No Drums in midi

[admiralnelson]

Hi,

I basically have the same problem. Drums come out as Acoustic piano. I looked at the channel config. and it is set drum instrument but had a bank name of general midi. I changed this to "manually enter a bank number" and chose 128 as suggested. I now get drums but they sound awful!!! Are there any other bank numbers I can use that may give me better sounding drums. The other thing I noticed on my external device is that it supports GM2. Does this make a difference as to which bank numbers I can use?

[Sherry C]

Hi,

Yes, you should definitely take a look at the manual for your MIDI device. Some devices use their own schema for channels and program numbers.

One other item to keep in mind is that some devices also use different "drum sets", which use the different patch numbers that you see in the grid when you open up Staff/Setup. For instance, some drum libraries use "1" as the "Standard kit", "33" as the "Jazz kit", etc. You can experiment with this by selecting different patch numbers and see how the drums sound. The different kits just use a different drum instrument for any given pseudo-pitch in the drum staff.

Alternatively, you can split out the drum staff into separate 1-line/instrument staves and manually assign a particular drum instrument to each of those, then merge them back together as a five-line staff.

To see more about handling drums, please see Help -> Users Guide, and then use the Index to look up "drum."

ttfn,
Sherry