For I guess a few months now I've been musing over how to put together a Doggiebox drum kit (or kits) to model a Latin-style percussion section. I've been thinking about the way the Doggiebox UI is organized, particularly as summed up in the manual: -----
The rationale behind our five-group drum arrangement hinges on two concepts: 1. A human drummer, with two arms and two legs, is typically able to hit a maximum of only four distinct drums simultaneously. 2. A huge grid providing slots for dozens of instruments quickly becomes very unwieldy, although the grid paradigm itself is useful for visually sorting information. Consequently, the approach is to group the drum kit instruments into five general categories, like so (from top to bottom): * accessory cymbals (crashes and other); * rhythmic cymbals (hi hat and rides); * secondary drums (tom-toms); * principal drums (snare drum); * foot-operated drums (kick drum).
This works great for modeling a single drummer, but I'm thinking that perhaps the UI concept could be expanded to include the concept of a rhythm _section_. For an easily accessible example, the contemporary Santana band has a rock kit drummer, a congas/bongo/quinto/tumba percussionist, and a timbales percussionist (and probably they or someone is shaking a maraca or whacking some claves occasionally, too). In theory, one could assemble a single, monster, Doggiebox kit with all these elements, though this would kind of violate the principles of the Doggiebox rationale (and I'm not sure how amongst the 5 categories I would want to sling all these extra drums anyway). In a sense, the Doggiebox rationale suggests that to put together a percussion section like this, one would really want to put together a percussion section: to load _3_ seperate drum kits -- a rock kit, a congas etc kit, and a timbales etc. kit -- which would appear simultaneously in the Drum Kit List pallette (though labeled and grouped seperately). Then one would proceed to compose your Doggiebox song as normal, but conducting a section rather than a single drummer/kit. Would something like this be sensible/useful/feasible? The ability to load multiple kits would work let you get into things like modeling situtations like the Allman Bros or Grateful Dead where there are two or more drummers/percussionists. Heck, with the addition of the talked-about "humanization" feature to offset timing and velocity slightly from kit to kit, one could quickly imitate a marching band ;) Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson mailto:cea@carlaz.com http://www.carlaz.com/