Akai MPD, Sample Grid, Piano Roll

[onecircles]

Salutations comrades!

I finally decided to get my mpd working with buzz. I’ve been using it to play out my automations/expressive controls in my synths for a while. The faders and knobs feel great.

I’ve had a plan to build a kit of drums from world and symphony percussion for a long time, and I decided today to begin. First step, get the pads on the MPD working.

I posted about the MPD a while ago and got some help from zaszhareen and elekt. zaszhareen recommended I try sample grid, and after some experimentation I was able to get everything working. It’s quite easy actually, except for one hang up I had, which is that if you’re going to record from your performance, you can only do it in piano roll!

Elekt recommended some vst’s: phatmatic pro and battery, one of which is no longer availible. I’d like to give those programs a try, but I can’t buy them right now.

So I wanted to report that you can get an MPD working in buzz and it’s a good way to write patterns from wavetable drums.

But I also have a question.

Is there any way to copy note data from piano roll into pattern xp? Piano roll has always seemed to do the best job of recording my ideas logically and without the weird rhythmic inconsistencies that show up recording directly into pattern xp. But if you record an idea this way, the pattern is stuck in piano roll and I don’t know any way of intelligently transferring it to pattern XP. That means that ideas recorded this way cannot have automations and expressive controls added to the synth after that point.

So that’s my question, but I’ve just thought of an idea. What if I make 2 channels for the 1 synth I’m working with. I record the note data into piano roll, and clean it up, then I make another pattern from the same machine in the second channel and record my expressive and automation controls into a separate pattern!? I have no idea if this will work, but I’m going to go try it now. :3

[onecircles]

So I got this working. I haven't yet looked at whether it's possible to record automation data on a separate channel for the same machine, but I have run into another problem.

Sample grid randomly breaks every time I open it, in this way. Some of the pads that I assign to samples will stop working. The pads that break are different every time I load the song. I have isolated the problem well enough to know that it isn't my mpd, my midi settings, or buzz itself, it's the sample grid machine.

I have tried all variations of the switch and byte forms of the program, and I have applied the multi threading disable in the machine defaults xml.

I'm just beginning to work with wavetable drums, and don't know much about trackers at all. Are there other trackers that allow you to work with a midi instrument like the mpd? I know n3wjack had this same question. I can always get them all and try. I suppose if I can't get this to work I'll just have to learn ableton, so it won't be all bad.

I'm running new buzz (x86) with windows 7 on a 64 bit microprocessor.

[onecircles]

It seems I could get this to work using unweildy tracker. But the fix would be, well, unweildy.

Matilde tracker is a possibility, but I haven't gotten it to work on my x64 machine. I stumbled upon this thread viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1756&view=previous
and ran the dll dependency checker on matilde tracker. I got the following error codes.
Error: At least one required implicit or forwarded dependency was not found.
Error: Modules with different CPU types were found.
Warning: At least one delay-load dependency module was not found.
Warning: At least one module has an unresolved import due to a missing export function in a delay-load dependent module.

The one that most concerns me is modules with different cpu types were found. I don't know if this machine works on an x64 microprocessor?

Thus far I haven't moved into the world of VSTs using buzz, but this if I'm going to get the mpd working, it seams this is my next task.

[onecircles]

I'm using geist now with polac vst and midi. Life is good. Everything is perfect.

After working at this for many days my conclusion is that it's not possible, at least in modern x64 buzz, to have a workable solution to using an mpd as a sampler within the ecosystem of buzz machines. If you're trying to do this I recommend you do it through vst. Tip of the hat to elekt since he suggested this to me months ago.

[szaszhareen]

glad you took the time to work this out, i've long wanted to get an mpd style workflow going and had a feeling that sgrid would present problems even though it seems the most likely solution for this. i'll have to give geist a shot.

thanks for reporting your experience