Drum Machine Designer Pitched HH Rolls - How to Automate Kit Piece Smart Control from the Piano Roll?

[Out.Line]

Hi everyone,

 

I'm trying to find the fastest way to automate the pitch of my hihats to create pitched hihat rolls on the Drum Machine Designer WITHOUT using the "Separate by Note Pitch" function because I really want to keep all my drum pieces in the same midi regions for sequencing and overview purposes. I came up with 3 different methods which should all be able to work in Logic, but unfortunately I can't get any of them to work with DMD, but they do work with other tools. The methods I'm trying to implement are as follows:

 

1 - Automate the Hihat "Kit Piece Smart Control" that controls Pitch. This is acessible in the Piano Roll by opening the piano roll automation and where by default it says "volume" in yellow choose "Smart Controls -> Kit Piece Smart Controls -> *Hihat Kitpiece name* -> Pitch". This method would be PERFECT for my workflow but unfortunately when I choose this option the automation stays in the default "volume" and doesn't present me the option to automate this parameter... but it presents the option to choose it! But when I click it, nothing happens. Here's a snapshot:

 

Note: I was able to pull this off by writing the automation directly on the Hihat track inside the DMD track stack, the problem is that with this method I'm not able to actually see the midi notes while I'm programming the automation, which makes it a bit harder. But it's a viable workaround if nothing else works.

 

 

 

2 - Velocity to Pitch: I'm a Battery 4 power user and have been for a few years and I have a great workaround in Battery for this. I use a function inside it where it allows me to link the velocity of a given note (in this case the note associated to the hihat sample) to its pitch, which means that to automate the pitch of the hats all I need to do is to change its velocity. This is very handy and one of the reasons I love battery but I would like to switch over to DMD because its very well integrated with the Piano Roll and the Step Sequencer. Is it possible to route the velocity of a note in Logic to a Smart Control in a DMD pad for example? This sounds awfully complicated to be possible and I've searched the web for it and nothing came up, but who knows.

 

3 - I saw a YouTube video of a guy using the Maschine 2 plugin to automate HH pitch inside the Step Sequencer! What he was doing was changing the "Note" value on each step of the Hihat and the Maschine plugin would route it to another note. I own the Maschine plugin and I followed along and it worked just as he shows it, but when trying to reproduce this on other drum machines it just changed the kitpiece, probably because Maschine is hosting the kitpieces in its own environment? Do you guys think this could be reproduced using DMD? I don't really understand plugin arquitecture enough to know how this could be implemented outside of the Maschine environment, but I suppose it might be possible. Here's the video. The HH Pitch roll is at 03:35

 

 

 

Thank you and have a great day!

[alexalex]

Hey @Out.Line,

I'm having the same problem with kit piece smart controls automation not doing anything. Like you, "when I choose this option the automation stays in the default "volume" and doesn't present me the option to automate this parameter... ".

Dis you find a way to make this work ??

I'm on the latest version (10.7.7)

Thx!!