What is your workflow with Battery? Anyone else find Battery UI and design confusing and weird?

Warren Postma · 2023-06-04T21:59:36+00:00

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Do people use these kits that come with battery? I don’t understand why most of them are like 16 kicks and 16 snares, and 32 almost identical hat sounds in one kit?

What is the workflow that works for people? I want to be able to audition kits with a drum controller but I’m not aware of any 90 pad drum controller pads, and I don’t understand the UI and layout of battery.

Other drum plugins have 8 or 16 pads arranged like a fairly standard drum pad arrangement (4x4 or 8x8), but not only are there a LOT of pads in battery the midi note mapping seems to be different than any other drum plugin.

I feel like I missed out on a basic explanation somewhere of why battery is why it is.

I have 10+ different drum plugins and battery feels the weirdest. Am I the only one who feels lost and confused?

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Comments

egjanuary

Ours is not to question why. It is to do.

I used it for the first time the other day and it is nice to have all those extra samples and modulation. But I also wonder what to do with it.

Warren Postma

I'm learning gradually. I just wish there was some insight to be had?

DaniloVillanova

The kits with "16 kicks and 16 snares, and 32 almost identical hat sounds in one kit" are most suitable to play with keyboards. It's useful for having a bunch of samples quickly available to try out in a song.

You can change the pad configuration in a menu to make it more similar to different controllers. I don't think this solves the weird kit mapping issue. Sadly Battery is more or less abandoned. Building your own kits, using the same pads for kicks, snares, etc. every time would allow you to use it with a controller.

chadmtl

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/75594#Comment_75594

NI puts out new battery kits every time they release an expansion. So when you say it's more or less abandoned, you just mean the user interface and wishlist from users?

I haven't started using it yet, but was planning to make it my go to for drums since I was under the impression it was highly supported given all the new content constantly coming out for it.

Rico010

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/75596#Comment_75596

Same here.

i just decided to switch from Maschine to Battery as it does not need a controller, uses less CPU in a DAW and just better suits cases when I do not have Maschine with me.

So Battery with a better scaled UI could be a great option considering that all new expansions are available there as well.

My main reason is that I want to use M+ standalone in parallel with laptop. And batter on laptop is a good option for having library available in another daw parallel to M+

Warren Postma

I am starting to grasp this.

Battery is a really powerful way of creating a massive set of samples playable with my 88 key keyboard, or with a 64 pad pad controller, which has pages and pages of modes (so 64 pads per page).
The kits are not all minimal, some are the opposite. Some are basically “here’s all 100 kicks from a certain maschine expansion”.
While battery lacks its own patterns system (what a major oversight if you ask me) it has a lot of features and is a pretty full featured drum sample player.
The pad layouts are sometimes huge but you can chop any kit down to 4x4 (16) or whatever size of pads you want and map that to any midi note triggers you want.
Really until I started making user kits with it I found it useless, now I quite like Battery

Maciej Repetowski

For me, to make it usable, Battery needs kit previews, like Maschine. With many expansions, I have now more than 1000 drum kits, so to find something by loading kits and previewing them by hand is nearly impossible.

I know I can use KK, but I hate that app. I’m using Maschine as a glorified drum sample player in my DAW instead.

I wish NI would provide “expansion player” for people like me.

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