I have an Alesis Turbo Mesh drum kit that I’ll be using to trigger drum samples in Native Instrument Battery.
The drums pads send MIDI notes as listed below.
Q1) How can I best protect my “songs” against changing the physical drum kit controller which may send different MIDI notes for Kick, Snare etc. i.e. I don’t want to have to edit every song in my set list if I change the kit.
Q2) Should I have ONE instance of Battery per song? I’d need multiple outputs so that I can apply EQ and effects separately to each drum sound.
I ended up editing all the kits to follow the Roland note assignments because it is the most widely used edrum kit. Then I can choose the Roland map in my controller (eDRUMin) and Superior Drummer.
The note assignments in Superior Drummer SDX kits vary slightly from developer to developer so I have a user note map in Superior for each one.
In addition to mapping as he suggested, you should be able to export all your Alesis patches which is good practice anyway. Also, I would think you must enable a menu item in the controller in order to edit them, mapping wouldn’t do that, so no worries.
For your 2nd question, I think you’d create a linked rack with Battery as the only plugin. That way you’re using just one instance across all songs and thus reducing your cpu load.
I’m not familiar with Battery per se, but somewhere you should have an option to route each pad (or group of pads like toms) to different audio outs in Battery, if it has multiple audio outs. Kontakt has that along with many others. FWIW most people use only 4 “groups” for live work: kick, snare, toms, cymbals.
Then inside that linked rack add a plugin EQ for each group… so 4 instances. (Melda EQ is free, light CPU, and pretty musical).
Route each group to each EQ. The out for each EQ should be Rack Stereo Out.
You can then also save various EQ settings as a Rack state (essentially a preset/snapshot), quickly available for any song. For example you might have a very dull muted EQ on everything, you could save it as “Lo-Fi”. Or a different kit altogether in Alesis might need different EQ, so you could save it as your “Jazz kit” EQ.
For Effects, I’d route that linked rack with all the drums to another linked rack for Effects… I’m thinking reverb, where you want everything with the same reverb. There you can stack your effect plugins, and save various rack states. If you want to split an effect to just one drum or group like the snare, in your Drums linked Rack you’d have to add a plugin there and route just the snare to the effect. Suspend/bypass it when not needed to save CPU.
I usually add an instance of midiNoteMap by PizMidi in the MIDI route from my drumset/keyboard/pad controller to the Drum VSTi. Easy to create presets for this and modify them, should you change your physical setup.
Best approach to insure against having to change all your songs would be to have a shared rack that abstracts and encapsulates your drumkit, so that a “normalized” MIDI output comes out of that rack (maybe based on GM drums as a common denominator).
Whenever you change your drum controller, you simply edit that shared rack, and all your songs will now comply with the new controller