Hello,
I found this forum while I was browsing another forum and I was excited to see that your main focus here is Alesis products. I purchased an Alesis USB kit. I should say right from the start that I am totally new to e-drumming, or any Virtual instruments for that matter. I did not know anything about MIDI going into this.
My kit seemed to work pretty darn good with the BFD-Lite software that came with it. I had to learn about the Trigger IO and make adjustments here and there on the thresholds, gain, x-talk and stuff like that but I got it working. Now that I think about it a second I actually had trouble right from the get go because I didn't know anything about ASIO so I hunted all over the net and discovered ASIO4all, then it was working lol. I quickly got bored with the sample kits on the BFD-Lite so I wanted to see what kind of software was available besides the upgrade, BFD2 seems great but it is a bit costly at $299. I am not doing any recording and I just wanted some variety of sound to play, BFD seems like over kill with all of it's advanced engineering capabilities. I found Steven Slate Drums at about a third the price and it has some neat kits with really nice sounds.
Here is where I am going with this, for the benefit of others like myself with little to no experience. I'm sure many of you veterans already know this stuff but the knowledge did not come easy for me.
In SSD all of the MIDI note # are off by two octaves comparing to the Alesis manuals keyboard chart. I knew that I may have to re map notes for the software but what I did not expect, and was a great source of frustration was that SSD's keyboard map and Alesis keyboard map do not match up. To make it worse the SSD map does not contain note# at all only notes. For example if you want to assign the kick you would look at SSD manual and it would be on "C1" so you cross reference to the Alesis manual and find that "C1" = note# 12. This is incorrect, I don't know who is at fault here and it really doesn't matter the important thing is to understand that the two do not match up correctly. I found that what SSD calls "C1", Alesis calls "C3" (note#36) and so on with the entire note scale. I initially contacted SSD support and they were good people so I'm not trying to bad mouth them but they didn't have a clue about this discrepancy and I did not yet discover it. They basically said that they only support Roland products at this time. I didn't yet know what was going on so I had to just trigger a pad and cycle through note# on the Trigger IO until I found what sounded right. That is fine for the Kick but when you get into multiple cymbals with multiple sounds bell/bow you can be sure that your going to have a pretty funky kit when you try to guess ;-)
Ok this is turning into a book now so I will save some of my questions for later posts. Thanks for reading and I hope that this may help some poor soul out there who is searching for answers concerning the Trigger IO, note numbers and mismatched notes.
A picture they say is worth a thousand words so I have included both Lol sorry for the long winded post, I created this chart from both the SSD and the Alesis manuals for easy reference to note# between the two. -----------BZ
