Well, this is beat (pun intended)....

[Tom]

So, on the Fr4x you cannot play the drums with free bass. What sense does this make? Maybe you can on the 8x I don't know.

So, if you want to improvise over walking (free) bass with drums you're sol unless you use a backing track. Or use the Stradella basses all in 3rd octave. Not the worst thing in the world.

Unless you can re-map the chords in bass/chord mode to single notes. I don't even know if this is possible (JerryPH knows ).

Always something!

 

[Ventura]

for experimenting and fun, just use your MIDI out to
literally ANY GM sound module

with a standard GM setup, you have full drum kits accessible,
and also about 10 percussion sounds (basic bass drum, hi hat, etc.
and other percussive FX sounds hat you can map onto the bass and chord
channels easily, or onto the treble channels

an easy and effective setup is simple deep snare or bass on the 2 bass rows
and hi-hat on the chord rows and just play Take-5

works great

of course you would prefer doing this just with the FR4, but for now
to get things figured out what works well and what doesn't, you can
use your MIDI to layer on the drums

before the FR7x existed, i took Akira from Roland to my studio and played him
Take 5 and Desafinado using MIDI drums on my MidiVox Excelsior 960
and it pretty much blew his mind.. that was the year i took Roland to the Coupe Mondial
and he flew in to see how it went

 

[Tom]

Thanks, Ventura, I can see how that could work. Is it possible to re-map the chords to single notes? Just curious.

 

[Ventura]

the gm drum kits individual voices are all mapped to notes, but
may not give the results you prefer with the default layout

MIDI guys have told me you can use re-mapping software on
a computer as a go-between to re-arrange things as you like..
probably work easier if you also were just using a Virtual drumkit
in software too

 

[Tom]

Yea, I haven't tried editing at all. Either with the computer editor or on screen. Some day.