius, I can get Sibelius to recognise each drum and cymbal correctly and put it into the correct part of the stave.

Where it goes wrong is when I try to live MIDI record (even at slow tempos) there is a time-lag between the drumset and what Sibelius writes. I am using a cheapish MIDI-USB cable to my desktop PC.

hence if I play quavers on the kit, these are not picked up by correctly by Sibelius. The timing is way out and I am completely stuck.

not sure if it's a nardware or software issue at the moment.

I'd really appreciate any help and advice and especially anyone who has recorded vdrums.

Best wishes and Happy New Year.

Michael

[FreeTim]

I hope you get this working. For me, I had a hard time and finally resorted to Multitrack Studio (freeware) to do the recording.
However, after spending thousands of dollars on a drum kit (The Roland is one of the very best) and many hundreds on Sibelius I was disappointed to have to resort to freeware to do my recordings.

Sibelius needs a way to have more flexible click track sync to/ from the Roland drum kit brain which supports external click triggers, but I can't get Sibelius to do that.

I understand if Windows has a delay playing the audio, but there is no reason that Sibelius can't send the MIDI in real time back to the drum kit which could then generate the sounds in real time to my headphones (this option works on the Roland - I know because the darn freeware software does it, but not Sibelius.)

I'm sure I'm just not understanding something?
I would appreciate any tricks that you can share.

Roland drum kit owners have full MIDI in/out/thu and tons of options on the brain/module.

Now Ineed Sibelius to have an option to ;

1) Play click track to MIDI while recording from the drum kit and
2) Not include click track in the midi score and
3) Echo the midi back to the drum kit brain in real time with
4) The option to include/ or not the click track.

Is this possible?

[SnatchLeader]

To solve latency (delay) issues in Windows, you could try using an audio-interface with ASIO-drivers, or use the 'generic' ASIO4ALL-driver. The problem with computers is that they need time to convert the audio to MIDI. ASIO-drivers are designed to have minimal latency (delay). With ASIO-drivers, you can set the buffer size pretty low (how much time you give your computer to calculate/convert audio). Too low = cracks (you want your computer to do stuff too fast, it can't keep up), too high= latency / delay (you give your computer a lot of time, hence the latency).

ASIO4ALL is a 'generic' ASIO-driver that works with most soundcards. Perhaps you could try that?

You could also try using a mixer. Line or headphone outputs of your drum and line or headphone outputs to the line ins of the mixer. In Sibelius, open the software mixer and mute the channel you're recording onto, but keep the click enabled. Then you can make your own 'mix' of click and (original Roland) drum sounds on that mixer. I think you can pick up such a small mixer for 30$ (2ndhand or even new: Behringer, t.bone, ...).