New Year's interface with 96kHz / 24-bit resolution

I got this new audio interface from Santa.

The things which I like in it:
- No external power is needed.
- XLR connectors with phantom power for the new year's experiments.
- Great driver which works with XP like a charm with simultaneous audio sources.
- Very low latency! Ableton reports 12.3 ms; drumming feels much more natural with my DD-65. Works with buffer size as low as 49 samples!
- Now I can use my Addictive Drums and WinAmp at the same time, thanks to the no-hassle driver!

Tascam US-144 MKII USB audio interface

Caution: Use the latest drivers & firmware; Stock driver & XP didn't play nice together!

Steinberg CMC-PD Pad Controller - I want it!

I was mapping the drum track of a song I want to remix yesterday with my LPD8. All the takes I recorded were sluggish. Of course not because I cannot play well, but my LPD8 are not sensitive enough. ;) So I googled sensitive pad controller to see if there is any better. After scrolling through the ones I have seen before I noticed the whole new CMC-PD from Steinberg. It's one piece of the many modular controller they have released recently. Pretty shiny. :) As Kiran explains it, all I have to decide is which one I need and which one I only want.

Midi interface for Android?

I was seraching for a solution to get my drumming recorded while I'm playing on the e-drums at the office. Ideally all my drum hits could get recorded so later I could analyze it and measure if I'm getting better at timing.

Since it's not my drum-set, I was looking for a pocket-sized solution which I can set-up easily every time. No. There's no stand-alone midi recording hardware out there which is smaller than a medium sized kitchen-table.Then I was looking for some midi interface for my Android smartphone, similar to Line 6's midi mobilizer  for IPhone. No. No such ones. No USB midi interface for android nor any generic bluetooth midi interface is out there. There are some nice hacking projects, but I don't have time to put some micro-controllers together, and they wouldn't be a pocket-friendly solution either.

Please comment if you know any solution for this!

GTG DrumSampler II

I was wondering if there is a simple VSTi for your own drum samples. Yes, there is.

GTG DrumSampler II VSTi

Note to myself: Experiment with it if you have some time!

Mandelbrot Drummer

I found an interesting software called Mandelbrot Drummer which generates drum patterns based on the Mandelbrot Set. The concept is very interesting and it's probably good for the claimed purposes: to get some ideas for your unique patterns. I found the tool a bit hard to use, e.g. you have to configure a lot of parameters for the individual kit-pieces. I didn't really find the generated patterns very unique either. E.g. usually one kit piece is either increasing or decreasing in intensity then stops.  Then the combination of the kit-pieces result something unexpected, but still they follow the same pattern. It's still fun to play with it for some time.

Mandelbrot Drummer

Latency

I decided to buy a low latency USB sound card: In Synthesia I only hit the notes 'Barely!' instead of  'Great!' or 'Perfect!' clearly because of the poor performance of the sound card and not because of mine. ;) The other problem was that because of the high latency I could only use my pad controller with my drum kit's built-in synthesizer which is not ideal.

I choose UGM-96 because of its small form-factor and because it doesn't require any external power. The low latency microphone input will be also handy if I ever organize a SingStar like party and the Cubase LE 4 and the free Virtual Guitar AMP it came with were also interesting add-ons: Cubase is the midi sequencer which I used ~10 years ago and some of my colleagues might have fun with the AMP if they ever bring their guitar over.

I also found out that there is a dedicated driver for my E-MU XMidi 1x1 Tab USB midi cabel. It has even lower latency compared to the default Windows driver. Using Cubase's soft synth also eliminated the low performance default midi synth of Windows. Using all of these Synthesia become much more easy to play! I also found out that Synthesia itself has a big latency so using my pad controller with Cubase and using the ASIO4ALL low latency driver with my built-in soundcard has good enough performance for real time drumming. Awesome! :)

ESI UGM96 and E-MU Xmidi 1x1 Tab

Some more hints: The driver for UGM-96 is pretty crappy; it can handle one program at a time only, and the device does not always work in all USB sockets. The free ASIO4ALL driver is much better. You can switch the output device from the laptop sound card to UGM-96 on-the fly without exiting the audio program and the device works in any USB socket without many plug & un-plug of the device and exit & restart of the audio application.

Synthesia hero

As I said I can't wait till next weekend, so this evening I played even more with my MIDI setup. While I was searching for a program to drive my MIDI gear over the weekend I came across Synthesia. It's a free practicing game similar to Guitar Hero except that you are using a real keyboard to play real songs. Its graphics are fairly good so the fun factor is high. The only problem is that I'm more into drumming and not so much into playing the piano. Anyway, this evening I downloaded it just to try it out. It claimed that it's possible to play & practice any MIDI song. If it's true I thought I could hack it so I can control it via a drum controller as they are not so different from a MIDI keyboard.

When I first launched Synthesia it welcomed me with a nicely polished interface. I selected a song from its collection. After that it offered me the tracks of the song to select for playing. There were nice grand piano icons next to both tracks. Then I got suspicious. Instead of starting the game I downloaded a random song which I knew it had drum tracks and opened it.

Instrument selection screen of Synthesia

As you can see it has native support for the drums. =) You can select any instruments you want to play and the ones you want to play along. The only thing left is to assign the same drums for the pads and the fun begins. :) It worked nicely with both the DD-65 and the LPD8. I'm telling you, it's way better than Guitar Hero. :)

Playing the drums in Synthesia

Controlling instead of practicing

I don't practice at home during the weekdays because the sticks are too loud on the DD-65 even if the sound is muted. I thought that I could practice the patterns on the computer keyboard with some music software or - to have more fun - on a midi pad controller. After some research I found this one:

AKAI LPD8 MIDI controller

It has arrived on Wednesday but I only had time for investigating its potential over the weekend. First I had problems to make any sound with it. It took some time until I found a software which routes the MIDI messages to the built-in MIDI synth of Windows XP. But it was useless. The latency was so big that it was not possible to play any rhythm with it. I was hoping that it's because the poor performance of XP's soft synth and not because of the controller. Then I found a very simple MIDI enabled sampler. The latency decreased a lot, but it was still not good enough for playing. Then I thought.. why not just use my DD-65's brain for the music synthesis? I plugged it into my computer and routed the messages from the LPD8 to the Yamaha drum kit. And then finally the magic happened. The drums responded immediately once I pressed a pad on the controller. :) And we have arrived at the end of the weekend. I can't wait till the next one. :)