Drum Looping

JDOD

JDOD

therecordingrebels.com
Like many people; I don't have the space or neighbours to record live drums so I rely on drum looping. I've never actually asked anyone's advice on this before so don't know if what I am doing is normal, stupid or just plain old fashioned.

I have a collection of loops, both built beats and single hits. I tend to soley use single hits and build my own beats.

I tend to devote the first dozen tracks in my DAW (Reaper) to drums. Say 3 - 4 tracks for hi-hats, 2-3 for snares, 1-2 for kicks with plenty left over for when I am working on cymbals and fills.

I select a group of hi hat, snare and kick sounds that work together and build up my beat then copy and paste it for the length of a song section that needs it, say a verse or a chorus. Later I will go back and tweak little bits, add in the fills and crashes - building fills can take a while.

To mix them I tend to imagine I am sitting behind the kit, leave the kick dead centre, pan the snare L10, the hat L15, the ride R30 etc.

I never render my beats into one track as I have found to my detriment that this makes later editing if you don't like the sound of a snare or something a right pain in the arse.

I don't tend to add many FX to my beats as usually you can't make anything sound that much better - I've found trying to improve a drum sound with FX is like trying to polish a turd.

I have bought a couple of CDs of drum loops and hits from BetaMonkey and I have been happy with them. Anyone got any other bright ideas for sourcing loops?

I have been happy with the results I am getting so far and have even had a mate of mine who is a drummer ask who was playing!!! He noticed it was a loop after a while 'cos it was so consistent and some of the fills were identical but he was impressed.

At a later date (when money and space allow) I do plan on getting a digital drum kit and playing the beats myself - I'll get more advice on how to best get that into a DAW when I need it.

In the mean time if anyone could give me any tips on my current technique to improve produtivity or sound or make things quicker/easier I would be well happy.
 
If ever there was a cry for EZDrummer, this would be it. Your method sounds like a giant PITA to me, but if it works for you, run with it!

Watch some of the videos on Toontrack's EZD2 site, and I think that you'll see how helpful the song building features could be for you:
EZdrummer 2 | Toontrack

They have pretty frequent sales, and it tends to be cheaper on websites other than their own.
 
Mr Clean said:
My thoughts exactly.
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Cheers, I will check this out when I get home this evening. Is EZDrummer versatile? Will I be able to get the beats that I want? Or is there just a small set to choose from?

What I do like about my current set up is that I end up with every single hit of every drum on the screen so I can alter pretty much anything.

Tadpui, did you used to post on Home Recording Connection? It may have been you who originally suggested that I get a Line6 TonePort and Reaper. I still use both.
 
EZD let's you use either pre-made patterns or create your own. You can even use patterns that others have created. It is just a MIDI file mapped to EZD. The ones EZD gives you are pretty good, and there are add on MIDI packs (data only in this case and not kits) to expand. Or you can just create your own from scratch. (MIDI edit feature in your favorite DAW).
 
Hmmmm, MIDI.... I know nothing about MIDI. Will check out the link above and see if I think I can use it.
 
JDOD said:
Hmmmm, MIDI.... I know nothing about MIDI. Will check out the link above and see if I think I can use it.
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You can use it and you will use it. Get some information on it so you understand it. Very important technology. It is an oldie but a goodie.
 
Yeah, I need something better than wikipedia which is part "death by information" and also makes it sound pointless.
 
JDOD said:
Cheers, I will check this out when I get home this evening. Is EZDrummer versatile? Will I be able to get the beats that I want? Or is there just a small set to choose from?

What I do like about my current set up is that I end up with every single hit of every drum on the screen so I can alter pretty much anything.

Tadpui, did you used to post on Home Recording Connection? It may have been you who originally suggested that I get a Line6 TonePort and Reaper. I still use both.
Click to expand...

EZD makes it pretty easy to add sampled drums to your songs. The "tap to find" feature is pretty awesome, it listens to a pattern that you tap and presents any loops/patterns that match (i.e. snare on 2 + 4, or 8th note hi-hats, etc.). Once you find a pattern you like, you can either drag + drop it into a MIDI track in Reaper, or you can build up a song in EZD itself. You have control of the overall intensity of the patterns, you can alter the strength of the drummer's "strong" hand, all without having to twiddle with individual hits. But you're also free to twiddle with individual hits if you want, or create your own beats or alter existing ones. Very flexible, and the actual MIDI implementation is abstracted away from the user a bit. But you can always use Reaper's piano roll to get into the nitty-gritty and fine-tune things.

And yeah, I used to frequent HRC a lot. I thought that I recognized your user name! Glad the TonePort has worked out, that must have been a long time ago that I would've made that suggestion! It was one of the first affordable USB interfaces that I remember seeing. It's a good little unit, although there have been dozens (hundreds?) that have come out since that are even better values for the money. It's amazing how preamp quality, converter quality, and feature keep increasing and prices stay reasonable.
 
Think its going to take me a little while to get head into MIDI. Will probably be fine once I make a start though. Sounds like it can get fiddly! !! I will probably end up replacing one fiddly method with an equally fiddly one.

The tone port recommendations would have been 5 or 6 years ago now! Still works though
 
It will actually end up a lot like what you're doing now, especially if you use Reaper's inline MIDI editor.

The big difference is that instead of placing the actual sound of a given drum at a point on the timeline, you are instead placing an instruction that tells EZD to play that drum at that time. So if you want to swap out a snare sound for instance, you just tell EZD to play a different snare, rather than having to replace every individual snare sample on the timeline. That alone will probably save a lot of time and fiddling.


Edit - But it doesn't have to be EZD either! You've already got a bunch of samples that you like. If you found a decent sampler (there is a half-assed one in Reaper) you could load the sounds in there and control that from MIDI the same way. Again, if you want to change a sound that happens a bunch of times, you will only have to change it in that one place (the sampler) rather than every time it happens.
 
If you want to sound "real", move away from loops, using MIDI as these guys are saying to build complete drum tracks - you can still repeat stuff, but it's easy to make little variations so it's not a "loop". You don't have to know anything about MIDI, it's dead easy. I do all my drums that way using Addictive Drums and Steve Slate Platinum.

You end up with a drum sound per track, so easy to adjust volumes of individual drums.
 
JDOD said:
Think its going to take me a little while to get head into MIDI. Will probably be fine once I make a start though. Sounds like it can get fiddly! !! I will probably end up replacing one fiddly method with an equally fiddly one.

The tone port recommendations would have been 5 or 6 years ago now! Still works though
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Na, at the basic level it is pretty simple. You just have to separate MIDI data from sound generated by MIDI. That is the part that confuses many people. They think it is the same.

To simplify, MIDI (which is just a standard way to communicate data between machines, like CNC) is generated internally by the keyboard to its internal computer and internal sound generators. The split happens when you want to capture the data for other machines to use such as sound modules or DAWs.
 
OK, I will have a good poke about in Reaper when I move into my new place and find the sampler. There's always loads of new things to find in Reaper. I'm not a keyboard player or anytihng like that, can you just use the keyboard of the computer as a MIDI controller?
 
Yeah, Reaper has a Virtual Keyboard that maps your computer keyboard to MIDI notes. It's not velocity sensitive, though, so if you want any volume variations, you'll have to draw those in.

You can also just draw in the MIDI notes in the editor (inline or otherwise) which will be a lot more like what you've been doing with placing the samples on the timeline.

Look for ReaSamplomatic. I've never really played with it, but AFAIK it's pretty powerful, if a bit clunky. A couple folks on the Reaper forum have set up some apparently decent drum kits with it. Not trying to steal traffic from this site (in fact there's a few folks around that are members on both), but you might get more specific and in-depth help/advice over there.
 
Here's a couple of songs with drum tracks on them. The newer (Title finally) one is built the way I described above, I basically give every drum hit a line in my DAW and work from there. This drum track took me about 3/4 hour to put together.

This 2nd one (Time for a Change) is much older; I didn't have an organised strategy to it so I would make a beat, loop it, leave a gap, build a fill, turn that into a loop, add crashes, right pain in the arse. Took ages and I wasn't able to easily change what I had done. I did make a pretty good job of this one though.

https://soundcloud.com/brother-number-one/finally
https://soundcloud.com/brother-number-one/time-for-a-change

What you think of these? Hints/tips etc.
 
I listened to Finally, sounds like you have the hang of it.

One thing to note (not on this song, but in general), on the drums, velocity variation is pretty important. It is the difference between a groove and a beat. Just keep that in mind for the future, if the drums aren't sitting right or seem out of beat, try the variation on velocity, might bring it in where you want it.

Another trick, get a drum pad(s), map it to your drum kit (many times they already work) and get your drums in that way, use quantization to fix the timing issues and then just edits as required. You can do a song with drum pads and edits with several takes in less time than it takes to draw it in. For me, I just can't get a good rhythm, then when I do, then I get lazy and copy and paste too much, then it sounds like a, well drum machine.
 
How hard/soft something is played or hit. You should see it in the MIDI data, in Reaper, in the piano roll, there is a velocity bar. Higher is harder, lower is softer.
 
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