I just took this picture of my “studio” (or “cluttered corner of a bedroom”) for an article I’m writing about a track I’m releasing in a couple of weeks. I thought Questers (or Groovers?) might be interested to see a Mikro 3 in a working setup. It’s in the centre of the image, mounted on the right-hand side of the main piano keyboard. If you zoomed in, you might be able to see that it’s on a layer of old yoga mat, trimmed to size, which helps dampen the sound of drumming. It’s set up for a standard kit; closest row is kick (blue) and cymbals (orange). Next row back is snare (two central pads are normal stick, two side pads are variations like sidestick). Beyond that is hihat (blue/green) and ride, and toms are across the top.
One recent addition to my drumming is that I have the soft and sustain pedals (under the desk) set up so that pressing the soft pedal scales all velocities down, no pedals scales to around 90% range, and pressing the sustain scales them up to full range. That helps me control dynamics better than I can with just fingers. Which is of course cheating!
I like those pedal tricks! I have an entire lesson on velocity curves and that with the limited dynamic range you have on a pad controller you sometimes need to top off the velocity to be able to play normally but get that nice, “held back” kind of sound.
That pedal trick is nice! I see you use it in Logic but I can already see it would be easy to implement in Ableton as well. Might consider that (although I’ve just been trying to just hit the velocities that I want - I have the opposite problem, it’s hard to get to high enough velocities when trying to play very fast moeller stuff). Will keep that pedal in mind.
I’ll add my setup pictures as well, as I’ve just tinkered with that a bit and am very happy with the result.
Fingerdrumming station. The Maschine follows the track I select on the Push, so I will typically edit on the Push and then play on the Maschine.
I stand instead of sitting at this setup, to keep the practice active. I move around a lot in the studio, which helps with posture/mouse-arm as well.
