Question about ProTools drum options..

[FuneralQueen]

Hi there

I'm very new to ProTools so I'm hoping someone can answer my (somewhat) simple question :)

I have an electric drum kit which I would like to use with Pro Tools - I also have some pretty good drum samples of my own. Is there a way for me to use my e-kit, with my own samples with perhaps a sampling program?

I don't really want to purchase a whole new drum RTAS for instance, if there is a simpler option for people who already have their sound library and just need someone to "program" it with.

(Unless of course there is an option to replace MIDI notes with say, .wav files which would be fantastic!)

Thank you :)

[DonaldM]

Its not completely clear what you're asking. If you mean can you use your e-kit with PT, the answer is yes. You can route the audio outs of your e-kit into PT and record that way. You could also record individual hits off your e-kit and build your own sample library for use in projects. With MIDI connection, you could record the MIDI of your e-kit (if your e-kit has that feature) while you're playing it and then use PT midi editor to do whatever you want and play back.

For your drum samples, if they are audio, then you can easily import those into any PT session using the digibrowser. (See the manual for that). WIth elastic audio, if any of those samples are loops, you can import them and conform to your sessions tempo.

Also, remember with PT 8.0 you already have some drum kits. You have Boom, which is a VI kit. You have kits on Xpand2 as well. And, if you have the PT Ignition pack, you also have Reason Adapted 3.0, with its drum kits. So you should have plenty to work with!

[albee1952]

To take it a step further, you may be able to load your samples into Structure Free and play the samples from the midi drum kit. I use a Roland TD10 kit and play ezdrummer and SD2 with it and it works great. Depending on what drum "brain" you have, you may need to re-assign midi notes on your triggers(with my setup, almost all was spot on out of the box). Back to Structure Free and your samples, drag them into the sampler and assign each sample to a single midi note that corresponds to the notes sent by your midi kit.

[FuneralQueen]

Excellent!

Thank you both for your help - I'll start trying out all those options :)

[tcbetka]

Excellent thread...

Now suppose that you want to record an acoustic kit, instead of an electronic one. What are your options?

I have a Gretsch USA Custom kit with 6-7 drums, an auxiliary snare, a Yamaha sub-kick, and a few cymbal mics. As it turns out, I need almost all of my current Mackie Onyx 1640's 16 inputs to record this kit. My current solution is to record (via firewire) from the Mackie into Sonar, into a 32-bit XP-based system, or a 64-bit Vista system on a different drive on the same machine. But I am looking at Mac solutions, as I may have the need to do some remote recording, and I have a 17" Macbook Pro and an external firewire hardware.

But I can certainly record into Sonar, save the individual tracks as .WAV files, and then import them into PT on a Mac. I am not sure how much that would gain though, to be honest; and it certainly won't work on my Macbook, unless I dual-boot to Windows. Don't get me wrong--Sonar is great, and I haven't even scratched the surface of its capabilities. But if the goal is to be capable of exchanging projects with other PT users (or Logic users, for that matter), then Sonar isn't the answer. A friend recently gave me a G5 Mac with a bad logic board, which can certainly be repaired. So this lends itself to a couple of options:

1) Mackie now makes an Onyx 1640i unit, that supports PTMP (with a $50 driver). I could ebay my pristine 1640 Onyx, and purchase this new model...and then use both Sonar and PTMP. This unit can apparently also be used as a control surface, in a limited fashion; there's no automation support, for example. But for basic things, it should be fine.

2) Keep the current Onyx board I have, and simply record with Sonar. When I get a Mac system up & running, I could load my PTLE v7.4 on it (or upgrade) and process the tracks that way. Of course I could load this PT software onto the XP/Vista machine I have and run it that way--I realize that it doesn't need the Mac. But if I wanted to go with Logic, then the Mac platform would come into play.

3) Transition to a more powerful PTHD system over the next 1-2 years, as I acquire more hardware and the skills to use it. Right now Sonar (and Sony Vegas) has been my primary learning platform, but it (and Vegas) has some very nice features that I wouldn't want to abandon. That is why having an Intel-based Mac capable of dual-booting a Windows OS would be an absolute requirement if I would go the Mac route. I would keep the other OS on a separate drive however, and simply use a boot manager at startup.

I've also been considering the purchase of a Mackie MCU Pro and an extender, to give me 16 tracks of control surface. I don't do any other mixing right now, but the opportunity exists to get into some video/audio work, and so I'd like the the ability to move to 24 tracks (or 32...) by adding additional Mackie units. As far as I am aware, this solution would work with any of the DAW applications I've listed.

One reason I am having somewhat of a dilemma with this, is that I am moving our household to Mac systems, slowly but surely. As our current Windows machines fail, they are being replaced with Macs. Having said this, I'll admit that I haven't tried Windows 7 yet, so that may be a game-changer (but I doubt it). As a computer science person, I simply find the Mac OS to be a more pleasant and stable environment. Thus I am slowly transitioning to it.

I'd be interested to hear any comments or opinions anyone here in the PT world has to say about this dilemma. Thanks in advance for your time.

TB

[albee1952]

16 channels into Pro Tools is easy with either 002 or 003, coupled with any of several options for lightpipe preamps for 8 more channels(from the $200 Behringer ADA8000 to the $3500 Focusrite ISA828). The new Mackie Onyx with PTMP certainly looks interesting. Re. the comment about Mac, I might have agreed 6 months ago(before Snow Leopard), but there's some trouble in that paradise for now(as there is with Windows7, but its all getting better soon.....................we hope)

[tcbetka]

Interesting, about Snow Leopard. I suppose a person could always just run Leopard, or Tiger...until those issues are sorted out.

I have been looking at the 002/003 units, but the Mackie solution gives me more flexibility regarding the Sonar/Vegas options. In other words, I wouldn't be building a "PT-only" system. Would these other I/O units support those other applications as well? I simply don't know enough about them yet to know what I don't know.

Thanks.

TB