I’m creating an XRNI from my old Roland R-5, and I wonder what’s the best order for the samples. So I looked at some existing XRNI drumkits and it seems that samples are spread in many different ways. Obviously there’s no way to map each and every sound of each and every hardware the same way, but I think it would be really nice to have the most common sounds always assigned to the same keys. (Nice if you want to replace one drumkit XRNI by another one.)
Percussion notations don’t help much, because symbols are used for open vs. closed hi-hat etc. on the same line. I can see there’s a tradition of bassdrum --> F and snare --> C, so this is what I will map them for sure, but all the other samples? Any suggestions?
I don’t think there overly is one. Following something like the GM and XG maps could be an idea though. A quick search brought up these mappings for GS/GM2.
Thanks for the link, will have a look into this later. At first glance it’s a completely different mapping compared to traditional notation, but probably it’s best to ignore the tradition, as it’s simply not made for this job.
For my kits i always start off with bassdrum- hi-hat -snare then any other samples after that i map in any order i feel at the time,this helps keep transferrable kits but also keeps the element of surprise and is a good way to encourage ‘happy accidents’
I follow the mapping in mxb’s kits, which is very similar to the mapping in Kit-Real.xnri which comes with renoise out of the box:
C-4 Kick tuned low
C#4 Kick tuned high
D-4 Snare tuned low
D#4 Snare tuned high
E-4 Hi-hat closed
F-4 Hi-hat open
F#4 Ride cymball
G-4 Crash cymball
G#4 High tom
A-4 Mid tom
A#4 Floor tom
B-4 Clap
After this comes the irregular percussion, I usually do it like this:
C-5 Cow-bell or ride cymball hit on the bell or any stable note metal percussion sounds.
C#5 Rimshot or sticks or any hard impact impulses without sustain.
D-5 Hi-hat almost closed, Hi-hat pedaled, tamburine or splash cymball or any metal percussion without stable notes.
D#5 Gong or large bell or any slow attack large sustain percussion.
E-5 High bongo, conga or tabla.
F-6 Low bongo, conga or tabla.
I never use whistles or “oh yeahs” but I guess they would come next together with various “ethnic” percussion.
The brilliant thing about following a structure like this is that you can easily flip through a number of kits on a drum pattern until you find one that fits so I remap all my drumkits to fit this layout.
