#electrobata

I recorded a quick test with the electro-batá set I’ve been working on, over some live drums I recorded. It’s all pretty rough playing wise but it does the job - the main thing I wanted to check is whether I could get the latency down enough to track parts with the Batá in time over a recording - and I’m pretty happy with the results!

I’ve been imagining this 6/8 pattern called Ñongo over a heavy backbeat groove, so I decided to try it out - it was a pretty hard one to play at the speed I choose so it was a challenge but a lot of fun as well!

For those playing at home, the drum track was required with just one mic, using the Zoom H2 in front of the kit, sitting on some boxes facing in towards the snare / hi-hat. The Bata was recording MIDI only, which then translates to samples.

Latency

So I was very happy with the latency - I played the part live over the drum track, using my speakers to hear the recording and the batá (an advantage of MIDI-recording since there’s no actual sound from the room) with a metronome, and it felt perfectly in time for me apart from my actual playing mistakes and my own time drifting.

The setup I was using was the ASIO4ALL driver, with a Sample Rate of 96kHz, and 64 samples, which Reaper estimated to have a delay of between 5.6-7.6ms. It wasn’t enough for me to notice!  All of this was still running through my legacy dd506 drum brain.

I don’t fully understand why the higher sample rate settings etc. made it better, but I had read to try this in several articles on reducing latency, and it certainly was much better than when I was trying at 44100 or 48kHz.

Set Design

In terms of the actual play-ability of the set, it was not bad. I could reach all of the drum heads which was pretty important since the pattern was so fast, it was at a good height that I wasn’t leaning down overly, and the width seemed to be good - shorter than what an acoustic set would be but quite comfortable. My main issues were still hitting the plastic rims of the drum pads, since they weren’t designed for playing with hands, and that the pads can sometimes move if they become loose on their mounting rods.

I could fix both of these issues by making my own pads, with no rims and a different mounting system, which is something I’m considering, but I’ll explore after some more testing.

I was also able to track the cowbell and shekere parts for the end of the video quite nicely, just setting up another track and assigning those samples to the right pads.

Sound

I was pretty happy with the sound - I think it blends well with acoustic drum sounds and sounds good, although there weren’t many dynamics because of how fast and roughly I was playing. It would be good to try a slower pace and try out more dynamics and some of the tapado notes.

Here’s a test just showing the range of samples I’m using - after doing this, I think I’m going to have to adjust some of the sensitivities.

My first test for the elctro-batá used two e-drum kit pads, mounted on a bar from a cymbal stand, with two Pearl conga accessory mounts. I used my Roland SPD-SX to trigger the samples, using the external trigger inputs. The samples are loaded directly onto the SPD, and play from the internal HDD.

This works OK, but you have a limit of four external pads with the SPD-SX, so wasn’t going to work if I want to play with all three drums (six heads) at once, works well for playing one drum at a time.

My first tests were OK, although not as easy to play as I’d hoped, the pads aren’t that sensitive and you’re hands end up hitting the rims quite often. Here’s a quick test of the sounds of all three drums together - please note, I am not playing this rhythm (Ñongo) correctly or very well, but it shows you what the sounds were like at this stage!

*Also these drums are often played with bells on the large drum, or Iyá, although not always in secular music, I’ve added in the bells to my samples because I like the sound of them and I also feel it helps smooth over the ends of the samples nicely and makes it feel more organic, like how in films we use ‘room-tone’ or recordings of the atmosphere in spaces to cover over silences or edits in dialogue. 

Here is the first test:

I sent these through to my friend Rob who plays Batá ( Rob’s running sick online Brazilian percussion classes at the moment ), who pointed out that to get the true character of the drums, I would need to trigger different samples to get all the tones of the instrument - not just the difference in sound between a quieter and louder hit (velocity sensitive), but the different tones that are achieved by a different type of hit (triggering different samples BASED on specific velocities).

Unfortunately the SPD-SX, can’t trigger different samples based on the velocity of the strike - they have this technology in their e-drums, I’ve messaged them requesting it for this series, feel free to do so as well and show them that there’s interest!  So Rob suggested looking into MIDI for this kind of triggering. Luckily enough, I had gotten an electronic drum kit brain as part of the random parts I got last year, which had a MIDI output ability via the USB cable. This had eight inputs, so I could use this to plug in up to eight pads, which would each send a midi signal of a different note to the computer. Using software that can do MIDI triggering, I could then assign any sound file to play when that specific note is played (aka that specific pad is hit), and it’s already velocity sensitive. I did some research online, and found that I could do this kind of triggering with the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) Reaper - which has a free trial period. Here’s a video about how the built in sampling plug in works:

Here is a video about the velocity-specific triggering it can do and also a really cool feature called ‘round-robin’ where an alternative sample can be played for the same velocity, based on a percentage number that you input, to give a variation. This is an awesome feature to add a more natural feel to sampling instrument - in real life, your hits will often sound subtly different. 

This way you can give your samples really interesting detail - and it doesn’t have to be just for playing an alternative sample - I made an electric bass instrument where different sounds of fingers running over frets (the metal bits that designate notes on a guitar / bass neck) or buzzes occasionally play, adding to the feeling that a real person is playing the instrument. 

Effectively what we are doing now is building what’s know as VST Instruments - virtual instruments made up of a large collection of samples. 

With all this in place - I set up another test for the electro-batá. First I had to source samples for all the different tones I needed, then program them into Reaper based on the drum machine’s default MIDI notes. This took a little bit to figure out until I found the manual online which has the default MIDI notes all in there.

This test worked great! Sometimes it wouldn’t trigger the sample I wanted, as the sensitivity isn’t the best, but it was definitely workable to be able to play different tones. I also really improved the quality of the samples I was using which made a big difference. With a sampling instrument, the quality is really only as good as the samples that you source. So, now that I had figured out the sampling side of things, I was sorted for playing one drum at a time. You can just switch which drum you’re playing on the computer.

Here is the second test: 

Here are the basics of my setup with the inbuilt sample plug in.

This is the setup I’m using for triggering different samples based on the velocity.

So I was pretty happy with the results there. This also opens up the option to trigger ANY sample at all and tonnes of digital effects using these pads - something I’ll explore later.