Making 'real' drums in Fruity Loops.

Meshuggah

Meshuggah

New member
Ok.. I use Fruity Loops a lot when I make music. I use it for drums and on occation a little bleep or bloop from the samples that comes with it. Ed hates it. I guess that's what keeps me going..
These are the methods I use to get my drums away from the 50$ Casio-synth sound. I hope ppl will add their own tipz'n trix to this thread.
Some of the advice in this posts requires that you're pretty used to FL and it's main functions. If you have any questions: Shoot!

Some good samples to start with can be found at
http://www.soundbank.hu
or
http://www.soundbank.web.services.hu/

so what do I do?

1. I build a set of drums.
- I pick a kick and a snare that will go well with song.
- An alternate snare with less attack
- Some different hi-hats (I'll explain how to make an open hi-hat 'close' on the bottom of this page)
- A ride. BOTH cup and flat-hits
- Some cymbals and toms.

2. I program all the different patterns I'm gonna use

Here is the time to export the whole song if you want to divide your export in different groups of drums and edit them in your main editor. By doing this, you have the advantade of being able to do modifications to any group all the way through you recording-session. If you only export a stereo-wav of the song, you have to go back to Fruity Loops to edit a single drum/group.
To export in groups, just use the 'mute-function'. Fruity Loops export 'what-you-hear'. This will result in one wav for each group. Don't forget to set the bit-rate to the highest value possible for you.

3. I do some modest FX in Fruity Loops
- Fruity Loops have a Master FX and 16 different FX-groups you can assign each sample to. So Kick, Snare, Hihat, Cymbals and Toms can have their own FX.
- You can also use external DirX and VST plugs. Just add them to the 'favourites-list'
- Every group goes through the 7 band EQ (if needed). I usually give the snare some 500Hz for 'punch' and 3 and 5 khz for 'edge'. Kick gets modest boosts and cuts. Just do small cuts and boosts with this EQ, and BEWARE of the 63Hz control.
- Kick, snare and toms can use some compression. Fruity Loops own compressor works well. I usually set an attack around 25-50ms, and ~200ms release. Experiment with threshold and ratio to get the right amount of 'punch' in the sound.
- An important thing to make the drums sound more real, is to tie them together. This is where a good reverb comes into play. Set the reverb in the Master FX, and find a good reverb that makes the drums sound like their all in a normal room (or church..). This helps the fidelity a great deal. Don't pan toms and cymbals too hard.
- DON'T use Fruity Reeverb. It sucks beyond belief.

4. 'Humanizing'
I really don't do a lot of humanizing. I usually only set different volumes on the hi-hat, and rarely I use a bit of filter-cut on the lower hits.. It's more important to think about how a drummer plays.. double-hits (flams?), 'ghost-hits', dynamics (volume control). I don't use the 'shift-function' to make it a bit un-perfect. I only use it to make double-hits (e.g. both sticks hitting the snare, one a blick before the other).
It's good to use different sounds of the same drum. e.g. Two different snares, ride-cymbals which alternate between cup-hits and flat-hits. et c.

5. Export and insert into your multitracker.
If it turns out the sound didn't fit the song in the end, you can just open up your saved song in Fruity Loops again and do some editing. Then just export it again and get it back into your multitracker...

6. Making open hi-hats close
- click out 2 open hi-hat samples. One on the 'hit', and one where it is supposed to close.
- Set the volume of the second hit to zero.
- By clicking the button with the sample-name to the right of the channel, you open it's 'edit-window'. Click on 'misc'. There is a button called 'cut itself'. This will cause the sample to stop playing as soon as another sample in the same channel starts. You only need to do this once.
- If it sounds weird when the open hi-hat just gets quiet, add a 'normal' closed hi-hat at that position.


I hope this helps.. I'm not used to writing this much and often get lost somewhere in the middle...:D
 
Meshuggah - good post, I can learn something from it (I like the idea of using two different snares, two different hihats, for example). But my main question is not to do with Fruity directly, it's about sounds that Fruity can use. Fruity comes with an interesting range of sounds and loops to play with. If you want more, you can download free ones from the net, or you can buy CDs with sounds on. I've bought one CD from Sonic Foundry, and I like the sounds, but not the quality of the sounds. I'd assumed that if you *pay* for sounds, they'd be better quality than free downloads. Okay, here's the question: do commercial CDs of sounds and loops exist that actually *sound* better than the free downloads?
 
Meshuggah,


Good tips, but what's up with the .exe extension when you try and download .wav samples from soundbank?

Makes me very nervous when I see .exe so I canceled.

barefoot
 
great post Mesh....i think what would really add credibility to this post is a mp3 with Fruity Loops drums only....quite a few times ive used you as an example of the fact that you can get good sounding rock drums with Fruity Loops.....
 
Just a few extra tips to add:

samples__
I use 4 or 5 different samples of the same snare, if I can get them. It really helps to have the dynamics in there.

shift and pitch__
I do use the pitch and shift functions on some of my patterns to make them sound more realistic. In real life, when you hit a drum hard, the pitch is slightly more sharp, so I mimic this for accents or hard hits on a snare or tom. But I rarely tune an individual hit more than 3 cents up.

exporting__
I use the same basic idea as meshuggah with mutes (I usually export kick and snare, then toms, then "overheads"), but instead of exporting the entire song, I export each pattern separately. This allows me more flexibility if I later want to rearrange the song or mix and match cymbal patterns with different kick/snare patterns, etc.

effects__
I hardly ever use effects in fruity, because the effects I have in Pro Tools sound a lot better. However, if I want to have an effected drum sound (like a really compressed, pumpy sound) I'll compress in fruity, or use some of the Buzz effects for a nice crunchy drum sound. Oddly enough, I really dig the fruity reeverb, I think it's a cool trippy huge effect, though it's not really useful on drums, and you usually want to do your reverb at mix time in your DAW anyway.

cymbals__
get yourself some decent cymbal samples that don't fade away. yeah, the crash cymbal samples may be 15 seconds long, but it will be worth it for the realism it adds. If I had to pick one thing that makes drums sound programmed, it's truncated cymbal samples.

cutting high-hats__
what you posted is one way to do it, but a more natural way to do it is to cut one sampel with another. For example, I'll usually use a closed hh (maybe 2 different samples of the same closed hh), then a "loose" or "half-open" hh, then an "open" hh. Then I set ALL of these channels to the same "cut" group. For example, I set them all to be cut by cut group 10. In this case, any time any of these hh sampels is palyed, it will cut off any other hh sample that happens to be playing. So an open hh will automatically be cut off any time a closedd hh plays, and if no closed hh plays, it will decay naturally. There are 2 parameters in the sample window called "Cut" and "Cut by"... "Cut" tells fruity which cut group to "cut" when the sample is played, and "Cut by" tells fruity which group should cut the current sample. So in my Cut Group 10 example, for all the hh samples, both these parameters would be set to 10.

Anyway, I have a couple songs up at http://charger.iuma.com where you can see my varied, and not always perfect results.

Enjoy your Fruity!
 
Barefoot: The .exe is a selfextractor which will "install" all the samples to a directory of your own choice. No bogus going on.

Gidge: Guess I'll have to put something up...

Charger: Very good sounding drums. Thx for the tip about the cut-function, I didn't know it worked that way.
 
Excellent post. Fruity is a great tool for those of us who need a drumtrack but dont have a drummer around.

Here's some real drum samples I ran across that sound good:

http://www.euronet.nl/users/flipillu/drumsamples.html

and

http://artistcollaboration.com/samples/

If you need drum machine patterns to get you started, just get a copy of "200 Drum Machine Patterns" by Rene-Pierre Bardet from Hal Leonard Publishing (I picked it up in Borders for $10). That'll give you a start with dozens of styles of music. If you want something a little more funky, I can suggest "The Commandments of R&B Drumming" by Zorro from Warner Brothers Publications.
 
Hey Meshuggah, great idea for a post man, those are some invaluable posts and this will be a very frequented thread for me. I use FL on occasion and have been wondering about a good place to go and get some useful samples for it. Alot of my tunes aren't heavily realiant on drums but those are some great ideas that I'm sure I'll be implementing soon. Personally I often will just put together some loops and try and make em into REX files for misc. use. In terms of fx, I agree that the FL ones aren't extremely useful, though they have their place; I usually just use the fx within Cubase to mess w/ my loops. Again great post, thanx alot!



Laj
 
importing a beat

what is the trick to importing a midi file , say, from band in a box or some midi files already composed. I have tried it but not been successful. It leaves all the instruments in a red condition? what am I missing here?
 
TimOBrien said:
If you need drum machine patterns to get you started, just get a copy of "200 Drum Machine Patterns" by Rene-Pierre Bardet from Hal Leonard Publishing (I picked it up in Borders for $10). That'll give you a start with dozens of styles of music. If you want something a little more funky, I can suggest "The Commandments of R&B Drumming" by Zorro from Warner Brothers Publications.
Click to expand...

that drum patterns book sounds interesting... I might have to try to pick that up. I'll admit, I get a little boring with my drum sequencing. maybe this'll give me a new launching point.

BTW, I loved that book, "The Things They Carried." :D

stone
 
Thanks stone, and those are good books to start out on.

BTW: of course I'm not the Tim O'Brien who wrote that book. I wish the publisher would make a mistake and send me his royalty checks tho..... you wouldn't believe how many emails I get a year from school teachers who won't understand I'm not him and there's more than one T.O. in the world :-))
 
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