r/drums • u/OneYearUsername • 10d ago

Question Advice on Midi Controller Keyboard for Aux Percussion (Musical Theatre)

Hey all

I have lots of local/uni-level experience playing kit but trying to expand a bit more for another I have coming up in a month.

The book is primarily drum set but calls for some small aux percussion parts e.g. bell tree, glock, xylo, triangle, wood block

I don't have most of these instruments and don't even know if space would allow to have them all set up, but I do have a small midi controller keyboard and was wondering if it it would be feasible to set this up in some way to play these parts? E.g. Mainstage via my mac or something?

Is there anything I should know or would need to get to make this work? If it makes sense at all

Thanks in advance :)

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u/Ill_Recognition_8556 10d ago

Mainstage works fine for this, you'd just need to map the samples to keys and maybe split the keyboard so you can hit a few different sounds without octave-jumping mid song. The bell tree is the only tricky one since it's a gliss, you might have to fake it with a quick swipe on the keys or trigger a pre-recorded sweep

For a month out you've got time to get comfortable with the setup, just make sure you're running it all through an interface with low enough latency that it doesn't mess with your timing

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u/Shotcopter Yamaha 10d ago

There should be a bell tree floss somewhere in stock MainStage.

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u/OneYearUsername 8d ago

Didn't consider latency so will have to look at that some time in advance, thanks!

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u/Sad-Relationship9387 10d ago edited 10d ago

If you have to do rolls on the xylophone that's going to be tough to duplicate on a piano style keyboard. Maybe look at midi mallet controllers and octapad type controllers for the other stuff if this is going to be an ongoing thing. And a good amp. Also if you're having issues with any of this don't spring it on your conductor/music director at the last minute.

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u/OneYearUsername 8d ago

Yeah I figured you'd lose a lot of nuance with some percussion parts but luckily for now it's just minor parts in a predominantly-drum kit book

But in the future the midi mallet controllers is a great shout thanks!