I am going to record some electronic drums and FX for one project and I am trying to think about ideal setup to make this easier for later session organising and the mix guy. Here is the deal:
1.)I will work with two sensors and I want to capture each drum separately as normal audio (two audio channels) + MIDI information (one channel). The MIDI plays crucial role here. I believe that this is the best and easiest way how I can provide the mix guy “organised” session. I will go through the each stroke then to divide the sounds (resp. pads) to the specific sonic categories like “snares”, “bass drums”, “fx”, “hihats” and then record them again as new audio stem. I assume that if I have recorded my whole performance as MIDI signal once, my DAW can send it back to the Sensory app and it should literally “re-play” everything I have recorded. Is that right?
a.)Is there someone who has already done this and can give me some tips to make the things easy and smooth?
b.)Should I be aware of anything when it comes to the MIDI communication (recording midi to DAW, sending MIDI from DAW back to DAW etc. etc.) between my DAW and Sensory app?
2.)Do I have to create two MIDI channels in order to record everything what comes out from Sensory app or one MIDI channel is enough?
Long story short, the point is to re-create my whole performance in DAW from (already recorded) MIDI and to make it sound exactly as I would record the MASTER audio from the Audio Streamer. The only time-consuming part should the separation of the sounds to the different categories.
Hi Michal,
a solution to your problem (as far as i understood it correctly) should be this:
A) connect your sensory brain via USB to your computer and on windows pc use ASIO4all to get your midi data into your DAW.
B) connect your 2 left/right audio outputs to a audio interface (there are lots of them on the market in different prices and qualities) and from the interface via another USB to your PC. In your ASIO driver tell the DAW to listen to the audio channels as an stereo pair.
Tenoch here from Sunhouse. Sensory Percussion works in a pretty different way from other electronic drum systems. We actually don’t use MIDI internally – so the Portal (which is really more of an interface than drum brain) is only sending audio to the software. The software is running the raw audio from the sensors through our hit and timbre detection algorithms to enable everything you can do in the software. There’s zero midi involved.
That said, you can certainly send and receive MIDI from SP2 to other systems. But when you’re sending midi out, you are deciding what gets sent, it’s not like something fundamental to your performance. You’d do this by adding MIDI Generator modules to a layer and routing it to a MIDI Hardware Output.
Now it is possible to record your performance then play it back through SP just like MIDI. But to do this, you need to use the Plugin version of SP2 in Ableton and what you’re recording is actually the raw sensor audio. When you record the raw sensor audio, you can pass that back through SP2 in a MIDI-like workflow. This is also the best way to capture multi-track audio from Sensory Percussion 2 outputs.
At the moment, this only works with Ableton. That’s really because other DAWs restrict the number of inputs Plugins can receive but Ableton Live doesn’t. We’re looking into some possible solutions to support other DAWs, but for now it’s only Ableton.
thanks for your reply and clarification. Before i invest additional money into a new DAW (ableton that is ) i will watch the instruction videos completely and experiment further with the X32.
) i will watch the instruction videos completely and experiment further with the X32.