I want to record Drums, Guitar, Bass and 3 vocals into my DAW (Macbook, Logic Pro X). Currently I use the channels on the mixer for all, and the drums are the L/R 1/4” from the main out of the Roland TD-27. Everything recorded to the Q-Drive. 7 channels. For post processing I have no control of the drum mix for individual drums/cymbals. So one solution is to use the USB out of the TD-27 directly to the computer. With the proper driver I can get all drums on individual tracks. However then can’t get the QU-SB to DAW using USB. Or can I? This requires 2 USB inputs to the DAW. I’m pretty sure I can’t do this. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Bradley, using the Midi via USB is a viable option, the USB connections to your Qu-SB and TD27 should happily coexist provided you have 2 spare USB ports on your computer. It might be a good idea to trial it whilst also recording your Left/Right Out channels through your Qu-SB at the same time. A lot will depend on your DAW’s capabilities and your configuration within your DAW, latency might rear so watch out for that.
This would involve you recording the track as a single Midi only track which depending on your DAW may or may not be recorded as drums because you will then have to route it through to a drum kit emulation, be wary of this as the mapping of Midi pitches to individual kit elements is often different and you may have to edit your Midi track to move the recorded pitches to another Midi pitch to get the right sound eg an F# for the hi-hat from the TD27 might not trigger the hi-hat sound you want.
Whilst this is probably all doable if your DAW will accept your drum module’s Midi signal, to get the stereo field separation or left/right balance you are seeking will depend on your drum kit emulation capability. Your drum kit emulation may or may not sound like your TD 27 so it may pay to invest in a drum emulation that has the choices of what you want. It is also worth knowing that some drum emulations might allow you to pan individual kit elements.
The attraction of recording the Midi signal is the ability to “edit” the Midi track. You could copy out each drum element into separate Midi tracks which could in turn be panned as possibly mono or stereo tracks. It might be a good idea to render out to Wav files these individual Midi tracks to reduce CPU overhead if using separate Midi tracks for each drum kit element.
The other thing that might save you cash is the TD27 might have accompanied software including DAW drum kit emulations (not sure about this but worth looking into). Check your DAW after installing any TD27 software, could save some frustration.
S
Thanks for the reply.
I was able to get the QU-Sb and the TD27 into the DAW. The Mac has a built in Audio midi tool where I was able to created an “Aggregate” usb input. So both usb inputs play as one. And Apple logic treats the inputs as audio. So 28 channels on the TD27 and 32 channels all show up. Then I created another input for midi. I was able record all 61 channels. Although we are not using all of them. I think it’s gonna work. We had band practice and it worked. The computer quad processors were running pretty high and the ssd was going good but the computer handled it with no overload. The midi was set to drums on the DAW/Logic. And all the drum instruments were recorded as midi tracks within the midi channel. The only finicky part was the USB hub is a choke point as not all hubs behave the same. One of mine would not play right and the other worked perfectly. Unfortunately the computer I’m using has 2 usb c ports and that’s it. So a hub is the only way in to the machine.
Thanks again.