Hey guys,

OK, Ike has come and gone with the only casualty being one side of my fence. Not down, but gone... not next door, not down the street... GONE :) I still don't have power yet but I'm camping out at my sisters house in the meantime.

Anyway...

To pass the time I'm messing with a few middle school projects and need some info on what some of you guys do for:

1. Using fingers on concert toms

2. Clicking the rim on concert toms and concert bass drums (rim samples on the marching instruments?)

3. Hitting a concert tom while muting with the other hand

4. Scratching the bass drum head with your fingernails (ocean drum?)

Any help you guys can offer on one of them or all of them would be great. Thanks in advance!

ps
Anyone have a few extra fence posts they could loan me?

And also playing in the center of the timpani head, sorry:)

Wow, sorry to hear about your fence. Glad you made it through.

A quick check through the template readme shows there are sounds for:

-Dampened concert bass (use notehead 31 with a staccato mark)
-Center of the timp head (using staff text ";hit center";)

Hmm... fingernails on bass drum head? Never heard of that before... sounds like fun!

Glad to hear you've weathered the storm with the important things in tact. Scary.

These aren't perfect suggestions, but can be reasonable substitutions if you just want ";something";:

Concert Tom/Bass rims - individual rims of bassline. Add some reverb and this might be kind of convincing. For toms, you might try raising the pitch of the bassline instrument a bit to get something of a ";higher drum"; sound.

Muting Concert Tom head - lower release knob all the way for a faster decay.

Fingers on concert toms - try raising the attack knob on the concert tom instrument (automate using controller 26). This will give you less of a woody ";stick"; sound and will dull the attack. You may also try lowering the LOW EQ to remove some of the lower overtones, and perhaps raising the HIGH EQ knob a bit (CC24 and CC35 respectively).

As Josh mentioned, playing in center of timp head is in VDL already as is dampened concert bass.

Fingertips on concert bass - this may be a stretch, but maybe try fiddling with the abovementioned EQ settings on your concert bass instrument.

Scratching - ocean drum is a good idea. Not sure I would have thought of that. Try lowering the pitch of this instrument to see if you might be able to make it more bassy. Again...maybe a stretch, but some possibilities to manipulate the instruments you have. That's definitely one of the nice things about the extra flexibility in VDL 2.5.

Good luck!

Thanks Josh/Jim but trust me, there are people that got it WAY worse than I did! Mine is just an inconvenience and maybe a $400 expense. There are people whose entire house is gone so I'm feeling pretty good.

It makes me feel like a total schmo when the answer is somewhere that I could have looked up!

And Jim, your answers blow me away as usual:)

[quote author=Jim Casella link=topic=2724.msg14493#msg14493 date=1221597957]

Fingers on concert toms - try raising the attack knob on the concert tom instrument (automate using controller 26). This will give you less of a woody ";stick"; sound and will dull the attack. You may also try lowering the LOW EQ to remove some of the lower overtones, and perhaps raising the HIGH EQ knob a bit (CC24 and CC35 respectively).
[/quote]

Is there a list anywhere of what all the MIDI messages are? I keep looking online but get more confused by what I find (status byte, data byte, hex,dec) Audib-whaty?

These are simply controlled via what's known as ";continuous controller"; messages that can be automated via MIDI. The listing of which numbers are assigned to which knobs can be found in the VDL User Guide. Some controllers are pretty standard:

CC1 - modulation
CC7 - volume
CC11 - expression
CC 64 - sustain

Some of the specialized things in VDL (EQ stuff, attack, release, vibe motor, etc) aren't standard, so you won't find a listing of those other than in the manual.

Huh, I didn't know that timpani center hits were included in VDL. I've been writing lots of those this season.

I'm actually writing true deadstrokes for timpani; hits in the center of the head with the other hand fully muffling the drumhead. To get proper playabck of this is VDL would I use the text ";hit center"; and also a controller message ";CC64,1"; to take out all of the sustain?

[quote author=Joe link=topic=2724.msg14561#msg14561 date=1222192539]
Huh, I didn't know that timpani center hits were included in VDL. I've been writing lots of those this season.

I'm actually writing true deadstrokes for timpani; hits in the center of the head with the other hand fully muffling the drumhead. To get proper playabck of this is VDL would I use the text ";hit center"; and also a controller message ";CC64,1"; to take out all of the sustain?
[/quote]

All you need to use is the Staff Text ";hit center"; in your score; use ";nat.";, ";natural"; or ";regular"; to get back to regular hits. The Template (and sound set) will do the rest for you.