How-to: Change your elements without having to replace them

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Wolfgang
Posts: 187
Joined: Tue Jul 07, 2015 11:36 am

How-to: Change your elements without having to replace them

Post by Wolfgang » Fri Sep 07, 2018 3:24 pm

Prequel:

After more than 3 years I still don’t feel myself able to set up an Aerodrums-kit in space from nothing and feeling comfortable with it after. Maybe it’s my age or the fact that I’m not a gamer, but I need references in real-space to find my emplacements. And the old (2D) interface didn’t help me a lot with that, even not for having to place just one element in relation to others.

For me, when you are placing elements you aren’t really defining points in space, but regions in the form of cones with a given diameter where you hit and having as vanishing-point the camera. What I mean is that you can trigger the same instrument by hitting more high but closer to you, or hitting more low but farer.

It had taken me quite a long time to try to find my perfect setup and this isn’t really the fault of Aerodrums. After my first gig with Aerodrums where I was missing at least 1 crash from 4 I decided looking more close on this. And what I’ve done was stopping adjusting!

There are more important factors than just the positions of your elements, and this are the position, high and angle of your camera, the distance to your seat and it’s hight. If you change just one of them your kit will not react like you expect and you will have difficulties to hit all your instruments. And when you start to try to compensate this by replacing your elements you will be fastly lost with something not satisfying at all.

So I’ve “cultivated” one kit based on the system’s Big Rock kit (which is quite good for my size), added a crash and a floor-tom, adjusted slightly cymbals, snare and pedals just to be able to play without looking at the screen. And after I’ve set the “Is_Preset” flag so that I couldn’t modify it.

This same kit I’m using on all my computers. If something isn’t working like I want I’m sure it’s my position to the camera (angle/distance).

At this time I was exclusively playing with midi and I could change my sounds (and volume) with my midi-controller-keyboard.

Some months ago I’ve started doing my own samples for Aerodrums, but it had driven me crazy to have to set up a new kit every time just to hear them in Aerodrums. In one of the threads were I was speaking about my sampling experience I was saying that it would be nice if we could setup one kit in space and assigning the elements after, like you would do with an e-drum. Actually it’s more like if you would have to re-arrange the pads of your e-drums just for changing a sound! But because this was going under all the other stuff we was talking I was looking myself for a workaround.


How-to:

For instant this isn’t an integrated feature in Aerodrums! This is a working solution for me, but it isn’t user-friendly at all because you have to edit the corresponding .ini file in the Aerodrums/conf/drumkits folder by hand. If someone who want to try this is afraid about touching internal files, he could just copy (or zip) the two concerned folders and put them beside so that he can revert after having made a mistake. I’m using only Windows (and Linux). For Mac this should work the same, but I don’t know where you will find the two folders.

So what I’m doing is this:
My “cultivated” kit is named TEMPLATE and has it’s “Is_Preset” flag set to yes so that I cannot modify it by accident (I will explain this later). When I want to set up a new kit based on this one, I use the clone function in Aerodrums, give it the name I want, save and then shutdown Aerodrums completely. Just to make sure things don’t get overwritten, because Aerodrums writes things back to disk when it’s shutting down.

After I would open two folders side by side:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Aerodrums\data\elements
C:\Program Files (x86)\Aerodrums\conf\drumkits

In the first one I would see all the instruments with the extension .ele in alphabetic order. All my new elements I’ve named in the following manner which makes it much more easy for me to find them because they are listed by family:

InstrumentShortFormAndSize-SoundLibrary-InstrumentName.ele

Example:

A 21” ride cymbal from the Addictive Drums 1 library with the name “ Meinl Byzance Dark”

would give

CR21-AD1-Meinl Byzance Dark.ele


In the second one I would see beside all the kits the just cloned one with it’s extension .ini. Now I would open this one with my preferred text editor (Notepad++) positioning the window over the C:\Program Files (x86)\Aerodrums\conf\drumkits folder window, so that I still can see all the C:\Program Files (x86)\Aerodrums\data\elements window.

So now all I have to do is copying the name of all the instruments I want to use, one by one and without the extension .ele, and paste them over the corresponding name in my cloned .ini file.

On top you can see the flag “Is_Preset”.
If you set this to yes you won’t be able to modify (accidentally) this kit later. Save, close all windows and restart Aerodrums.

In less than five minutes you would have set up a new kit which will respond like you would expect it to do.

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