Dreaming of drumming [intro post]

[Tom Henderson]

Hello Overtonians,

I have been a drummer for 16 weeks, and I am trying to Frankenstein an electronic instrument out of some interesting hardware and my laptop. I have programmed in Clojure for many years, and have a musical background, but I'm pretty new to the world of MIDI and sound hardware.

I have three instruments that I am trying to stitch together into one:

- An Alesis Nitro electronic drum kit module (with pads, a kick pedal, hh pedal, etc)

- An Akai MPX16 sampler (with finger-drumming pads)

- A Volca drum synthesizer (generates cool drum sounds --- I am ignoring the sequencer for now)

My musical goals are:

- Trigger the Volca with the drumkit

- Trigger samples with the drumkit --- on the sampler, on my laptop, or both

I am deliberately avoiding Overtone's sound synthesis for now, but who knows what the future will bring.

So! I've spent the weekend tinkering, and I've got the sampler pads triggering the drum synth, no laptop required. Now I want to figure out how to trigger samples, and perhaps the synth, with the drum module. I have had good experiences with Overtone's plug-and-play capabilitites, so I figured it was time to bring it in.

I have gotten as far as,

(use 'overtone.core)

(def devices (midi-connected-devices))

(def drums (first devices))

(def sampler (second devices))

(event-debug-on)

...and, wow are there events. Stuff starts flying up the buffer --- I think that the Alesis Nitro has a clock signal that I don't know how to turn off. I hit the pads on both the drum module and the sampler and I found a couple events that look like they're probably triggered by those, which is great news. But, what should I do next? I'm assuming that there's a way to filter the event stream (rather than the printed debug output) and, when a predicate is satisfied, shape and send an event either to whatever can handle samples on the laptop, and to the sampler.

A lot of the Getting Started page seems to be for musicians who want to type their compositions, but I want to get my instruments up and communicating as quickly as possible. I would appreciate any pointers or links in this regard.

Thank you,

Tom