Working with MIDI (from Sensory app to DAW and vice versa)

Hi @pixelbursche,

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.

You can watch this tutorial video on how this all works: https://youtu.be/RGIpD2_njis?si=ueNAeP1y18meDoYU

Let me know if you have any questions about this.