About Analogue Drums

Analogue Drums specialise in recording drum kits to tape and releasing the results as sample sets for use in Battery and Kontakt. The samples are loose WAV files, so are available for mapping in other formats, such as sfz, and they actively encourage users to contribute new sampler mappings.

Tape Series Two

I am progressing on SFZ mappings for Tape Series Two. This section provides the current test versions and, in addition, support for the Korg nanoKontrol, TouchOSC and TrapKAT. The Korg nanoKontrol mapping supports five mic mixing and panning, gate time and cymbal gate selection, plus kit piece selection. The TouchOSC mapping supports the same features over two tabs.

Note that the mappings target Plogue/Garritan ARIA Player, as it provides the most complete SFZ support currently available. Their enhanced support for SFZ further improves upon the work René Ceballos originally did when creating the format and the work he subsequently did with Cakewalk on SFZ 2.0. You can get their free sforzando single-slot player here.

The mappings

It has been a long process - I started over a year ago - but here is the final set of mappings:

• Kingpin-20130614.7z
• Plastique-20130827.7z
• Gorilla-20131029.7z
• Monotown-20130811.7z

I played and recorded a short MIDI sequence, which I have then rendered down through each kit mapping. The results are below, so you can compare the kits. No adjustments have been made - the kits are "as loaded", so you get the defaults only. All files are FLAC-compressed 24-bit WAV.

• ADTS2-Kingpin-20131110.flac
• ADTS2-Plastique-20131110.flac
• ADTS2-Gorilla-20131110.flac
• ADTS2-Monotown-20131110.flac

The MIDI file used for the above demo tracks is here: ADTS2-Demos-20131110.mid. (I did edit it to fix my timing at the start...) Also, over on my jamming page are a few jams with these mappings. They let you hear the kits in context of a group. However, here is Plastique on its own, played "live":

• Plastique on its own (45M flac) (It is not particularly exciting...)

I would love to have some feedback over on the Analogue Drums Forums.

The mappings follow more-or-less the same layout as the Analogue Drums Kontakt kits, with the following exceptions and additions.

Kick

Where there are two kicks (i.e. in Kingpin), these are selectable on note 36 using CC83 (last but one button on Korg nanoKontrol). Kick2 is also on note 96. You can edit the Kit file to change the definition (#define) of $kk12 to some other value than 83 if you like.

Snare

Similarly with the snares, these are selectable on notes 37 to 39 (where used) using CC82 (last but two button on Korg nanoKontrol). Snare2 (or B) is also on notes 97 to 99 (where used). You can edit the Kit file to change the definition of $sn12 to some other value than 82 if you like.

Tamourine

The two tambourines in Monotown are selectable on notes 72, 73, 75 and 77 using CC84 (last button on Korg nanoKontrol). Tambo2 is also on notes 84, 85, 87 and 89. You can edit the Kit file to change the definition of $tb12 to some other value than 84 if you like.

The tamborine samples are mapped to support choking of the "rattle" (the continuous jangling of the tamborine) by any of the other hits. This is encoded in the SFZ file "Mute-Tambo.sfz" included in Monotown's kit file.

The TrapKAT mapping uses the hi-hat pedal to select between the rattle and the hand-hit triggers on rim 21 with the forward and back shakes as alternates hits on rim 22.

Hi-hat

The hi-hat is mapped on note 42, to be variable from "tight" (TT) to "open" (OP) using CC4 (foot controller). "Pedal" (PD) samples are only mapped on note 44. "Tip" (TP) samples are only mapped on note 60. The other triggers in the Analogue Drums mapping are not (currently) used.

Hi-hat mute groups (choking) are also implemented slightly differently... because I prefer it my way... Tighter note ons mute looser notes playing but not vice versa. In the table, a "y" indicates the incoming note mutes the playing note (this represents Gorilla - the other kits omit "very loose"):

	Note Playing						Group
NoteOn	PD/TT/ TP/CL	LS	VL	SO	OP	FS
PD/TT/TP/CL	-	y	y	y	y	y	6
LS	-	-	y	y	y	y	5
VL	-	-	-	y	y	y	4
SO	-	-	-	-	y	y	3
OP	-	-	-	-	-	-	2 (*)
FS	-	y	y	y	y	-	1
(* needed to set off_by)
OffBy Group	-	95	94	93	92	91

All of this is encoded in the SFZ file "Mute-HiHat.sfz" included in each kit.

Crash Cymbals

Crash cymbals in all kits support muting on notes 54 (Crash2) and 58 (Crash1), regardless of whether there is a sample triggered on that note.

Toms

All kits have six active tom triggers (notes 41, 43, 45, 47, 48 and 50). As no kit has more than five toms, how these are mapped varies a little and I have not strictly followed the original layouts. Note 41 is the largest floor tom. Note 48 is the smallest mounted tom and note 50 always duplicates it. The following table lays out the details.

Kit	41	43	45	47	48
Gorilla	Tom5	Tom4	Tom3	Tom2	Tom1
Kingpin	Tom4	Tom3	Tom2	Tom2	Tom1
Monotown	Tom3	Tom3	Tom2	Tom2	Tom1
Plastique	FloorTom2	FloorTom1	FloorTom1	Tom1	Tom1

Mic levels and panning

The mic mix and pan positions of each mic can be adjusted. The set up is designed for the Korg nanoKontrol: the first five sliders for mic levels, the first five knobs for pan position. When you first load a kit, the mic levels are all set to 100 (out of 127) and the pan positions centred. As with the other CC values, you can edit the Kit file to change the definitions. The following table lays out the details. For example, the CC value for Coles 1 pan is defined by $pnC1. Note that Gorilla uses mixed case naming.

(mx) Mix CC:	42	43	50	51	52
(pn) Pan CC:	57	58	59	60	61
Gorilla	Close (Cm)	Overhead (Oh)		Snare Bottom (Sb)	Room (Rm)
Kingpin	Close (CM)	Overhead (OH)			Room (RM)
Monotown	Front (C1)	O/head-1 (C2)	O/head-2 (RC)	Snare Bottom (RE)	Room (RM)
Plastique	Close (CM)	Overhead (OH)			Room (RM)

No per-kit piece adjustment has been provided (at this stage).

Gating

The Analogue Drums Gorilla kit comes mapped with gating on the Room mic. Here, this has been replicated on all kits. The gate is time-based only (at this point), with the gate time adjusted on CC59 (change #define for $gtRm in the Kit file if you like). Cymbal gating is enabled using CC69 (#define $gtCy in the Kit file). Cymbal gating is on when the CC value is 64 or above.

If you have any comments, please get in touch over on the Analogue Drums Forums.

Extras

As Tape Series Two follows a standardised kit layout, it was sensible to set up a kit mapping for it on my old TrapKAT 3.1 (V3 MIDI SysEx file (updated 20 January 2013)).

As I now have a TrapKAT V4 (through a PCB replacement), I had to convert the mapping. (Which meant updating my TrapKAT editor, of course.) (V4 MIDI SysEx file (updated 28 July 2013)).

In addition to the TrapKAT, I also use a Korg nanoKontrol. I have followed the CC assignments on "Scene 2" but NOTE that all of the buttons should be configured to toggle on/off rather than momentary action (nktrl_set).

For those without a Korg nanoKontrol but with an Android or iOS device, I have created a TouchOSC layout (ADTSControl.touchosc 2Kb). The layout spans two tabs, with the faders on the first tab, along with kit piece selection. The second tab has the pan controls, along with Kit volumn and pan and hi-hat foot controller. As TouchOSC runs full screen, I also included battery level and time on the second tab for easy reference.

Tape Series One

I originally did Natural Drum Kit layout mappings of two of their kits - Big Mono and RockStock - and have subsequently completed mappings using the "native" layout for Big Mono, PopSticks, RockStock and SplitSticks; this includes separate snare maps for all the Snare City snares, too.

Having bought RockStock, I went ahead and bought everything else Analogue Drums had available at the time! That covers PopSticks, SplitSticks and the Snare City add-on pack -- before the Tape Series One bundle came out...

As noted below for RockStock, SFZ (the sample player) has a severe limitation with large sample sets - it wants to load everything into RAM. Even if you have plenty, the time taken at start up can be annoying, so you are recommended to use a player that supports streaming.

Included in the first archive are the individual sfz mappings per kit piece, along with kit mappings and ARIA Player ".ariax" files for the kits. The second archive contains additional kit mappings compatible with LinuxSampler. For PopSticks and RockStock, the kits do not include a snare - pick one from the piece mappings.

This first archive (78K zip) should be extracted alongside the Kontakt, Battery and Wav folders for the kits. For users of LinuxSampler, this second archive (15K zip) should also be extracted to the same location and the kits used in place of the ones in the first file.

Natural Drum Kit layout

Big Mono free kit

As a taster of their wares, Analogue Drums released the Big Mono kit. It's a pretty neat kit, too, recorded in mono with not too much room sound.

Once you've downloaded the samples, create a "sfz" folder along side the Battery and Kontakt folders and put the sfz mapping in there.

This mapping (5K zip) follows the Natural Drum Kit layout (with some duplication to fill the gaps - but I have not created "new" drums or cymbals where none existed in the Big Mono kit).

RockStock kit

OK, so I liked Big Mono so much I went and bought RockStock. It's very nice, comes with close and room mic'd samples and a very large number of kit pieces. In fact, as many pieces as Natural Drum Kit. So it does benefit from being used in a disk streaming sampler, like Kontakt. Of course, you may want to try it in SFZ...

The mapping uses the floor positions of Natural Drum Kit as a guide - so the actual kit pieces do not necessary match perfectly. I felt this was a better approach than trying to shoehorn things around. Of course, there still needed to be duplication to match the range of samples Natural Drum Kit comes with - but then, it comes in at about 6GB for the rock kit and this is a "mere" 873MB..!

SFZ will try to load this into RAM. If it cannot find a contigious chunk for a sample, it will silently fail. If you don't hear one or more notes, this may be what has happened.