drum kits for Yamaha

[ronaldstone]

I have a Yamaha keyboard with various drum kits. For example these are some samples of the names: Room Kit, Rock Kit, Dance Kit, etc, etc. There are some dozens of drum kits in my Yamaha machine. How wonderful it would be if I had access to all of them.

I have been trying to figure out how I can import and set up these kits in Composer's software. My software setup goes back to using the default value for drums. I have spent days researching the Internet to see if there are some files that I can import to have these various kits available to me, but I am starting to conclude that it is an impossible task.

Also there is reference to "General Midi" and I was always under the impression that "General Midi" would give me access to these type of kits, but there is some logic that I am not understanding.

Should I be content with just using the "default" kit?

Ronald

[Sherry C]

Hi Ronald,

Actually you can access these various "kits", but it's not so intuitive at present (we're working to make things more so).

If you are using your Yamaha keyboard as the MIDI playback device, you'll want to check in your User Manual for the keyboard to see which Instrument Patch number to use for each kit.

What that means: you will always use Channel 10 to access drum sounds (that's the MIDI standard). When you open a song file in Musician or Composer, click on the Drum staff's Staff Control button. You will see that it is set for Channel 10, and typically the Instrument Patch in the grid will be selected as "1 Acoustic Grand Piano". For most MIDI devices (eg. your Yamaha keyboard), this translates as "1 Standard Kit". Most (not all) also use "33 Jazz Kit" which on the GM grid is "33 Acoustic Bass". You'll have to check in your Yamaha's User Manual to see what other kits are available, and what patch numbers you should use for them.

Please note that the MIDI instrument patches can be numbered 0-127 or 1-128 - our products use 1-128; if your device uses 0-127, just add "1" to it for the corresponding correct number in our grid.

Enjoy
Sherry

[ronaldstone]

Thank you for giving me some direction; now it will be easier to experiment which I will be doing over the next couple of days. I appreciate your help.

Ronald