I’ve had the system for a few months now, and my mind is a little blown with the potential of it all… I’ve been playing around with presets with great results, and now starting to dive into trying to make my own kits, which I’m still rather ropey on! More tutorials are always welcome
I have a few questions swimming around which I wonder if any of you can shed light on, either through your own experience or just a sense of what’s possible.
Hybrid mic setup
I was envisaging doing a cheeky one mic (or possibly two) setup to bring in my acoustic drums + cymbals into the Portal. Do I really then have to add this to every SP kit I want to use it with? Is there no way to add a mic input directly to the output mix and then blend in with the sensor output, this would seem to make more sense, in my head at least, for those using hybrid setups and wanting things to work quickly.
I like the idea of having all my drum+cymbal sounds controlled and mixed in SP and then just sending an out from the box to the desk for gigs, is that advisable/preferable? If not, why not and how would you do it?
Another idea I thought of would be the drum mic(s) going into a little standalone mixer with the SP, so I essentially submix myself.
FX Part 1 - is anyone using a MIDI controller (specifically knobs I guess) to change effects parameters live on the fly? This also appeals to me greatly as I don’t want to be using the computer directly at all when playing, but I love the idea of incorporating this kind of live dynamism into my playing, when jamming with a band, but also for live.
As a follow-on, has anyone tried taking the output into an multi-effects pedal to do something similar? Like doing basic looping? The potentials of this make my creative side excited
FX Part 2 - I saw a video demo where the drummer used a KMM BopPad with various assignments, so for example you could set one to trigger FX on/off, one to do a full cut which left just the acoustic drum sounds in the mix, for creative application in different song sections etc. Is this easy enough to do and/or worthwhile? I like the idea of controlling parameters via the drumsticks!
I imagine I’ll have way more questions crop up, but just want to say WOW what an incredible piece of technology you have created. It almost feels like a full-time job just figuring out how to get the best out if it for what I want, but then that’s half the fun eh.
hi @lifeinfractals welcome! Great questions – would be curious what others’ experiences are with these, too.
Regarding #1 – yeah, this is not so easy to do right now, unfortunately. We have plans to address this in a coming release (not the next one, but hopefully the one after that) by allowing you to essentially “pin” a set. So you could have a pinned set with your audio insert or MIDI or anything you want to have present for the entire session. We’re still finalizing the plans for this and hope to dive in after this next release is out.
In the mean time, you would have to copy/paste your layer with your audio insert to each set.
Thanks for your post~
I set up my Yamaha EAD (on the bass drum and snare) and it works really well picking up the bass drum and all my cymbals/hihats (2). I am pleasantly surprised by how good it sounds and also makes for easy recording from SP into my zoom Livetrak L8. Looking forward to being able to “pin” it so I don’t need to add it manually to every kit.
((Maybe I can accomplish this with global kit settings? I haven’t figured that out yet…))
Also looking forward to setting up a little looper and being able to activate it from drum region-
I’d love to hear about how that goes for you when you get into it…
Also mind blown with SP and the myriad possibilities!!! There’s definitely not enough time in the day… lol
Yes, that’s exactly what you can use the Global Set for. It works just like any other set, but it’s always on. You can just cut/paste your modules in there. Let me know if you run into any issues!
I would love a “pin” feature too! @lifeinfractals I use a two mic setup through the Portal for my cymbals and snare. It works well since I enjoy being able to process the mics through the SP software as well (I run it in an Ableton Live session), but an option to avoid having to add it each time would be really helpful.
@tenoch I was also curious if something like “module presets” could be a future feature addition. I imagine the use case may be somewhat niche, but if I were to setup a virtual input or a controller with specific settings, the ability to “favourite” it and pull it up quickly in the future in a different project could be useful, compared to having to either copy it from a previous project or rebuild it from scratch.
@rrv24 Have you tried using the Global Set? I think that’s exactly the “pin” feature you are asking for. What is your use case for this? I can walk you through it if you want.
We’d love to have module presets (and presets for other things) – it’s something on our radar and we’re working toward building that in.
In the meantime, you could create a set and copy/paste your preset modules in there. Copying/pasting working really well throughout the app. You can even select a module and paste it into an external note pad
I have been using the Global Set, actually! I was going to say that I often switch between different sessions and I was curious if there was a way to have the Global Set’s settings/inputs be unaffected by those changes, but now I wonder if just copying and pasting would work fine (I haven’t tried it)
