Hello and Seeking Drum Program Recommendation

[DavidS]

Hello. I joined Taxi in October and this is my first post. Been checking things out, to get the lay of the land.
I am a long time musician and songwriter, done some DAW recording, but looking to improve my setup. I am looking to upgrade my drum program. I currently have EZ Drummer, but I would like to move up to something where I can program my own beats in real time, rather than using canned beats or mapping it all out in the midi editor. My wheelhouse is guitar rock, pop, folk and blues. Any suggestions are welcome.

David Silverstone[/color]

[mojobone]

There's no reason you can't do great things with EZDrummer, but I'm a huge fan of Addictive Drums, and Superior Drummer likewise, though I don't use it, myself. Generally, the tough part is getting the dynamics right between your MIDI input and audio output. I like using a pads kit, but you can get really expressive with AD2 and a keyboard.

Drum replacement and drum remixing are nearly as important as the drums themselves, these days, so if you're not a drummer, something like Spectrasonics' RMX could help you re-groove drum and/or bass samples to get more mileage from loops, which is a valid approach to lotsa modern genres.

[Len911]

What daw do you have? Many have built-in programs, Cubase had beat designer and groove agent one

Steinberg has a new program called Groove Agent 4 and groove agent se 4 which is included in cubase

https://www.steinberg.net/en/products/v ... ne_up.html

but I would like to move up to something where I can program my own beats in real time, rather than using canned beats or mapping it all out in the midi editor.

From a little looking, although there is an option of "canned beats", what I see is sort of an implementation of drum and percussion samples, if you're familiar with Cubase, it's like it combines the sample editor with the midi drum notation window. It's like you are playing the samples as midi, there is no mapping per se as the drum notation window does the mapping for you if that makes sense. Not to mention effecting your samples.
https://youtu.be/H2FWSQ4GMrU?t=4m49s

It sort of looks like it has the familiar cubase mediabay, groove agent, beat designer, drum editor, bfd effects, jamstix styles, a combination of a lot of the good features from other programs.

[DavidS]

Thank you for your responses. I am using Reaper as my DAW. I get that drum samples can be obtained online for free, from online libraries, and there are VSTs, some for free, with which you can work with the samples. Is this a better way to go than to just upgrade my drummer program? My last Newbie inquiry is what is a good source to learn how to work with drum samples and drum samplers to create beats?

David Silverstone

[Len911]

Hello David! The advantage of a drum program is that most of them are "sampled" instruments and work as a vst or in a sampler such as Kontakt or Play, etc., and the major advantage is that they usually contain velocity layers, and the overhead mics can be mixed in, round robin, etc. The instruments are going to be more realistic, than only having one sample with no velocity mapping. It's maybe possible that you could buy drum samples with different velocity samples, and extra samples for round robin, and you would insert the samples manually according to the velocity, I don't know of anyone who does that,(edited-see below), or if there are many sample libraries (not instruments) that contain multi-velocity and rr samples?? Depending on the genre, it may or may not matter as much, if at all.

Does anyone really need a sampler with modern daws essentially being a sampler. And most samplers today are not really used like samplers, people generally purchase instruments that run in samplers like Kontakt or Halion, etc.
It's a lot of work to map out samples, loop them if necessary, and have them sound worth a hoot in a sampler.

For someone who doesn't want to spend an arm and a leg on drums or a program, and needs one or two really good drum kits, and has a daw, the drum drops "Multiple-Velocity Packs/ Multi-sample pack"

The Multi-Velocity Pack offers up to 16 velocity levels of each articulation. This pack comes with 480 samples. All the samples have been mixed from a combination of the close, overhead and room microphones. This pack can be loaded into any DAW, sampler or drum machine that can read 24 bit WAVs.

~$25 per kit. 20% off purchase on sign up.
https://www.drumdrops.com/drum-samples

[Len911]

My last Newbie inquiry is what is a good source to learn how to work with drum samples and drum samplers to create beats?

David, my advice is to search for youtube videos of any product I am considering purchasing, for example you have Reaper, search "reaper making beats" or "Reaper drum sampling"... The websites often have tutorials, or forums, or manuals.

Unless you want to learn to play a guitar, a piano, a flute, a generic product, you'll probably not learn much at all from generic programs, how-to's, not near as much as you will from a specific program.

[mojobone]

Your needs will differ depending on the genres you need to cover. Usually, you'd want to avoid having more than four kitpieces sounding at once, cuz most drummers have only four limbs, so polyphony isn't really a factor. I guess we could rock our heads back and hit that big gong suspended behind us, and there are some other exceptions; Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead and of course, lots of latin/salsa/mariachi stuff has drums plus percussion or two drummers, even.

Another tip for building beats is that in nearly every circumstance, one limb is keeping time; playing fours, eighths or sixteenths, often on the hihat or the ride, which is why they call it the 'ride' cymbal in the first place. If you're keeping time on the ride, that's usually the right hand but keeping time on hihat could be right hand, left hand OR left foot, and remember that 'keeping time' stops, as soon as there's a fill. This is where it's nice to have Reaper with its built-in beat-slicing, cuz almost no drum VST instruments come with enough or unique enough fills.

All beats don't work at all tempi-and you'd think this'd be obvious, but real drummers play way more sparsely at faster tempi and nobody does ghost notes at 200 BPM and up. Neal Peart probably can, but he doesn't.

For me and my music, 16 levels/layers of dynamics/velocity wouldn't be even close to enough, but it's probably more than sufficient for hiphop or EDM and lots of pop, dance and even R&B, but not old school R&B or classic Motown. EDM guys tend to have hundreds of kick samples, all of them different and they use maybe two or more layered together in a track but only one velocity for each and there's no round robin. There are also lots of sounds that can substitute for snares or hats in electronica, including claps, cowbell or even white noise.

[Len911]

It might make an interesting experiment to take all velocity settings (128), and see where people listen and choose the places where the samples changed. Or checked the threshold by increasing or decreasing the volume on samples until people recognized that the low velocity samples were played too loud, and the high velocity samples were played too soft. That's not even checking what happens with compression and limiting.

The problem is, when you have 1 velocity sample covering say every 8 samples, let's say 32-39, they are the same sample, however they are a little louder each increment in velocity, same sound just louder.

The noticeable difference really lies in round robin, where a drum roll with the same sample sounds machine gun. However with integrated sample editors in daws, you could conceivably change the waveform slightly, and changes in gain, transient response, etc. to buffer the machine gun sound effect, or just use different velocity samples and change the gain.

Once upon a time, in another life,lol, I was going to take my vsti drum samples and turn into a sound font for some reason, some program, and noticed that the waveform was the only way I could reliably tell whether the samples were different or not, not by listening. Anyway

[DavidS]

Thank you all for your excellent suggestions. I ended up upgrading from EZ drummer to Superior drummer, and looking at tutorial videos specifically geared to Reaper drum editing.

David S.