[Free Midi Drum Patterns Files
Katerine Aldrige
I know that Sonic Academy has got a specific Trance Pack in their Ultimate Drums bundle ( you can get each pack separately and it contains some Midi patterns as well as Ultrabeat & Ableton Live DrumRack kits.
Hi @QbO. The Drumsynth 500 VST, currently on sale for $9.99 contains 500 midi drum patterns. Analog Techno Drums from Electronic Sound Lab also comes with some 49 drum patterns. Drum Depot by Marco Scherer (Drum Depot) also has midi drum patterns included with some of their packs. Hope that this is of some value and please do share if you find any decent Trance drum patterns.
Now when you import a MIDI file into Maschine, it's kind of ingnorant of that and just maps MIDI notes numerically accross the pads (so, for exmaple, I'll generally end up with hi-hats where the snare should be, etc. etc.)
The other way around would be ok too, i.e. to batch process a bunch of MIDI files to say that everything on MIDI note 46 should change to 39 - athough that would be sort of the bringing the mounatin to Muhammad.
Really love this box overall and am really enjoying it, but again it's another of those things where you think if this is a mature product, then why on earth, if it's possbile to drag MIDI files into something that's at it's heart a tool for creating drum patterns, does it not respect the MIDI notes certain hits would typically be mapped to?
That basically happens in most software, what note triggers what changes so much in between SW's and plugs that you always have to adjust and move stuff around manually... Some DAW's support the MIDI GM standard to some degree, Logic comes to mind but you still have to do a lot of manual work afaik. Cubase has an advanced logical editor for MIDI that can potentially solve these problems with one click after a lot of configuration.
It's not numeric per se... If there's a C2 in the MIDI file it's still a C2 when you import it, MIDI has no info about what note trigger what drum piece, it's just a bunch of notes and channels... In that sense all SW is ignorant to is mapped to what. The only thing you can really do is change the input octave in case it's way off in Maschine Group -> Key Mode - Manual -> Start Note; this can make the MIDI show up in the right octave but it will still be scrambled. ?
No, that's not possible afaik, would be very cool as well as a batch tool, I guess searching for the latter would be the most practical solution but still far from ideal. There are some MIDI plugs out there that are able to basically remap notes around but Maschine does not support MIDI FX, even if it did it wouldn't help much in PAD Mode anyway.
As far as I understand some dedicated Drum Instruments partially use the GM standard to some degree, products like EzDrummer, Superior Drummer, Perfect Drums, Addictive Drums, etc... But it's never perfect so some do offer conversion methods or built-in mappings, NI's drum Instruments have it too:
It makes more sense to have those in realistic-sounding drum instruments than for Maschine "Kits" where the sample positions arent really super consistent, but hey... don't get me wrong I'd love to be able to use random Drum MIDI files too. I'd say if this would ever happen it would be long ago when this was actually a hot topic.
Thanks @D-One, I think what I'm saying it's ignorant of is typical general MIDI drum note numbers, and that nstead it just maps them sequentially up the pads, rather than to the pad that Maschine normally has for a particular hit.
Maybe there is typical general MIDI drum note numbers and NI could remap it to "typical" NI layout.... But what if someone wants to use imported MIDI as is, not converted? And what if not all NI drumkit layouts are "typical"? And what if importet MIDI is not typical?
I guess it wouldn't be converting the MIDI, still using it "as is" but just triggered by different pads. Agree things aren't always typical, but there is at least an agreed typical that could be used as a default. I think my point is it could easily go to working well(ish) for 95% of use cases, from not working at all for 95% of use cases.
The only case I can think of for anyone wanting it to not work like that would be if you're importing MIDI for an instrument rather than a drumkit, and being that the Maschine focus is arguably around kits, it seems to make sense that GM would be the default.
It's certainly an old standard for MIDI drums, but afaik it's the only thing resembling a standard that there's ever been or continues to be. Those dedicated drum instruments can use different MIDI notes for more out there percussion things, but it's fair to say you'll always find kick/snare/hats/toms on the same channels on all of them (and indeed pretty much anything that's a named GM hit), and that's directly becuase of GM Drums. So in that sense although it may be an attempt from 1991, it remains a very sucessful attempt. Maschine is kind of the odd one out in this respect, and it should be as hot a topic as it always will have been.
Kick/snare/hats/toms are always on the same pads on the more conventional Maschine kits (and even something resembling it on the less conventional ones), so why not at least give your MIDI file the best chance of sounding like it should when you drop it in, instead of making you do the work? Especially when (and I know this is massively underselling it) it is essentially a drum machine? A rhetorical question of course, and I know I'm going round in circles. I think only NI could really answer!
Maschine groups have 16 sounds. You can not fit the entire GM drum spec into 16 sounds. Any attempt to support it would be limited at best ("hey cool, now my kick/snare/hats play OK, but my percussion grooves sound like garbage?" and so on)
My recommendation is for you to use a GM drum spec compatible instrument inside Maschine for auditioning your generic GM MIDI drum sequences. Once you find one you want to take further, you can probably feel arsed enough to do the manual work required for transposing each kick/snare/etc to the 16 sound slot format of most Maschine drum based groups
Stumbled across these GM (General MIDI) drum patterns.
Chances are you probably have similar or better patterns with your favorite drum VSTi but these might come in handy and the price is certainly right.
_patterns.html
At last, a solution to electronic drumming for people without a degree in percussion! Two all different book and software packages are available: 200 Instant Drum Patterns and 260 Instant Drum Patterns - for a total of 460 different patterns! They both include a variety of musical styles and fill patterns. About one-third of the patterns are fills.
You asked for it - hot rap beats! The 560+ unique measures were written by leading drum author Chuck Kerrigan for drummers. The patterns can be used for rap, house, dance, pop, jazz or any style of music where you want a modern rap feel.
Together with EZplayer Pro, you would have the possibility to pick kit pieces from different patterns and join them to new patterns.
You can also use Velocity sweep to affect the overall velocity while recording your edited MIDI to a new track.
If it sounds interesting, I do recommend checking out the EZplayer Pro product page for more info.
1. The Toontrack MIDI packs are mapped for use with Toontrack samplers (EZdrummer, S2, Beatstation). You can use EZplayer with other drum samplers but the mapping will need adjustments. When used with EZD/S2/BT, the MIDI can be dragged and dropped to your host.
The playback is locked to Logics current bpm.Midi loops are different to audio loops ,
You could be using a midi file created at 97 bpm and it could easily worke in a track your doing at 112 bpm as example,no change of Quality.
Thanks guys Johns answer was what I was looking for. I recorded a custom snare pattern separately from the pre programmed beat I had chosen, then copied the midi pattern in. But, when I copied it in, it started playing it with a different groove, so I had to quantize it again. A couple times when I quantized the snare, it removed the rest of the drums from the beat. Not really sure what happened there.. Luckily the undo button was there for that.
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