Beatjuggling with Drumpads

[rkiesler]

Hi guys,

I've just read Ean Golden's nice Beat Juggling Tutorial and wanted to do something similar with the 8 drumpads of my Novation 25SL MkII. So I've added the 8 "Select Hotcue" mappings to my MIDI mapping and the hotcue points are triggered.

The problem: It has kind of a weird behavior. When I use my PC keyboard to trigger the hotcue points, it works as it should: The cue point plays as long as I hold the key, then it stops.

For the drum pads, this is different. The cue point seems to play for a rather short, but fixed while and then stops. Also, I cannot trigger the same cue point twice in a row in a short time, making fills or similar things impossible. Only, and that's the funny thing, if I use two different cue points in alteration. So, if I rapidly press cue 1, then cue 2, then cue 1, then cue 2 on my drumpads, it kind of works.

I'd like my drumpads to behave like the PC keyboard though, any suggestions?

Thanks, René

[DJPhaidon]

The problem: It has kind of a weird behavior. When I use my PC keyboard to trigger the hotcue points, it works as it should: The cue point plays as long as I hold the key, then it stops.

For the drum pads, this is different. The cue point seems to play for a rather short, but fixed while and then stops. Also, I cannot trigger the same cue point twice in a row in a short time, making fills or similar things impossible. Only, and that's the funny thing, if I use two different cue points in alteration. So, if I rapidly press cue 1, then cue 2, then cue 1, then cue 2 on my drumpads, it kind of works.

Never worked with the 25SL, but I do know that if it's only allowing you to trigger a note once and not re-trigger the same note, but will go to cue 2 like you describe, it is probably running in a re-trigger mode like my padKontrol can. Recommendations are to either get a program to look at the actual midi that your 25 is spitting out, or dig into the novation mapping software to see if there is a way to switch the default behavior of the drum pads.

[djmoonie]

My money is on that fact that the drum pad sends a short burst of midi each time its pressed (rather than a single cc or note), this would cause exactly what you describe, and is probably supposed to represent the phase of a drum beat.
You could check this with midi-ox, and or strip out extra midi to give you the result you want.

[rkiesler]

Well, the drum pads pretty much do what I told them to do :-)

I had to configure them so they'd send something, so I chose the CCs 100 - 107, with a fixed velocity of 127. Pressing the CC 100 one for example gives me this line in MIDI-OX:

TIMESTAMP  IN PORT STATUS  DATA1 DATA2 CHAN NOTE EVENT
00000000   10  --  B0      64    7F     1   ---  CC: RPN LSB

There's no "note-off" though, so that's probably the problem. Hmmm.

When I configure the pad to use a note event instead.... it just sends the "note on", nothing more. So pretty much what DJ moonie wrote.

Any idea how I could fix that?

[djmoonie]

Thats not actually what I expected.

I was putting my money on a few lines of midi bursting on each pad press..

CC's don't send note off, but that could be a problem in this case.

When set as a note event, the missing 'note off' should cause the pad press to act like a play button, so it just keeps going, because there is no 'off' signal when the pad is released.

If this is the case, then you have found your problem. I'm guessing also that because cc's don't send note off's, traktor has a default time out which is whats causing your 'plays for a short time'.

[rkiesler]

Hmmm. Well, I guess, I can't use the drumpads for beatjuggling then. I'll use them for loop handling, no problem.

Figured out that using the black buttons of the "keyboard" part works great, I have 10 of them -- 5 for both deck A / B. I'm happy. :-)