Making drum machine sound real?

[to_see_me]

I have a Yamaha RY20 drum machine, which is pretty cool. But none of the drum sounds are organic or sound very real. Can I run it through some effects or compress it or soemthing to make it sound more crusty?

[Blue Bear Sound]

...use a real drummer!

[jake-owa]

People will say to pay a lot of attention to proper velocity and use groove quantization and blahbitty blah blaa.

Drum machines suck. I use a module for kick, tom and snare sounds but cymbals absolutely have to be real. Patterns suck the big one. I play everything out in realtime and the feel is much better even if it's not perfect.

One thing you CAN do is to tap the drum kit on a keyboard or pads in realtime...it's not the best but with some practice it sounds much more realistic than pattern based grooves.

[badassmak]

Originally posted by Blue Bear Sound
...use a real drummer!

I have yet to achieve good results by bashing my drummers head into the drum machine...

I'm in the same boat as you to-see-me

I hate my drum machine
I find my curiosity piqued by drumkit from hell, and sampling and stuff, but I don't have a clue.

I have tried a few things. The best way so far is to painstakingly program each part by itself...ie a whole song of just the snare pattern...then a whole song of just the kick...etc etc...and then you can have each piece on its own track to mess with. From there you can add effects to each piece...ie compress the snare, distort the kick etc etc...

also when doing this, you can move the individual tracks around, giving it that real offtime, or humanized feel, that is so often inherent in a live drum sound.

uhh...I only mention all of the above if you have multitracking ability. As far as what effects, again, I don't have a damn clue.

but, I have gotten better results this way than by recording the whole section of drums on one track.

whatever happens, by all means come post your best results, I need serious help when it comes to drum stuff

[Slackmaster2K]

Sell your drum machine and use that very same machine you're reading this on! A good software sampler like perhaps battery and something like drumkit from hell can produce RESULTS!

Not as good as a real drummer, but we have to make due.

Slackmaster 2000

[JFogarty]

If you're not selling your stuff, just listen to some CDs and get some tasty drum loops from there...

Rick Jame's ghetto live is a good one, so is Another One Bites the dust, by Queen...

[j]

As far as doing it on a pc: I've gotten some pretty good results with Battery and MusicLab's Slicy Drummer and Fill-In Drummer midi plug-ins. However, you currently have to have Sonar, Cubase SX, or FXpansion's DR-008 to use these midi plug-ins.

I'll have to check out 'drumkit from hell'.

[badassmak]

Personally I'm sold on the samples I have heard on DFH...I'm not into pre-made loops, I like to create all of my own stuff...it's just the sound samples themselves I want. Battery seems to be the sampler of choice to go with it.

[j]

Originally posted by badassmak
Personally I'm sold on the samples I have heard on DFH...I'm not into pre-made loops, I like to create all of my own stuff...it's just the sound samples themselves I want. Battery seems to be the sampler of choice to go with it.

I really like the Battery Studio Drums CD from Native Instruments. As far as pre-made loops: The MusicLab stuff starts you out with ready to go loops but you can pretty much mold them into anything you want, so that you have your own beats. And since it is all midi, you can easily edit patterns and change out kits in your sampler. But of course, there is nothing wrong with programming it all from scratch.

[badassmak]

for sure...somethings i have had success with in the past are modifying existing loops, in my drum machine. Sometimes when I make my own loops they are a little crazy, and dont really sound like anything a real drummer would do.

To kindof pickup on what JFogarty was saying, yes thats a great approach. I like to kindof emulate my influences, and drumbeats I like to listen too, so quite often I will listen to some of my favorite bands' drummers to get an idea of what drums I want to sound like. And take it from there. Of course I try to make it my own styling, but as far as beats are concerned its pretty hard to be completely original i think.

I dunno if you have checked out the DFH, for the most part I believe it is more for the heavy drum sound...I believe ...

[j]

The next step for me is probably an electronic kit to trigger samples in Battery and record midi drum tracks.

[theletterq]

http://www.leafdigital.com/Software/leafdrums/

Excellent shareware drum machine that uses WAV files as it's sound source. The samples that are included aren't half bad with the ability to change pitch, etc.

[badassmak]

hey yea id love one of those vdrum kits, but my left nut is too valuable at this point and time.

I have actually recently downloaded those leaf drums, they're pretty cool. I can't get a decent enough sound with the samples included tho. The help section is very well done. I noted that it does everything in 16 bit...lol I havent even tried importing those into my 24 bit projects...lets see how that works...

[Garry Sharp]

I bought a Yamaha DD55 - they're less than $200 and have seven velocity and position sensitive pads plus two (rather tacky) pedals. You can use them to trigger a module through MIDI, and it's a hell of a lot easier than pecking at those drum machine pads.

And if you crank up the noise it's fantastic fun if you're not a drummer.

[brandon.w]

I prefer to keep the two (real drums, and drum machines) seperate, as they're both really wonderful but different...however...before I got my acoustic set, and before I got my electric set, I used fruityloops to programm all my percussion, I still sometimes use it. I wish I could remember where I got these samples to point you in the right direction...but I just used fruityloops and found some royalty free, downright godawful drum samples...people hitting their acoustic sets...a lot of them were sort of poorly recorded, and the drum sets themselves sounded ummm "vintage"? but when I sequenced them in fruityloops and applied a WEE bit of effects (slight reverb and EQ mostly) and put just one guitar over it, all my friends thought I had finally bought my drums.

[badassmak]

after having said all of this, I can still see a use for my drum machine. For example, when playing and recording actual drums...to keep my ass in time, as well to program beats that already exist (tabbing drums), and learning to play along, without the confusion of the rest of the band in the background.

Otherwise my machine would be gone by now.

[Myx62]

First I want to say I really hate my drum machine. (DR-670)
To get good patterens you have to do them yourself in realtime and record them. Then piece them together. Its a real pain in the ass. Live cymbals are a great idea I havent tried yet.
I have been experimenting with using a little phase shifting. It takes the steril consistancy out.
Still Im looking for a real drummer right now for my next projects.
Myx