Phantom triggering a Drum Machine ARP pattern

Thanks to Dan Stesco http://www.danstesco.ro for providing this trick.

Continuing with my Fading Lights example, I managed to create an ARP pattern using the House Kit drum patch, and highly detuning it to its max, since it matches more closely the original sound. Still is not perfect, but is good enough for my needs.

Once the ARP pattern was ready, I simply created the combi, assigning the strings to Timbre 1, the lead to Timbre 2, and the drum sounds to Timbres 5 and 6, to be able to use the fake delay trick explained earlier.

But I found a problem: If ARP is on, and I trigger the pattern, everything works as expected, I play the strings, and the drum machine follows in the background. But, when I have to stop the ARP to play the lead, and I touch the keys, the drum samples play as well. Sounds really weird.

Why is that happening? Well, because Timbres 5 and 6 are assigned to the global MIDI channel, so they will play with the keyboard. How can we make the drum machine play, but avoid triggering the samples with the keyboard? We will call this: Phantom triggering the ARP with a hidden timbre.

Lets get down to it:

As you can see in this image, I selected the Timbres where the drum machine will play from (5 and 6) and assigned MIDI channels 5 and 6. In fact, any MIDI channel other than the one you are actually playing works. You can assign both to MIDI channel 10 if you like. If you have multiple surfaces, like myself, assign it to a MIDI channel you don’t use. I’m using channels 1, 2 and 3, so anything including and above 4, will work.

Now, lets use Timbre #15 as our Phantom Timbre. We want to turn that timbre Off, so it doesn’t matter which program you select there, you can leave it with the default piano, but assign it to the global MIDI channel, so we want to be able to trigger it with the keyboard, but still it will not play, since is Off.

The next step, is to assign APR pattern A to the timbres where the drums will play from, in our case timbres 5 and 6, and also to the Phantom timbre, #15.

Now you can turn on the ARP and the pattern will play, and if you turn it off, you can play the keys, and the drum sounds will be silent.

That is all.

 

Again, thanks Dan.