MIDI Drums

[mms]

My first foray into MIDI drums…

I’m using General MIDI only, and I can see there are 6 defined toms, and can clearly hear the different “pitches” of each.

There are only 2 defined Bass drums (Bass Drum 1 and Acoustic Bass Drum) but I cannot tell the difference between the two,
nor find anything on the net about them.

Is there documentation somewhere, or do you (or anyone else) know more about these?

[JohnG]

The General MIDI (GM) specification, which came out in 1991 I think (several years after MIDI 1.0), just specifies the two bass drum sounds, as you have written.
It makes no recommendations as to what the difference between them might be.

So, it's down to the individual manufacturer of the sound chip/card/module/sample, as to exactly how to interpret the spec.
In fact, this is the case for all the GM sounds, and I'm sure one could distinguish differences between, e.g. Yamaha's and Roland's, implementation of GM.

The same goes for the extra kits in GM2, e.g. with Program Change #41 on the percussion channel we get Jazz Kick 2 and Jazz Kick 1.
No clue as to what they might sound like.

Sorry not to be of much help.
JohnG.

[mms]

OK, thanks.

No big deal I guess.
I just wanted to assign the "lower pitched" bass drum to a lower degree on the staff for notation purposes.

I have a fairly decent Harmon/Kardon speaker set-up, but I can't discern the difference between the 2 bass sounds.

Is their a difference on your higher-end synth set-up?

[JohnG]

To be honest it's been so long since I used any GM kit based on hardware, I've completely forgotten.
I'm fairly sure though that when I used my old MU1000, the kits there were distictive for all the Yamaha created sounds.
But the GM kits? I don't think I ever used them because the Yamaha ones were so much better.

My percussion usage is based on VST instruments and the kits available to me do have different sounds for the two bass drums.
But since most of my MIDI sequencing is on classical music I tend to use only orchestral percussion.

Again, not much help I'm afraid.
JohnG.

[mms]

OK thanks,

As I said, not a big deal...