Drum kits in Xpand

[mcphoto]

HI all -- tried searching for this topic but no luck...

Anyone give me some pointers for building & using drum kits in Xpand? I'm using Xpand successfully for other instruments, but the drums puzzle me; there's lots of kit-piece menus & selectors there, seems like there's only one note for each tom sound, etc. How do I get a full kit put together that I can trigger via keyboard/midi? Also, is there any way to re-map note numbers to sounds (I often do side-by-side high hat keys, etc). I'll eventually upgrade my BFD lite but for now I'd like to see how far Xpand can go.

Also, is there any deeper documentation out there than those PDFs? They don't seem to cover anything I'm looking for.

I'm not a total newb at this, in the past I'd have two or three drum machines going via midi, with all the customization that makes possible... but I'm hoping to get an all-internal solution going that doesn't need an external mixer.

Thanks for any help! -- MC

[musicalavtech]

I've used the first Xpand to deliver four parts: kik menu, snare menu, hat and whatever. Then a second Xpand for toms menu @ part A; ride cymbals on part B; crashes on C; and so on. I use at least one separate midi track for each part.

When you click and drag on the piano roll, you should hear the same tom kit/family every octave higher or lower. You should map out Xpand's hi/lo key, and adjust the octave placement of midi drum notes in the edit window. Then you can keep the snare midi note from triggering anything but a snare.

You could use the transpose function of individual Xpand parts to re-map according to key assignment. It would take some experimentation.

I thought Strike would phase out Xpand for me, but I still get better tom kits from Xpand. Good luck!