Connecting an iMac to an electric Drumset?

[Eckels]

Today is my third day as a proud owner of my first Apple product, the 20" iMac. I purchased it mainly for my business, as an office machine, so I hadn't really thought about this before, but now that I see all the real music capabilities, I started thinking about feeding a line into it from my electric drumeset (a Yamaha DTXpress III Special) . The drumkit has midi out ports. I'd like to transcribe tracks direct from the drumset, possibly to edit later on. (fix timings, odd sounds, etc.)

Is there anyone here who has done such a thing that could walk me through it, or at the very least, point me in the right direction. Keep in mind that I never made this type of hookup with my PC either, so I'm an absolute newbie as far as this goes.

Thanks in Advance!

 

[grum]

You can do this reasonably easily but you would need some sort of midi interface for the computer. Midi transmits only information about when and how hard the drums were hit etc - if you wanted the drum sounds as well you would need an audio line going into the computer.

You could use the drum kit to trigger other sounds or sampled drum kits within the computer - the parts could then be quantised and edited etc. I'm not sure if this is possible within garageband though I would have thought it probably is. If you are serious about doing it you might want to invest in something like Logic Express or (my fav) Ableton Live.

I use a Presonus Firebox Firewire audio interface which has both midi inputs and outputs and audio inputs and outputs which would do what you need, but you might want to find something cheaper to start out with. There are lots of USB interfaces which would also do the job.