Midi Beats

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BradGray
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Midi Beats

Post by BradGray » Sun Jun 13, 2021 9:46 am

Hey All,

In programming drum parts, for certain tracks, the following popped into my mind. Do any of you use, and I'm sure you do, pre built midi beats that you just drag and drop the sounds on top of? At least as a starting point?

While it's pretty simple to program some basic beats, and full-parts, I'm sure some of you leverage a number of pre-built ones. Anyone familiar with some sites that have pre-built midi files, that have beats in various styles?

Just looking to leverage and/or build out some standard patterns that I could use over and over; at least as a starting point.

Thanks!
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Re: Midi Beats

Post by Telefunkin » Sun Jun 13, 2021 12:12 pm

Drums on demand deal mainly in audio drum files but if you search on midi there's midi patterns too.
https://www.drumsondemand.com/

EZDrummer is pretty common way to get good performances based on midi. You need the core package to start with, EZX expansions give you more sounds and midi patterns, and midi packs are just midi patterns without extra sounds.
https://www.toontrack.com/product/ezdru ... gKUfPD_BwE
https://www.toontrack.com/product-category/midipacks/
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Re: Midi Beats

Post by cosmicdolphin » Sun Jun 13, 2021 12:33 pm

Life is too short to be programming every drum beat from scratch although sometimes it's still the quickest way to get what you want if you need something specific.

I leverage several different things :-

Addictive Drums 2 ( which is similar to programs like EZdrummer ) ..loads of midi performances which are more trad styles but you can make it your own using different kits and bits of editing

XO - This lets you use all the one shot samples from your hard drive as well as it's own kits and also has loads of it's own midi based grooves

LoopCloud - You can build custom grooves from separate loops or one shots, it's fun to play with and there are pre-built patterns that chop up the audio which you can apply to the one shots or loops so it's actually very flexible even though audio based.

Splice - Lots of one shots and loops , they've just introduced a bridge plugin to sync the key & tempo of the samples to the DAW but they don't have the advanced tools of LoopCloud for building beats

Kick 2 - I use this for 90% of my kicks as it gives a lot of control

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Re: Midi Beats

Post by RPaul » Mon Jun 21, 2021 5:10 pm

BradGray wrote:
Sun Jun 13, 2021 9:46 am
In programming drum parts, for certain tracks, the following popped into my mind. Do any of you use, and I'm sure you do, pre built midi beats that you just drag and drop the sounds on top of? At least as a starting point?

While it's pretty simple to program some basic beats, and full-parts, I'm sure some of you leverage a number of pre-built ones. Anyone familiar with some sites that have pre-built midi files, that have beats in various styles?

Just looking to leverage and/or build out some standard patterns that I could use over and over; at least as a starting point.
I mostly use Toontrack's Superior and EZ Drummer lines, both for sounds and the MIDI loops -- these days always within Superior Drummer 3, though I started with using EZ Drummer long ago. Their loops are played by solid professional drummers and cover many different styles with a good deal of depth. And, though some of the beats are specialized to the kits in terms of which sounds go with what, most of the basic beats can be used with most any of their many kits. Plus you can create the kits yourself from pretty much anything you have within Superior Drummer (and you can also import your own sounds -- and MIDI beats for that matter).

Where Superior Drummer 3 (and EZ Drummer 2) goes the extra mile, though, is with some controls to make their programmed beats busier or less busy, typically in useful ways -- more clicks toward the busy side gets more and more busy as you click additional times, whereas going the other direction makes them less busy. They also do have a grid editor, and, within that, there are nudge controls, so, for example, if you want the snare to lay back a little more, you can select the snare notes and nudge it a bit later until you get the feel you want. Of course, you could do that in your MIDI track later (once you move the sequence of patterns to your DAW), but this is within the SD3 (or EZD2) song construction area itself, and there can be workflow benefits to use that. There are also rhythmic search capabilities to help find beats that are close to what you want.

My workflow in this is to, fairly early on in my project arranging (typically after doing a scratch piano part to a metronome to lay out the song structure) build the basic drum part with SD3. I then use that for fleshing out the rest of the arrangement. Once the rest of the arrangement is fleshed out, I go back into SD3 and refine the drums, for example making some parts less busy and other parts more busy, adding more fills or just editing the ones that I've put in up front, adding extra cymbal hits, and doing any detailed beat editing -- basically just making the beats that were already in the ballpark respond to the other parts more like a drummer might. I usually pick the kit early on in the process, but sometimes I'll also change that as the arrangement progresses.

Rick

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Re: Midi Beats

Post by glogleemusic » Tue Aug 24, 2021 11:13 am

Thanks for all the great insight. I like to get my drums down fairly quick in the arrangement too. I use Drums On Demand. But I'm thinking it's time to go back and look at EZDrums or Superior again.
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RPaul
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Re: Midi Beats

Post by RPaul » Tue Aug 24, 2021 12:11 pm

glogleemusic wrote:
Tue Aug 24, 2021 11:13 am
Thanks for all the great insight. I like to get my drums down fairly quick in the arrangement too. I use Drums On Demand. But I'm thinking it's time to go back and look at EZDrums or Superior again.
I've got a number of Drums on Demand collections from the first half of the 2000s. I do remember using them in some of my songs back then -- a few other brands of ACIDized drum loops, too, like Beta Monkey and Smart Loops. I'd alternate between those sorts of loops and straight-up MIDI loops with whatever drums plugin I might have been using at the time, really depending on whether I could find the right sort of feel for the songs I was working on at any given time. Prior to that period, I'd either be using straight up MIDI loops with a hardware drum machine or playing drum parts on a keyboard with a drum machine.

What really changed things for me, though, was when the first version of EZ Drummer came out in 2006. That provided the flexibility of MIDI and the starting point of well-played drum parts (albeit in MIDI form instead of audio) with well-recorded drums to match, or mix and match. I tend to have an idea of what I want a drum part to be by the time I'm starting to track a song, so the challenge is to find loops that are at least in the ballpark (since playing drums on a keyboard really doesn't cut it, at least in my case -- maybe if I had a solid drum controller, and a lot of practice playing it...). It was still a hunting exercise at EZD v1, but at least it was possible to make some tweaks if you found something that was close but not quite 100%.

With EZD2 and SD3, though, the groove search possibility made it much quicker to find loops that were close to what is needed, and their song editor and built-in "intelligent" variation possibilities (to make a given drum part in a clip be busier or less busy), as well as the built-in grid editor and various other tools that let you manipulate feel in subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways, really raised my productivity level for getting to final parts. I'm not even sure when the last time I used audio loops for drums was (i.e. other than in the context of remixing a song that was using them where I didn't need to change the drums in the remix).

Rick

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