Mandala Drum Forums

Hello
do I have to change the parameters of the drum to get a shift in pitch (like a scale) from center to edge? I can do it in battery, but I'm only able to get 3-4 notes.

There's a couple different ways. Have you tried this yet:

Perhaps the easiest in battery would be to have a single sample, let's say on C3. Then on the Modulation tab, select Modulation source (First drop down) as MIDI CC#, and select the CC number you have assigned to Position. Then on the second drop down, choose pitch. You can use the slider to adjust how much the pitch will change as you move to the edge.

One note, this will be a very imprecise way to play pitch, almost impossible to play a scale. But for drums, this is sometimes perfect. I think a combination of the 4 surface zones and 9 rim triggers is the best way to play specific notes. Is that kind of how you're approaching this?

If you want to separate the surface of a Mandala into any number of custom sized quantized zones from center to edge using Battery you can do it with the Cell Activation feature located under the Setup tab. You would set each cell to Trigger only when the Mandala Position Controller is between certain values that you choose, and then the sample you assign to each cell can be set to any pitch you choose. For example, divide the pad surface into 8 zones and set the pitch of each sample so that you'll play a minor scale from center to edge.

If you set one cell to trigger when Position Controller is between 0-10 and the next cell to trigger when Position Controller is between 11-30 and the next cell to trigger when Position Controller is between 31-58 (etc. all the way up to 127) you will be defining custom sized surface zones to your liking across the whole surface. Each of those zones will trigger their own Battery cell and each of those cells can have any sample you want and can be set to any pitch you'd like.

Amidatong: I am trying to get a pitch range from high to low from a sample by triggering the drum, one hit, one note, up and down, in a pre-determined range. I tried the solution presented and I couldn't get it to work but I see where you're going with this and I'll keep trying. It does bring me to another thing I noticed while working on a particular kit. I cut and pasted a sample from another kit and dropped it into the current one I am working on. When I trigger the sample with the keyboard, it sounds one way, when I trigger it with the Mandala drum, it sounds another way..why is that?

You can make Battery step from cell to cell with each hit by using the Cycle Round Robin function under the Setup tab. Then you'd just put the same sample in each cell, each with its own Tune setting so they are the pre-determined pitches you want to be cycling through as you hit the pad.

Menu>Online Battery Documentation in Battery 4 has more details if you search for 'round robin' there.