Starting with one drum chain (say fluidsynth), is there a way to get some kind of individual control/routing for kick drum and snare so that effects and EQ can be applied separately?
I know this could be achieved with multiple chains but the main benefit of using one chain is ease of using the piano roll to compose rhythms.
No! Most of the percussion engines have stereo outputs so any processing of individual drums has to be done internally within the instrument / plugin. Fabla has per-drum processing but only for level, pan and envelope. DrumGizmo and the “..multi” kits have multple outputs but we don’t have a mechanism of routing those outputs. (We could consider a feature request to manage multiple outputs like we do for sidechain inputs.) So currently, to process indivdual drums you need to put them in separate chains which makes pattern building tricky.
Ok good to know. I will have a look into DrumGizmo and maybe raise that feature request after some exploration.
Depending on how much you need at least a per drumpart equalizer, you could rewrite an sfz script usilizing the eqN-opcodes for each group, which should be supported in sfizz.
Though that doesn’t give you separate outputs and also no other effects. Only designated eq controls for different groups in your script.
Another options is drumkv1. This engine is disabled by default and does not have complete parameter integration with zynthian knobs, (well, it kinda does but this does not expose all of the plugin’s functionality.) but it is very configurable from is native UI, allowing selection of each drum sample, individual control of each sample’s filter, volume and LFO envelopes, global effects chain (so not per drum as requested here), etc. Although this does not give the per-drum effects, it does giver per-drum send to the single effects chain and gives some interesting per-drum sound control.
One significant shortcoming is that drumkv1 v1.3.1 currently in vangelis (Debian Trixie package) does not support FLAC which many of our included drum samples are. The latest stable release 1.5.0 does support FLAC. @jofemodo could we add this later version? It compiles cleanly.
[Edit] It would also be advantageous to add a mechanism for importing or creating presets of existing drum kits, e.g. import all the Hydrogen samples and saving as LV2 presets. This feels like a python script waiting to be hacked.
[Edit] The samples are referenced the LV2 state which may be challenging to encode in a script. V1.5.0 also supports OGG and includes several preset kits but these are not exposed as LV2 presets so would require some effort to create these.
I had another idea which should work theoretically but I can’t get going yet. I can add a midi fx key split to the original chain with all the patterns and set the split point above snare and kick. Then add two more chains with the same drum preset on different channels. One more key split should separate the snare and kick to their own chain. So the ’pattern’ chain has everything coming out apart from kick and snare which get routed to their own chains where separate fx settings can be applied.
When I apply the key split to the first channel, there are options for sending the high and low sides to other midi channels. But when I do that nothing comes through. I have confirmed the kick and snare are notes #36 and #39 so I set the split accordingly. Not sure if there’s some other setting required for this routing to happen.