Monday Drum Day: Rolls and Roland Drums on Linux

I am still busy with the Drumeo courses. I mentioned last week that I was doing a 30 day challenge to improve my single stroke roll. I am two thirds of the way through and making good progress. I am still limited to about 125bpm with four hits per beat, but I can play a little slower for several minutes with no real issues. I do this on my practice pad and have some foam on the stick tips to keep the noise down a bit. I am sure there are elements of my technique that could be improved to get it faster as I know others can manage 160bpm or more.

I have not done quite so many of the lessons this week as I have been a little busy with other things.

One of those things is my new kit. I put it together one evening and have been experimenting with it since then. It does not take up too much room, but I may need to rearrange the room a little more.

I will be doing more recording of the drums of course, so I have been experimenting with how I can do that. The simplest way is to run an audio lead from the headphone output to my interface, via a mixer. Unlike some kits the Roland TD-07 does not have a dedicated recording output. It can send audio over USB though.

My first issue with a USB connection was not having a long enough cable, so I ordered a 5m one from ebay. Firstly I verified that it would pass MIDI data by running into Hydrogen drum software. Audio was more of a problem. I could see TD-07 listed using the ALSA, but not in the Ubuntu Studio volume controls or various recording apps.

The USB audio has two modes called GENERIC and VENDOR. You would think a generic mode would be more likely to work, but I had to change it from that default to VENDOR. Then it worked in Linux with no need to install extra drivers.

There was a further twist I wanted to achieve which was to be able to hear the drums through my speakers when connected over USB without having a recording application running. This involved using features of the PulseAudio sound server. You can load a 'loopback' module that lets one sound source connect to a destination. You have to do this via the command line as far as I can see, but then you can change the routing in the volume control screen. I found details of this here.

The command I used is something like:

pactl load-module module-loopback latency_msec=1 sink=3

Where sink=3 uses the device number of my audio interface.

This is all very geeky, but I wanted to get this information on the blockchain for future reference. Someone else may find it useful eventually.

Rock on!