How To Map Roland's V-Drums Perfectly To Your DAW's Drum Instrument

Roland's V-Drums are a great way to play and practice drums without the associated noise that a real drum kit makes - and so you can play them anywhere. But much more than that they allow you to play countless different kits on the hardware and also hook up to a computer to play any software-based drum instrument of your choosing. The world is your oyster! In this video from the course V-Drums 101: V-Drums Explained And Explored, Matt Vanacoro shows you how to hook V-Drums up to a virtual drum instrument inside your DAW using MIDI.

V-Drums 101: V-Drums Explained And Explored

The key to getting this right, as Matt explains, is to correctly map your MIDI channels and data through from the V-Drums hardware to your software instrument so that they sync up properly. You need your physical snare to be routed to the software snare, hi hat to hi hat and so on, and all the associated velocity data needs to be correct too if the results are to sound good.

Matt demonstrates using presets to quickly link up the two systems - if you are lucky you will have a preset available. But sometimes you will have to create custom maps. Crucially, Matt shows you how different areas of different virtual drums are set up to react to different MIDI notes. So for example the centre of the snare uses one value, but the edge uses another. When you understand this you will see how important it is to set up MIDI mapping correctly. Be sure to check out the full course using the links below for a complete guide to using V-Drums!