Can anyone help me? I am writing for a line and the instructor tells me he has 6 bass drums and 4 sets of tenors with 2 spock drums.
How do I write for this?
I am usine Finale 2004 and VD.. right now I start at the E line and drag up or down to get the notes I want on the tenor or bass voice, but it won't add more notes. It just stops at the top/first Bass and the 1 shot drum.
AHHHHHH help! please! I don't even care if the one extra note doesn't play, I just need to be able to write for 6 basses and 2 spock drums A.S.A.P.
any help would be appreciated!

Will Gordillo

I don't actually have Finale installed (haven't used the sucker in a while thanks to Sibelius) but I can give this a shot. This may or may not be accurate--perhaps Jim can quantify that.

In Finale, click on the staff tool and double click either the tenor drum or the bass drum staff. Once you get to the staff attributes dialog box, look at the bottom where it says "Notation Style" and hit the select button.

You'll be given the percussion map selection dialog where you'll see the "Virtual Drumline X" sections. Click on the one that is relevant to the staff you're editing and hit edit.

You'll see a long list of all of the midi notes and how they are mapped. Perhaps you want to use two unused notes to map to a 2nd spock drum on the A above the staff (a common notation convention). Let's pick C4 and C#4 since they are empty.

Select C4 to be your left handed-hit. Set the staff position to 12, Give it a meaningful name, set the playback note to be 74-d5 (the normal LH spock drum hit sound) and check the "use note for Tenors" box.

Repeat a similar procedure for C#4 to be the RH hit (which is playback note 75-d#5, still on staff position 12). You may have to change the noteheads around to get them to be the ones you'd want displayed.

With that all done you should be able to use the keyboard notes C4 and C#4 to enter right-handed and left-handed 6th drum hits.

You could follow a similar procedure to map a 6th bass to the template.

It's the current limitations of VDL that will keep you from really having a lot of nice sounds for these extra instruments--I'm sure in future releases they will be a little more expanded (more instruments, more drums, etc).

If you're in a time crunch and you just want the notation with decent playback i think that would do it for you.

Justin

thanks for the tips!!!

Good call Justin. You look to be right on the mark with your suggestion to simply map to an unused note. In fact, you could even have it play one of the current drums just so you can at least hear it. You won't get any sort of timbral difference from drum to drum (on the newly added note), but at least you can see it display while at least hearing something.

This topic will be addressed further in future updates. More news on that shortly.

I'm new to this software and would like to know if the issue of writing for and hearing more than five marching bass drum sounds has been addressed in VD2.5.
I'm not able to tell by viewing the instrument list profvided at the TapSpace homepage. 
I realize this question may be very elementary in comparison to those centered around problems with system configuration, MIDI, etc.  I'm sincerely interested in purchasing and using this software, but I absolutely have to know if I can write for and hear quality sounds for more than five marching bass drums.  If so, what's my limit?

Thanks!

Sean Haleem, old school guy.

VDL:2.5 does indeed have 6 basses as well as six packs for the tenors.  These have actually been in since VDL:2 came out.

Thanks, Bill!  So, would it be possible to write for seven basses and hear all seven in the playback?

VDL 2.5 only has 6 Bass Drums mapped in the library.  If you needed 7 this might be something that could be done with the FULL version of the KONTAKT program, but it would not be something that would be easily done with just a few clicks.  If you are just going to be purchasing the Virtual Drumline 2.5 then you will get 6 bass drums as a choice and no more unfortunately.  there are definitely ways of getting playback to get this through a sequencer, but not just through the "barebones" library and notation program that you would have to start with.

OK.�� Now I'm going to take the plunge and ask: What would be the best way to edit an existing bass sound and adding it to my existing VDL multi as a seventh bass drum?
I'm prepared for an involved (and probably moderately expensive) answer.�� Fire away!
I'm running an Intel Dual-core Mac, 2.16GHz processor, 2 GB RAM, Sibelius 5.1 (with the VDL Template - thanks Jim and Justin) and VDL 2.5.

I write the percussion music for a Major Div. 1 University and the 7 bass instrumentation is important.

I thank whoever replies with a workable solution to this issue.�� The extra drum really does matter, especially for fight songs.�� It also makes doubling snare parts and adding high bass drum timbral effects while still having a lot of low drum flexibility for ostinati and low brass compliments a lot easier.��

Thanks again. 

A side note to new users: Read the VDL 2.5 User Guide and Template "Read Me".  You want to talk about things falling into place...
Thanks to Hugh and Jim (and whoever else helped)!

Until the next issue arises,

Sean Haleem

Hi Sean. As you already know, you'll get 6 different drums with VDL 2.5. As mentioned earlier in this topic, if you need to synthetically create a seventh drum you can do this with Kontakt (not Kontakt Player). Bear in mind this important notion. Kontakt will not "do it" for you. You'd need to invest the time in learning how the Kontakt programming works. Given the marching bassline instruments of VDL are fairly complex this wouldn't be a quick endeavor and would require you to get "under the hood" with the guts of the instrument to pitch shift current samples, and map them to different, unused portions of the existing instrument. This process is certainly possible, but the options for doing so would be pretty wide ranging and too involved to supply an explanation of here. With a working understanding of how things are programmed in Kontakt, this would be possible.

Hey Jim

I haven't tried it myself yet, but is it at all possible to do a "pitch shift" in KontaktPlayer2 directly to either Drum 1 (going up) or Drum 6 (going down)? I know that you can do some EQ-ing to get different results, just wondering if there was enough tweakableness in KP2 to get a large enough interval between sounds - and of course something that otherwise sounds good.

My idea is to have Sean add the appropriate mappings to the BassLine instrument he wants to use and then apply the MIDI messages to those notes when in the score. Right now I am thinking that it may be easier to do this going up, adding a drum above the current Drum 1.

Anyway, just an idea.

Late

That's actually an interesting idea Hugh. I don't know if it's possible though. That would take a little more investigative research, but something tells me it'd be a little awkward to coax Sibelius into this type of behavior to manipulate only a few pitches within a patch.

I have the solution - well, my initial tests work great anyway!

Download and listen to the following file:

�� ��[url]http://members.cox.net/oldhands101/files/Seven_Bass.sib[/url]

The next step is to add entries to the sound set so you don't have to enter the MIDI messages all of the time. After that is done, add the entries to the instrument mappings.

I will let you know when I am done.

Oh, and BTW, you won't have to do anything in KP2. Woo Hoo!!

Wow! I figured pitch bends like this were going to be possible, but I guess where I got stuck was how to have those automatically applied to a mapped note within the instrument (without having to enter the pitch bend midi messages). But I see your gears turning, and it sounds like a solution is on the horizon. Right on Hugh!

Yeah, I know how I want to have the sound set setup, but so far I haven't figured out how to do it, if I can at all. So far the problem is with being able to define the "~B0,[i]byte[/i]" command in the sound set. If I can do that the way I want to then we will be golden.

I may have to consult the sound set "guru" to see what is possible.

Worst case:  Sean (users) will have to enter the pitch bend messages by hand.

Late