Kongified Dr. Octo Rex

This post continues a recent trend of non-EWI related tips and tricks. I know this EWI Reason Sounds, but sometimes I come across something in my own music making that others might benefit from, too. Maybe it'll help you finish a tune, or inspire you to start a tune. 

In this tip I will show you how I beefed up a Dr Octo Rex drum loop by using it to trigger pads on a Kong Drum designer.

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What I wanted to do was have the snare slice trigger a snare sample on the Kong and have a kick drum slice trigger a kick sample on the Kong. This way I could layer the sounds or replace the sounds in the Rex loop. So, lets look at the back of the Kong and Dr Octo Rex.

There is only one Gate Output on the Dr Octo Rex which fires for each slice. So we can't use that unless we want to trigger a sound for every single slice in our loop. We want the kick drums slices  to trigger Pad 1 and the Snare slices to tigger Pad 2. 

Multiple outs on Dr Octo Rex

However, there are multiple audio outputs on Dr Octo Rex, and we can assign individual slices to the different outputs as shown below.

Here you can see I have entered slice edit mode, and sent the kick slices to output 1-2 and the snare slices to output 3-4.

Triggering the Kong

What we can do now is send outputs 1-2 and 3-4 to an MClass Compressor, then use the Gain Reduction CV out to trigger the Kong. As you can see in the picture below, I have the gain reduction CV out of he MClass compressor set to trigger the pads on Kong.

If we flip the rack back around, we need to set up the Compressor. I recommend these settings: 

• Input Gain: 0
  
• Threshold; ~-36db
  
• Ratio: between 16:1 and inf
  
• Attack:0
  
• Release:
  

This is the basic setup. One thing to note is that in this configuration you will never hear the snare and kick for the loop because they go into the Compressor and don't go anywhere from there. We can get around this by adding a Spider Audio Merger/Splitter, and use one split to go to a mixer and another to go to the Comprwssor, like so:

The only thing you need to do now is layer up the kick and snare however you want. 

One advantage to doing it this way is you can arrange the slices in your track however you want and the Kong snare and kick will always follow along, since they are being triggered by the audio.

Here is a little demo of the finished patch, which I have included for you to download below. There are two caveats to this technique though. 

1. You may have to play around with the input gain and threshold parameters to get the Kong pad to trigger. 
   
2. You may have to get rid of the velocity parameters on the Kong Pad like this:
   

kongified_rex.cmb
File Size:	1129 kb
File Type:	cmb

Download File

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There you go, have fun and be musical.