No Drums in midi

[Tombanjo]

First of all thanks ahead of time .
With what i am wanting to do,I step input everything and need to export it as midi.Anyway, I the drumsets play as drumsets, but when i export the piece as a midi and play it with another app they come out as piano .Is there a way to fix this ? Tom

[dj]

Hi, Tom:

Look at the Staff Setup box (either from the Staff menu or by clicking on the "loudspeaker" icon to the left of the track in Window view). By the way, they are different boxes, but do basically the same, one just does it for one track only, the other for all the tracks.

Make sure you have set your drum track to midi channel 10. That is the default (and for most purposes ONLY) channel that General Midi drum sounds play on.

You may be hearing the drums playing from your keyboard, but the channel may not be set correctly in the recording, thus giving you a non-drum sound when the midi is played in another program.

Also, look at the Bank setting. Make sure the drum channel bank is set to "General Midi drums" or "Bank 128" or something similar. If it is set at Bank 1 (General Midi or GM or similar), while it may play back correctly (if the channel is set to Channel 10), you may see "Grand Piano" or similar as the instrument name.

Hope that helps.

David

[admiralnelson]

Hi,

I basically have the same problem. Drums come out as Acoustic piano. I looked at the channel config. and it is set drum instrument but had a bank name of general midi. I changed this to "manually enter a bank number" and chose 128 as suggested. I now get drums but they sound awful!!! Are there any other bank numbers I can use that may give me better sounding drums. The other thing I noticed on my external device is that it supports GM2. Does this make a difference as to which bank numbers I can use?

[Sherry C]

Hi,

Yes, you should definitely take a look at the manual for your MIDI device. Some devices use their own schema for channels and program numbers.

One other item to keep in mind is that some devices also use different "drum sets", which use the different patch numbers that you see in the grid when you open up Staff/Setup. For instance, some drum libraries use "1" as the "Standard kit", "33" as the "Jazz kit", etc. You can experiment with this by selecting different patch numbers and see how the drums sound. The different kits just use a different drum instrument for any given pseudo-pitch in the drum staff.

Alternatively, you can split out the drum staff into separate 1-line/instrument staves and manually assign a particular drum instrument to each of those, then merge them back together as a five-line staff.

To see more about handling drums, please see Help -> Users Guide, and then use the Index to look up "drum."

ttfn,
Sherry