I’ve just bought Drambo and installed on my M1 Mac Mini but I can’t get any sound and the sequencer won’t play. Anyone have any idea what I might be doing wrong? Whether or not the play button at the top is enabled the sequencer isn’t stepping through and I get no sound of any kind if I click any pads etc.
I have one other iPad app installed (ElasticDrums) and it works fine.
Absolutely baffled!
no problem here on the MBA M1… have you checked this ?
I guess there is no mic on the mini, but maybe you must select another interface.
Thanks for the help. I don’t have that “System” tab on the options, just the “Touch Alternatives” one. I’m very confused!
confusing indeed… better ask the dev now…
Try looking at the midi sync. If the clock is set to external it won’t play.
Thanks for the tips @acidhouseforall and @ZDS but I can’t get anywhere! I’ve contacted the dev through the website form so let’s see what happens. It’s very frustrating as the interweb is full of people saying “it works great” which is rubbing my face in it!
I think I found the issue and perhaps this will help others - I had to plug in my webcam so that the Mac Mini had a microphone input. When I then ran Drambo it picked up the input source and now it seems to work even if the webcam is unplugged. I’d consider this a bug given that it clearly doesn’t actually need an input source, but it seems to have got the thing working so I’ll take it!
I’d definitely report this to Giku @ beepstreet.
Maybe I’m late to the party but I just realized that Drambo works on MacOS!! Amazing…
I must be searching for the wrong term because I can’t believe this hasn’t been discussed yet, but how do people deal with “choke groups”? If I want open and closed hat samples, each on their own pad, is there a solution?
Use the Sampler (not Shot Sampler) and import a handful or a folder of hi-hats to the zones, then in the MIDI TO CV header unselect “trigger overlapped notes”. Use the keyboard to play the samples laid out on the keys.
Or make a sample chain and load it into flexisampler, OT style.
So the only way to do it is playing open and closed on the keyboard? No way to do it giving each its own pad (Discounting the “display keyboard a pads” global setting)?
I’ve tried rerouting the track outputs but couldn’t find the secret recipe.
You can get similar results by sidechaining a noise gate as well. Probably closer to what you are after.
Doing instrument groups with Drambo is not straightforward, but there are ways to get good results while using separate tracks.
The solution I use for my hi-hats is to have one Drambo “Instrument” for both closed and open hi-hats. The “trick” is to use a sample-and-hold module to generate a signal that is 0 when the open hi-hat is fired, and 1 when the closed hi-hat fires. You can then use this signal as a modulation to alter the parameters of your instrument so that the closed and open hats sound different.
If you take a look at the screenshot, you’ll see that I use a midi-to-cv to get a gate signal for both instruments in my “choke group”. I add both gates together in the adder and use that as my trigger for the sample and hold. The signal being sampled in the sample and hold is the CH gate. This gives me a signal of 1 when the closed hat fires, and a signal of 0 when the open hat fires. I then use this to modulate different parameters on my instrument.
There are some minor tweaks you may have to do to make this work consistently. I delay the midi track of the “dominant” sound slightly so if there is a note at the same time on both tracks the dominant one wins out.
Does it support actual OT sample chains complete with markers? I don’t have an OT anymore but have loads of sample chains I made in sample chainer.
One day I will buy Drambo.
This is cool. I get that the S&H is being triggered on any gate from either OH MIDI... or CH MIDI.... And because it’s sampling the CH MIDI... gate, I see how it will 1 if the CH was triggered and 0 otherwise. And I see how I could use this to modulate, say, an amp on my OH such that it snapped shut whenever the CH is triggered.
What I don’t get how to wire up the two MIDI to CV modules. If I put them both on a track like in your screen shot, they both trigger the same gate and note whenever that track’s pad is tapped. The S&H will always get triggered at the same time and it will always be 1.
Clearly what I need to do is route the MIDI triggering the OH sample only to OH MIDI to CV and the MIDI triggering the CH sample only to CH MIDI to CV, but I have no idea how to do that. Any pointers?
You can connect the MIDI input on the “CH MIDI to CV” to the output of the track your CH notes are coming from. Click the MIDI symbol on that module, switch to the track you want to get the notes from, and then click the midi symbol below the track title on the far left (of the module viewing page). This should route that midi data into the modulation generating module I showed in the post above.
Note that the track you are connecting to has to come BEFORE the track your “CH MIDI to CV” module is on. Drambo processes linearly so you can’t route backwards, and tracks go in order.
I realized there is one more step after this, if you want to make sure the length, note and velocity data is coming through correctly for the two streams (e.g. you want the note value from OH to come through when you trigger OH).
You’ll need to mix cv/gate/velocity data for each of the two streams, and switch between them when the sample and hold changes.
You’ll need to set up 3 of these like the velocity x-fader, one for velocity, one for gate and one for pitch. I feel its worth noting I do this in a template I use across tracks, because its somewhat of a pain but once it’s set up you don’t have to fuss with it much.
Anyways, I may try to make a small youtube video about this sometime this week, as its a common struggle currently in Drambo. May not happen tonight but I’ll post it here when I can get around to it!
Oh. My. God. I’ve been using Drambo for a year and I never realized you can switch between tracks (and to Main) when selecting a destination. I always just assumed I had to patch to something already on the screen.
I feel like an idiot, but also highly inspired now! 
