How to make adequate drum track without using actual drums

Joepie

Joepie

New member
Hi guys, I'm just starting out. I was wondering what's the best way to create a good drumtrack besides recording an actual drumset. Is there a plug-in for sonar 3 that sounds better than the horrible MIDI drums? If so, how does this work? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,

Joepie
 
some ideas.
1. google for the free hotstepper. if you use high quality drum samples you can get very nice drum tracks. import into your sequencer the finished product. search under my name for more info.
2. use an outboard midi drum module that sounds good.
or even a sampler triggered by taking the midi out from the pc to midi in of the sampler or drum module.
hope this helps.
 
MIDI drums, when programmed properly and using the right samples, can be quite good.

You need to program them so that they are not robotic - i.e., humanistic variations in timing and velocity. Then sequence them using decent samples.

I think one of the Sonar versions included a set of the Blue Jay drums from Sonic Implants. These are not half bad, but you will need a DXi (or hardware) capable of playing sound fonts.
 
Horrible MIDI drums - NOT

On a DVD that I bought for Sonar 3, the narrator suggests using Edirol's VSC soft synth to generate drums.

His way of doing it has you laying down all of the instruments in one MIDI track, which is fine, if you can live with the volume levels once recorded.

Had I to do it over again, I would have used a separate track (I hope that is the right word) for each percussion instrument, then it would have been easier to mix the levels precisely where I wanted them.

I'm new too, but the drum kit named "room" in Edirol's VSC soft synth sound great to me, when mixed with other instruments.

Being a bass player for many years, my position was next to the drummer, so I tend to record the drums a bit louder than most. Anyway, having stood there for so long, I think I have a good idea of what drums and cymbals sound like. The drum kit in Edirol's soft synth (included free with Sonar 3) sounds good to me.
 
After laying down the whole "drum kit" in 1 MIDI track, which is probably the most convenient way, then you can run a CAL script (IIRC, it's called Split Note to Tracks) on it to separate each "piece of the kit" out to its own track. Then you can make individual adjustments to your liking. Note - in most cases, you'll have to also assign a different MIDI channel to each of these new tracks, since a lot of adjustments (e.g. panning) will be shared by the whole channel, not each separate track.

HTH, :)
-Jeff
 
Thanks for all the great info guys. I'm gonna try fooling around with some of the soft synths in Sonar I guess. I don't have enough $$ for external synths.

Now I just need to figure out how to use these (install them), since the help file looks a Chinese to me. Also, I tried to split the drumtrack into seperate tracks for each note, but I can't even seem to get this to work. What am I doing wrong?
 
try drums on demand

this cd of drum loops is set up in "families" which are nice sets - not real busy like 9/10 of the loop libraries i've tried
 
Joepie said:
Also, I tried to split the drumtrack into seperate tracks for each note, but I can't even seem to get this to work. What am I doing wrong?
Click to expand...
What steps did you take? What happened when you tried it?
 
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