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Personally, I've been doing all my "chunky" drums as audio for a long time and I just tried to change that last night as an experiment. Did not dig. Auxiliary percussion/clicks/etc makes sense in midi to me. But when it comes to 808 style - trap type of kicks that I designed myself, I have a hard to committing that to a single "punch" of audio.

The reason for this is that it is hard to know exactly what length would be best. Sometimes I like to be able to hear the decay of the kick and stuff, other times I want a continuous sustain until the next hit. But at the same time I feel like I.... "Don't trust" midi as much.

The other issue is all of the pitch automation that comes into play. I'd rather use audio but in Ableton I find that simply pitching the drums around in warp mode doesn't maintain the integrity of the sub the way I would like it to.

What does everyone do in this regard when it comes to treating subs? There are some interesting sounding subs in future/experimental trap stuff happening, I'm very curious how they are doing it.

I also saw a youtube commerical for some VST that looked perfect for this. Some ebsemble for Reaktor that I foolishly skipped out of habit, that promised to bring huge and wide array of sub bass kicks.

I use midi cos I have no choice running a really old version of reason

Save patch. Print to audio. If I need multiple versions, I print multiple version to audio. Or keep it as MIDI. Ya'll make shit way too complicated.

Not really man, I thought I recalled hearing a strong reason against using midi for subs before. Something to do with some technical shit regarding clocks and phase issues so I was putting this out there to see what anyone had to say about it. I also get differing transients on it in Massive sometimes too. So, if by "making shit complicated", you mean "paying attention to detail" I suppose you may be correct.

TheAudioMedium wrote:Not really man, I thought I recalled hearing a strong reason against using midi for subs before. Something to do with some technical shit regarding clocks and phase issues so I was putting this out there to see what anyone had to say about it.

Then I'd put that in the OP

I can't speak to that...but it would seem bouncing multiple versions to audio would avoid the issue if it exists.

You are making it a little more complicated then it has to be, at least your post makes it sound like you have to commit to one or the other. Do as much processing as you can in midi, then flatten that bad boy and mess with the audio to taste.

If I had to guess what the difference you're talking about is, I'd say it has to do with the audio engine looking at something one way, while the midi programming looks at something different. Since midi isn't actually sound by itself it doesn't think in the same way.

midi is just a bit of command information.

it terms of sampling or triggering midi, it's all dependent on the device/or virtual ting thats receiving midi note.

"midi" by itself means almost nothing

MIDI can be flakey sometimes but it isn't MIDI itself, it is the program using it. FM8 for example has terrible errors like skipping the first arpeggiator note in 64bit mode. Sometimes it's your own fault for not having envelopes restart but sometimes the VST or FX isn't consistent. I used to use a transient shaper that would just skip certain beats and not actually transient shape randomly. In cases like this when I am using something that doesn't seem to reproduce a sound consistently, I bump to audio.

The only other reason I bump to audio is if I am making drums. A snare is a good example. I like to layer a noise tail in with a snare so I actually bump some noise out of my VST into audio and draw the fades to get the tail right. When I get my layers all set, I resample so that I have a single waveform and then I put that back into Ableton's simpler so that I can use it as MIDI.

My sub is all MIDI though. I can't see a reason why a certain sound needs to be in MIDI or audio.

So a note about Ableton's pitching. Yes..if you are pitching an audio clip in warp mode, you have to pick the correct mode. The best way to transparently pitch an audio clip in Ableton's warp mode is to select the complex option and transpose away. I find that putting a sample into Simpler and transposing that way also works very well. The other modes give you strange results and actually really cool results if you are trying to make a weird sound. Complex pro mode kind of works like Melodyne in the sense that you can play around with formant shifting and get your cool ragga robo skrillex vocals.