127. I hear handclaps and other strange sounds when I play styles that use the drum brush kit. How do I get brushes to play properly?

Many Band-in-a-Box® styles use the Brush Kit. There are a few ways you can tell if a particular style uses the brush kit, aside from just listening to it.

  • The Memo field in the StylePicker window will indicate if drum brushes are used in the style.
  • Many styles that use the brush kit have a ~ symbol in front of the style name, although this only applies to older styles - most newer styles don't use this naming convention.
  • If you have the style open, press Play, then click on the Drum radio button in the instrument panel. If the style uses brushes, it will say "41 Brushes Kit" in the instrument pull-down menu.

MIDI channel 10 is the drum channel on most MIDI synthesizers. On the drum channel, different notes are interpreted as different drum sounds, instead of being different pitches of a particular instrument. Instead of using Program Change messages to switch between different instruments, on the drum channel they are used to choose a drum kit. Patch #1 is the Standard Drum Kit. Click here a list of the drum sounds that correspond to each MIDI note in the Standard Drum Kit. The Brush Kit is usually the same as the Standard Drum Kit with the following three exceptions:

  • Note #38 is a Brush Tap instead of a Snare Drum.
  • Note #39 is a Brush Slap instead of a Hand Clap.
  • Note #40 is a Brush Swirl instead of a Snare Drum.

Some Yamaha synths use a somewhat different map for the brush sounds. On these synths:

  • Note #25 is a Brush tap.
  • Note #27 is a Brush Slap.
  • Note #26 is a Brush swirl.

If you are not hearing brushes when playing a style with a brush kit, this most likely means that the MIDI device you have selected doesn't have a brush kit. You have two options:

  • Choose a different MIDI output driver in Opt. | MIDI/Audio Driver Setup so that you are playing through a MIDI synth that has a brush kit. Synths that support brushes include the Roland VSC3, VSC-DXi, ForteDXi, and Microsoft GS Wavetable. If you have a Sound Blaster sound card, you may have the soundfont synth selected as your output driver - this may appear as "SB...Synth A", "SB...Synth B", "Creative Soundfont synth", or something similar. Often the default soundfont bank included with Creative cards does not have a brush kit.
  • The second option is to get Band-in-a-Box® to re-map the brushes so that the drums sound ok using the Standard Drum Kit. This is done by going to Opt. | Preferences | Arrange and selecting "none - remap them" in the Drum Brush pull-down.

Another possibility is that you are playing through a synth (usually an external synth/sound module) that does support brushes but uses a different MIDI note map for brushes. This is common with Yamaha synths. If you have a Yamaha synth, select 'XG format #s' in the Drum Brush pull-down.

One last possibility is that you are playing through a synth (usually an external synth/sound module) that has a brush kit, but it is not located at program # 41 on Bank 0. In this case, you will need find an instrument list in the documentation for your synth and find out how to access the Brush Kit. You need to know the PC#, Bank0(MSB) and Bank32(LSB). once you know these numbers, you can use the instrument pull-down menu, Bank0 box, and LSB box to select the patch for the drum track. You will need to use File | Save Song with Patches and Harmony after you do this (and before you play your song again) so that your drum track doesn't revert back to the default drum patch. One other thing you will want to check is that 'Drum Bank changes' is enabled in Opt. | Preferences | MIDI Options.


Alyssa - PG Music