PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows is there a way to split drums into separate tracks ?

Hi Robert. Time to dust off Bob's mantra again:

"Midi is not audio, audio is not midi ommmmmm..."

Gotta know the difference. Midi is simply digital computer commands instructing a midi synth what to play. It's the synth that creates the audio you hear. Midi by itself is not audio. Real Drums are stereo audio files, no different at all from a favorite CD you may have. This question about Real Drums and midi could just as easily be "How do I convert Phil Collins drums from the record to midi?" Sounds kinda stupid when you put it that way, right? Audio is audio, not midi.

When myself and others refer to putting drum tracks into a DAW like Real Band, we're referring to midi tracks not audio. It's pretty rare to have access to multitrack drum recordings of a single performance because it's difficult if not impossible to have completely separate parts of a drum kit recorded each on it's own track. It's hard to do because of audio bleeding between all the mics. Most audio drum tracks are stereo like the Real Drums. When you hear all these different drums on a commercial recording and some are panned left or right and sound great, most of that is overdubbing in the studio. It's very hard to recreate that live in one take.

When people on this forum talk about notation being made from midi what happens is someone literally has to listen to the audio track and transcribe it note for note into a midi sequencer in order to create the midi information that is required for notation to work. If there were to be a midi file created from a Real Drum track then that would require someone to sit down with a sequencer and a midi controller and recreate the Real Drums playing into the computer using the midi drum controller. Even if someone were to do that perfectly and you now have a perfect midi file created from the RD track is that midi file going to sound anything like the original audio file? Absolutely not, they have nothing to do with each other. The sound of that midi file is entirely based on what your midi drum synth sounds like.

Converting an RD track to midi is basically trying to create a live midi drum track. Biab already has hundreds of those played by good drummers on midi drum kits. Those are live midi tracks and if you use a high quality drum synth like Jamstix or BFD then those midi drums can sound almost as good as a RD track.

"Midi is not audio, audio is not midi."

Bob