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Old 05-21-2022, 10:11 PM   #1
RominRonin
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Default Need help with exporting MIDI hits in to their own reaper MIDI track lanes.

I created a virtual drum kit instrument in reaper with reasamplomatic, from drum samples I recorded during a session. The drums sound great, the kit works as expected (well, apart from the fact that the hihat kill trigger doesn’t seem to work as it should, but that’s another issue entirely).

I’ve started to use the kit in mixes and I want to improve my workflow for mixing the drum kit as a whole. What I would really love is a way to split each midi key/lane in to its own track in reaper - for example, all kick hits go to a kick track, all snare hits go to a snare track etc.

Ideally this would be some kind of automated process that is repeatable, such that I am able to update the drum pattern in the source track and ‘reexport’ the tracks to the same tracks (so I can keep any plugins and fx settings for those parts of the kit).

Is there something out of the box that fulfills these requirements? Or do I have to program it on my own?

Thanks
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Old 05-21-2022, 11:29 PM   #2
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There are explode/implode actions for this, but IMO it's not as good as it sounds. You can label the notes in Piano Roll, so it's convenient to find everything in the same MIDI item.

Often people trying setups like this want the individual drums' audio on the same tracks as the MIDI, but this is only possible by enabling feedback routing, which decreases performance.

Is that what you're trying to do? Sending the MIDI to the drum track but mix the audio using the same track?
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Old 05-22-2022, 03:02 AM   #3
RominRonin
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Explode. That’s the term!

So why I’m trying to achieve here is to explode a midi drum kit track into individual midi tracks (kick, snare, hi hat etc.) then I want to be able to mix those individual tracks (just as if I had recorded them separately).

Why? I want to control the relative levels of the drum tracks, apply some fx to individual kit items, eq, saturation etc. Then bus them (folders) for compression and finer eq.

But if at any point I want to add a hit here or there, I will have two options:
1. Add the hits on the individual MIDI tracks
2. If the change is more substantial, I can edit the original kit track, then explode again to the already-mixed tracks.

I’ll take a look at the explode functionality in a bit, sounds like it’s one step in a chain of functions to achieve what I’m after.

PS. I’m new to programming reaper, but I’m a web developer by trade, I’ll jump in this thread if I have any difficulties
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Old 05-22-2022, 12:29 PM   #4
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Yea that's what I thought. Again, you don't want to try and do audio mixing on the same track as your MIDI. It seems like a good idea but doesn't work well.

Why? Because Reaper routes audio and MIDI together and sending either sends both. When you send MIDI to the drum module, which is sending audio back to the MIDI tracks, you create a feedback loop. Reaper disables this by default (you can enable it in project settings, with some caveats).

To avoid this, you can explode your MIDI tracks, but create separate tracks to receive the audio for mixing. Since it is undesirable (in terms of performance) to use the same track for sending MIDI and receiving audio, IMO the best compromise is to keep MIDI all in one track. It's more convenient this way for editing IMO.

I'll even keep multiple, simultaneous drum tracks in the same MIDI item separated by MIDI channel. When I tried editing the MIDI your way long ago, things got messy fast.

I think most people have the idea to try it your way (I did), but in the end I settled on keeping the MIDI all on one track and having individual audio tracks for each of the drums. If feedback routing wasn't an issue, your way would be best.
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Old 05-22-2022, 02:01 PM   #5
RominRonin
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I found the 'Item: Explode MIDI note rows (pitch) to new items' action and this did what I was aiming for, the Drum kit source track has the original drum pattern, after running this action I got each MIDI note on it's own track (screenshot):

https://forum.cockos.com/attachment....1&d=1653252806

This is exactly what I needed, so I'm happy about that.

Also included in the screenshot is the group of ReaSamplOmatic5000 instances that make up the kit, just to make sure we're on the same page. I'm not using a drum module, so does your last message apply here too? Or are the ReaSamplOmatic instances my 'drum module'?

Either way, I don't mind running a follow up action that will render the exploded MIDI items into audio items/tracks (to avoid potential MIDI routing issues that might be caused by this approach).
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Old 05-22-2022, 03:12 PM   #6
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Oh, gotcha. Well if the sound module is on the MIDI track then you're good.
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