Tagged As: Yamaha Drum Kit
Question:
please forgive me if this is not the appropriate forum to ask this question. I've searched quite a bit and the manuals don't cover it. I have a Yamaha QY-70 sequencer (500+ GM and XG compatible sounds and 20+ Drum kits) and when I use the onboard sequencer I can have patterns and songs that use say the Hi-Hat from one Drum Kit (say Dance) and the Kick Drum from another (Rock Kit for example) and that works fine. When I try to do the same thing in Cakewalk, with every instrument with a separate patch on it's own separate channel it doesn't work - during playback the channel that has the first Drum note - say HiHat has the first NoteOn - switches ALL drum tracks regardless of channel or patch settings to whatever Drum kit that has the first NoteOn (in this case since HiHat was first it means that the Kick Drum Track would be played as that note from the Dance Kit instead of the Rock Kit it was set up to be). Effectively this means that onboard the sequencer I can create songs with multiple Drum kits while in Cakewalk I can't. This makes no sense to me as I would assume anything the onboard sequencer can do CakeWalk can do alot better.
Answer:
That's why you have the ability to redefine an instrument channel to be a drum channel (other than 10) with a sysex. (I guess you can do this with the Yamaha like you can with a Sound Canvas.) Then in the Cakewalk setup you redefine the instrument channel to be percussion. Keep the tracks requiring overlapping percussion of different kits separate and it works out. For an XG synth, the first thing which always helps is resetting it (via sysex in the file) to XG mode. Presuming that the module is in XG mode, all that should be needed to get the drum kits you want is to select the drum kit bank for that channel. Cakewalk only shows drum note names for channel 10 by default, but that doesn't matter for sequencing. You can use one kit on channel 10, another on any other channel, just by using the bank select for the kit. AFAIK the QY70 supports using two drum kits at once, at least, and it should work just fine through any sequencer as long as it is in XG mode and the proper bank select and channels are used. Another helpful thing to use is a separate XG synth editor like XGEdit. Cakewalk does have instrument definitions and other interface tools for XG synths, but using a separate editor might be a lot easier to get used to. The only thing is then you tend to do *all* of your song setup (instrument patch selection) in the editor, not in Cakewalk. When you finalize the project, then you combine the info between the two programs. I find this easier because the editor program already knows all about what they synth can do. You just need to pick patches and settings, no worries about how to place it within the sequencer (including sysex). It does require an extra step to combine the two parts at the end, but I think it is worth it in faster setup for the synth.
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