Qtractor Wiki How To - 17 Get Individual Drum Instruments with a MIDI Track

How To - Contents

• Author: G3N-es.

• Difficulty level: Intermediate.

• Required Plugins : MIDI filters # Introduction Drums are multi-instrumental instruments (kick, snare, etc.). The most convenient way to sequence a MIDI drum kit is on a single track, as it allows access to all instruments from the MIDI editor.

This means that if you host a drum synth on that track, all instruments will share the same audio output. They cannot be mixed separately.

In many cases, this configuration will be sufficient. Since each instrument dominates at its specific frequencies, EQs focused on the spectrum of each instrument can give good results.

It’s not all about frequencies. Sometimes we’ll want to customize the envelope, color, reverb, and so on for a particular instrument. For example, shortening the release of an Open Hit Hat with a gate. Making a Snare bigger with reverb followed by a gate… In these cases, we’ll need each instrument to have its own audio output.

There are multi-channel percussion plugins to tackle this task, but it’s not the workflow we’ll use here.

In this tutorial, we’ll give you an alternative method. As with the multi-channel method, you can use GM or custom mappings.

We’ll get the following advantages:

1. You don’t need a multi-channel synth-plugin. You can use any synth-plugin (mono, stereo, multi-channel, etc.)
2. You can use different synths for each instrument.
3. You can use multiple synths to build a single instrument (see How To - 15 Use Multiple SoftSynths on a Track).
4. It’s based on MIDI auxiliary sends, not audio ones. This simplifies routing.

Workflow

We start with a MIDI drum track:

1. Create a MIDI bus for each instrument: Kick, Snare, Hit Hat.
2. Add a MIDI Key-Range Filter and a soft synth on each bus.
3. Edit each MIDI Key-Range Filter to assign the key (GM or custom) to each instrument. Example: Kick, range 36 to 36.
4. On the drum track: Insert Aux Sends (MIDI) to the MIDI buses (Kick, Snare, Hit Hat).

You can now work with each instrument independently.

Example Schematic

In the schematic, we have also created a Group Bus Audio called DRUM to receive all the audio from the different drum instruments. This will be the audio output assigned to the MIDI instrument buses: Kick, Snare, Hit Hat.

This is just an example to show the mixing organization possibilities. It would have worked the same with the most basic configuration of a single default MASTER bus or with much more complex configurations.