Quote:

Mac, Bob, Matt

Now that I understand what Velocity is compared to Volume and now that I understand how to change both, including Mac's version (creating separate audio tracks of the drum kit), are there any advantages to working with one or the other (Audio versus MIDI) - assuming I've got both to work with.



Excellent Russell, you're picking this up fast.
First, even if you're staying in midi it's easier to split up the drum part to change parts of the kit. Maybe the whole part is good but the kick and maybe one of the cymbals just isn't what you want. In any good drum module you can modify the kit using a whole library of samples so you switch out the kick and the cymbal. You can still do that with the drums on one track but it can be easier to do it with separate tracks. Also, I've split out the drums in order to use different synths for different parts. For example, I liked my Jamstix for the basic kick, snare, hi hat, cymbal kit but used the Forte for the congas and timbale on a hot latin drum track that somebody played live using a full midi drum and percussion kit. That track had something like 12 or 13 parts on it and it was definitely easier to split it out so I could decide what I wanted to do with which part.
As to your audio question, don't do it until you know the drum part is playing correctly. Then converting to audio gives you way more options to use your full suite of audio editing without stressing your CPU. For example you can put compression, eq and a limiter on just the kick and do something different on the snare and cymbals. Audio puts you back into classic old school mixing and mastering plus you can really change the character of the sound in audio. Not sure exactly why but while you can make pretty dramatic changes in midi using DX plugins, there's something about editing in audio that just sounds better. But don't do all that and then decide you want to change the drum part on the third chorus or something. Even if the quality of the sound isn't exactly what you want, you can tell while it's still midi that the part is at least correct.

Bob

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