Is there such a thing as a keymap converter? If not, could that be done with BFD? Specifically converting a BFD keymap to GM?
I know that it wouldn’t be literally possible due to the amount of notes BFD uses for so many more articulations and zones, but for example, all the hi-tom hits funnelled to the GM hi-tom note and all the hi-hat (except pedal) just funnelled to the closed hi-hat GM note and so on…
The reason I ask is, I do have other GM drum instruments that I like to be able to blend with BFD. For example, I have East West’s “Fab Four” plugin. So I could use a modern beefy BFD drum kit and blend and manipulate those sounds to get a kinda hybrid Beatles sound.
Does anything like this exist already, and does anyone else ever do this?
I think you can probably do what you want to do already, but I’m not sure exactly what that is.
Specifically, you can define exactly which keymap you want to use in the Preferences pane, and that will change the MIDI map. General GM is one of them, but there are a bunch of others for, for instance, various drum controllers and whatnot.
Either way, that’s what is used to translate BFD to MIDI and vice-versa, no matter how it’s done, i.e. either incoming notes, or notes in a MIDI file, or whatever.
So, the upshot of this is, if you wanted to code everything inside the BFD groove engine, and then use the MIDI out from BFD to trigger another drum software, it would just be a question of using the right MIDI map. General MIDI would probably work.
Now, when it comes to translations, there’s an open and closed hi-hat, and I found that those are pretty well adhered to. Obviously all the rim clicks, snare artics, bell and edge artics, etc, aren’t part of the standard, so you’d probably have to define it yourself.
Does that come kind of close to what you’re looking for?
Hmm yeh I guess I could just program in reverse. I always use Cubase’s drum editor.
I prefer to program using BFD loaded, mainly because I usually do the drum track first, then layer everything on it, so I wanna get the groove right first. Using other standard drum instruments won’t achieve that very well, but I wil try that out tho, thanks.
What I’ve been doing is just duplicate the drum track onto a midi track with whichever other plugin, remove the cymbals & hats, then find which notes each drum is on and move them to the right notes.
It works, I just wondered if there was a faster way to achieve it.
A lot of standard grooves, I have programmed already using BFD’s keymap, so if I switch that to GM, it’ll play the wrong notes (unless I can fix that?). Hats & cymbals I’m not really bothered about, it’s mostly the shells. The edge hits, multi-zone etc, even though they don’t exist on my Fab Four plugin for example, don’t really matter either, because the BFD ariculation gets that job done.
OK, so, if I understand correctly, you’re doing MIDI programming in Cubase to the default BFD keymap, but you’d really prefer to be using another keymap, such as GM, correct?
You can probably drag into BFD, change the map, and then drag out. That sounds tedious, to me. There must be some kind of batch converter out there somewhere. And then once it’s done, just use your favorite keymap in BFD forever instead of the default.
Yes, I program in Cubase with the default BFD keymap and I have matched my Cubase drum map to it.
Ok, I found something that does exactly what I want to do, altho it doesn’t do I want to do, because it doesn’t cover BFD, but the process is exactly what I’m trying to achieve, load my midi file, convert it to GM, then drag it onto a new midi track and load any GM library, so that I can blend the sounds.
That’ll work. Honestly, I just use the GM keymap in BFD because it’s the most commonly used one. If I bring in any outside MIDI grooves, they’re always in GM anyway.
Well, it won’t work, cos it doesn’t do BFD
But anyway, yes maybe I should just move to programming in GM then from now on. I just built a little library of my own grooves that I drag in to save time. I guess if I just maually convert the ones I most commonly use, I’ll be good to continue from there.
Thanks
Unless the GM keymap in BFD3 has been fixed there are some errors in it. I had to make some changes to it for it to follow GM assignments. I forget exactly what the changes were that I made and it’s been a while since I’ve done them. Let’s put it this way - I made the changes when BFD 3 dropped.
If you dig around in Cakewalk (Bandlab) you may find some useful tools for remapping or converting drum maps. Not sure if it’ll do exactly what you want, but it’s worth a look anyway.
