emusonacid!

It can't be this difficult to sample drums...

I'm scrolling through all the kicks/snares on my drum modules attempting to sample them into my E4XT. I simply want to sample each drum sound and have each sample assigned to a single key, chromatically. This is proving to be very difficult.

Which original key should I use? These are drum samples so they aren't pitched really. Sometimes the sample is played 3 octaves down.

Do I have to set the range to C1-C1 for one sample and then c#2-c#2 for every sample? I thought it could do this automatically. I don't need a range at all.

I'm triggering the sampling via midi and unfortunately the trigger key triggers both the sound I'm sampling and the key in the preset which gives me two drum sounds. I thought the Emu would mute the preset.

By the way, is there an easy way to get the samples to play until the end unless otherwise set up that way? My old Akai has a 'play sample until end' thing in the sample settings. I don't see that here so maybe I can only do that with the filter.

You can turn Non Transpose to On in the Preset Manage/Tuning page, that will play the sample back at its original pitch regardless of the key it is assigned to.

Let me tell you my approach to drum samples

I first sample a bunch of bass drums then save as Bass Drum Bank 1
Repeat this process for each drum type (snares, hats and so on)
Then I load up all the saved drum sets and map out a general midi kit.
When building the kit create a new group for each drum. (Building the GM map takes a little time to assign root note,
highest and lowest note but you only need to do it once.)
Once you have this kit built copy the preset to an empty location and make a new kit by going to each group and scrolling through all the bass drums for group 1, all the snare drums for group 2 ect.
Dial the volume, pan, transpose for each drum group.
You also have the option to assign new amp decay settings, filter settings for each group (very nice if you want to have a phasing hihats just assign the filter to desired type and have it modulate by an lfo set to free run)

You can very quickly build a massive number of kits if you have a few hundred drum samples, it's great to have a track playing while you dial sounds volumes pitch in real time to make a suitable kit, or once you have built a bunch of your favourite kits you can dial through your presets and then copy this bank and tweak it into a new kit.

Thanks for the tips, non-transpose is perfect to avoid the Original Key setting!

Let's say I'm not using the non-transpose function. If I were mapping samples to the keys, would I always have to change the orig pitch setting to the key it's assigned to? So it would be like:

sample 1:
low - C1
orig pitch - C1
high - C1

sample 2:
low - d#1
orig pitch - d#1
high - d#1

and do the same for every other key. Right?

Also, will I have to play with the amp filter to get the samples to play until the end? I thought there would be a setting to quickly change that like on my Akai.

Sometime down the road I would also like to set it up to play until the end, but have the sample restart in the middle of playback if another midi note is struck. The manual is so big that I can't find these settings.

Hi
Yes you will need to make a drum map setting original high and low notes for each drum.

Easiest way to set amp to play the sample right through is to go to the amp envelope page and set release to 127 (full)

I don't think there is an option to have the sound trigger a second time from midway through the sample automatically, but you could always assign a cord to do this with velocity controlling the sample start point, this would allow total control of the point that playback would begin if you used your DAW and draw in the velocity points.
The cord would be something like this

Source... Destination....Amount
Vel----------SStart------------75

I realise that this may not be the best solution as you will loose velocity on the hits but you could always assign an alternative controller as the source.

I used to do it very quickly as follows:

* Recycle 2.X on Windows
* SCSI connection.

Create a big sample set - all the snares, drums, mashed up nonsese in one big file - each sample must have distinct start to make it easy.

Set recycle to find the transients - start points - manually inspect to ensure no wrongly identified transients.

Dump to sampler - it maps each sample to each key automatically.

Since I moved to the Mac, its a no go - but in Ableton I can do the same thing - slice to MIDI - sadly my Emu's get used less and less due to the lack of being able to easily handle SCSI and the old apps no longer working on Lion etc......


M