Pitching a Pad in Drum Machine Designer

[Sir Hannes]

Hi,

I'd like to pitch my timpani I loaded on a pad inside of Drum Machine Designer. 

- no "pitch" parameter available, neither in the main DMD-window nor in the (sub-) track plugin window "Orchestra Timpani" "Tuned Percussion"

- there's a INPUT and OUTPUT menu where I select (I guess) MIDI input notes to trigger. Like in Quick Sampler, where I can change the pitch by varying the root note, this here does nothing.

- as I use an alias region on this track to save time just let it follow the kick drum, I can't change the MIDI notes inside the region nor does in the inspector the "transpose" function change anything.

Edited February 1 by Sir Hannes

[Sir Hannes]

Wow, to continue working I put a PitchShifter plugin on the subtrack for tuning. It's shown inside of DMD as a pad-controlling element. Pretty cool but doesn't change my quesiton. 😉 

[polanoid]

DMD basically only is a surface to trigger the instruments on its sub tracks. The input note determines which note triggers the pad, the output note determines which note is sent to the instrument on the sub track. There is no way DMD can tell the triggered instrument which pitch it uses (unless that instrument plays back different pitches for different MIDI note values, like it would be the case for a Piano, bit that doesn't seem to be the case for your timpani).

So your only option is indeed to change the pitch in the triggered instrument channel strip itself. Using the PitchShifter is one approach, albeit a crude one, the other would be to edit the instrument's playback pitch parameter.

[polanoid]

45 minutes ago, Sir Hannes said:

Like in Quick Sampler, where I can change the pitch by varying the root note, 

If the pad does trigger a Quick Sampler instance, you can change the pitch just like that because DMD will display the Quick Sampler UI when you select the pad

[Sir Hannes]

Thanks for your explanation!

DMD creates a "Tuned Percussion" plugin instrument. Never saw this before and this has no pitch parameter.

Will check, if Logic provides also a quick sampler instrument with timpani.

[Sir Hannes]

Ah weird + funny: I replaced the "Tuned Percussion" slot with Sampler. It kept the Timpani preset automatically. Very interesting, yet kind of confusing comfort-behavior 😄

Pitching available now, yes. 

[polanoid]

Where do you find that Timpani? I looked in my Library but don’t find any Timpani at all…  Nevermind, found it.

Indeed no way to change the pitch there, unless you use the - very valid - workaround you discovered...

Edited February 1 by polanoid

[polanoid]

1 hour ago, Sir Hannes said:

Very interesting, yet kind of confusing comfort-behavior

Some background info to un-confuse you: Those Tuned Percussion are from the legacy Jam Packs originally provided for GarageBand (AFAIR) and simply provide a very basic UI for the underlying sampler (the average GarageBand user was not supposed to have more tweaking possibilities than these), so replacing that with Sampler will indeed unlock full control over all parameters.

Edited February 1 by polanoid

[David Nahmani]

The Tuned Percussion is a GarageBand instrument that leverages the Sampler engine under the hood. 

Replace the Tuned Percussion with Sampler on the subtrack, and you'll have access to the tuning knobs in Drum Machine Designer: 

Edit: @polanoid beats me to the punch... again. 😄

[polanoid]

3 minutes ago, David Nahmani said:

Edit: @polanoid beats me to the punch... again. 😄

It's a tight race, you know

[oscwilde]

4 hours ago, polanoid said:

It's a tight race, you know

All those years in speed typing classes are finally paying off 😉