MIDI editing - cutting a drum sound short

[plums]

This isn't exactly Doom specific but I know there are some experienced composers here.

It seems like for drum sounds, the note duration is basically ignored and the whole drum sound plays no matter what. Is this correct? How can I cut a drum short, like if I have a crash that I want to silence after an 1/8th note, or an open hi-hat that I want to cut when the next closed hat comes? So far the only way I can find is to play the same note a second time with a velocity of 0, which seems hacky.

I'm using a weird editor called ztracker so it's a bit hard to tell what is a ztracker quirk and what is normal MIDI behaviour. I've got Sekaiju too but I'm not entirely confident with it yet.

[jdagenet]

After the 1/8th note, you could call an MIDI event that instantly sets the drum channel's volume to zero.
You do run into some problems this way though. If you were to change the channel's volume back to 100 (or whatever it was before) before the tail of the sound has ended, you'll still hear a bit of the sound.

That's the only method I can think of.

[plums]

Thanks, but doesn't that mute everything in the channel then, though? So I'd need a separate channel for each percussion instrument that I wanted to cut. Sounds messy.

Am I correct in thinking that normally/without hacks, you just can't cut a drum sound short?

[jdagenet]

It does mute everything in the channel, but that was the only way I could think of achieving that, and you can't add more than one drum track in an MIDI so you couldn't have an independent crash cymbal channel for example.
Other than that, there is no way to cut off drum sounds.

[Tristan]

Bit late, but I think I just replicated the hi-hat cut-off, completely by accident, so I made a file to check it.

It plays 2 hi-hats, then a hi-hat with a pedal hi-hat a 16th after it. Closed hi-hat works too. No trickery involved. Not a clue about the crash cymbals though.

[plums]

So that's interesting, seems like there's some "hard-coded" gating going on with the hihat sounds. What's more, it seems like it doesn't work in every SoundFont I have -- nor does it work in OPL emulation in either PrBoom+ or ZDoom. I guess some SoundFonts haven't implemented the note-off properly, or whatever the proper MIDI term is. Anyhow, thanks for that.

edit: Found a page with some more info about drums at the bottom.
http://home.roadrunner.com/~jgglatt/tutr/gm.htm