making the best of drum machines. very realistic.

very nice drum track

sounds great. obviously, you've spent some time with it. excellent!! chances are,even if you had some areas that you felt needed more work, that once all the supporting instrumentation was tracked it'd help mask undesired nuances anyway. sweeeeet work, fangar!! :)
 
Can't hear it. :( Streaming audio sucks for those of us behind fire walls. Is it possible to download the mp3?

barefoot
 
pencil mics? wrong forum...:D

The best thing about this technique that Ive found is that you can get some really creative things happening that complement the music.

When I use my drum machine software I always seem to start with a simple 4/4 beat of kick..snare..kick..snare.
Doing the mencil thing alows me to try new timings and totally different ideas.

And I dont even play drums...:D
 
Samich,

Thanks brother. I do have a bass line as the song is one that I wrote a couple of years back. I am just re-doing it as I have picked up quite a bit of new equipment lately. I would love to hear your ideas though. Feel free to lay something down and then post it where I can get to it. I will add some guitar too what you have done too! That would be fun.

Tiger,

Thanks to you as well. I have spent a bit of time with it, but ACID makes things fairly easy. I do use mostly one shots for the grooves. I prefer the flexibilty. Most of the fills are hand created too. When I get the time to finish the other tracks, I will post it up too. Thanks for the kinds words.

Barefoot,

I have a firewall too and have not had too many problems. I will see if I can make it downloadable for you though. If you can sign up for a nowhereradio account, you would be able to download it. I will set it up for you though. Thanks.

Fangar
 
.

you think webcyan's ideas blew you away.. I've been debating to post this, but decided I wanted to keep it to myself for a while..

well, this is along the same lines but.. yet, very different..

awhile ago I happened across a direct x plugin called Drumagog. Anyone heard of it? well.. what it lets you do is replace samples of prerecorded drum tracks. am I getting any gears rolling in your heads yet?

to elaborate further, if you had 3 tracks, for example, one with all the kicks, one with all the snares, and one with hi-hats, you could run them through the plugin seperately to create a new drum kit, an unlimited number of possibilities really.. a beauty of the plugin is its ability to detect velocity and match it, and apply random sounding hits, depending on if you have multisamples handy or not.. you could record some into it, but it does have a couple of multisets built in. when you replace fills, snare rolls, flams, etc, it sounds just as natural or moreso than the original did, depending of course if the original was a real drum kit or not.

NOW. what I'm getting at is, by simply tapping something, whether with a whole bunch of mics or one mic alone, you can "tap out" a beat, fills, double bass, snare rolls, yada yada.. start with the hi hat for a metronome to do the snare to.. then add the kicks last. run each track through drumagog, and I swear you'll have a realistic as hell sounding kit, if you have the right samples and you have enough coordination. utilizing punch-in recording, you could fathomably easily fix large sections of mistakes, or small ones simply by moving individual samples back or forth.

I have been using this method for months now, in conjunction with other things but I always end up coming back to it. it's simple, nothing a drum program can do can even touch it in terms of realism.
 
Mistral - i just downloaded the demo for DrumAgog i am using Cool Edit Pro...but it isn't in my direct x plugins category....i refreshed the list, but it still isn't there...how do i open up Drumagog with cool edit pro?
 
the demo is free as samich said.. I believe it's pretty much functional except for recording mode. meaning it won't let you import any multisamples.

not sure what's wrong there samich. make sure you're looking for "wavemachine labs drumagog" and not just "drumagog" on the list.
 
well, i found the drumagog in my list, but damn this thing is hard to use...i wanted to just add some alternating hits to my snare track and it was all like, "wookuhboo homluh homluh miggily miggily." i'll just stick with my own tedious methods...:)
 
dude.. you give up too easily. you've got to twiddle the knobs a little, like any good engineer ;)

you've got to experiment. and anyways my point was that you could accomplish realistic drums from finger tapping with it, if you just want to replace a few real snare hits, it's kind of pointless.
 
Mistral,

This sounds like EXACTLY the thing I've been looking for. I'm going to check it out.

Thanks!:D

barefoot
 
ColdAsh said:
Wouln't using a MIDI keyboard ro program your drum tracks help with (or solve) step one and two?
Click to expand...

Am i right in saying this or would buying a midi keyboard be a bad idea if this was going to be its only use?
 
My drum programming, sequencing for FUSION

Hey there,

With all of the discussion of "realistic" drum programming, I thought you guys might be interested in hearing these fusion compositions of mine...

I'm the guitarist and I sequenced all the other instruments...(drums, keys, bass, etc...)

I really tried hard to make the sequences as realistic as possible, so they aren't just sketches or temporary tracks...

In fact, Keyboard magazine, Recording Magazine, and Music and Computers magazine, all featured my sequencing and composing back in 1996...which essentially, were these tunes without the guitar parts (which I just added January 2002)...

Once you guys have had a chance to listen to the results, I would be more than happy to discuss my process and discoveries in programming...

Anyway,

MP3-All in high quality MP3 files, download time will vary...

Muldar's Search-Hi energy fusion.

Every Time-a tribute to Weather Report with a Tribal Tech vibe.

S'Corea-a tribute to Chick's Elektric Band.

Three Steps From the Sun-some elements of Japanese and African music with a touch of Bill Frisell and Mike Brecker.

Give It Time-a fast-paced short little tune, quite fun.

Heartland-a laidback, Robben Ford style tune I wrote the day of the Oklahoma City Bombing back in 1995.

Tito's Time-a latin fusion tune I wrote back in 1995, and later renamed to dedicate it to the late Tito Puente.

Rise Above-a kind of Steve Kahn/Anthony Jackson vibe.

Beast of Burton-a tribute to Gary Burton.

One-a "fun-filled", dark tune in 7/4.

From Nothing-a busy, keyboard chops fest.

Think About It-a Yellowjackets kind of vibe.

Eek! A Mouse!-one of my oldest compositions/sequences...very hard to read down when I did these guitar parts...but, the title says it all.

STREAMING-these will vary automatically according to your connection speed...doesn't do too well with dial-up.

Fusion index Page-It's obvious which are the new ones with guitar...

Anyway, enjoy...and thanks for listening!

Peace,

Scott
 
Last edited:
File inconsistancy...

Hey,

I noticed that the song "S'Corea", from my original post, was a .ram file, instead of an .mp3, so here's the .mp3...

S'corea-MP3

Peace,

Scott
 
Dynamics, shmynamics!

I've been intrigued by the fine art of drum programming for a while now, as it's one thing I can lay claim to being able to do convincingly.

Over the years, I've had a couple of singles released which have led drummers I know - and who use machines themselves - to ask "Wow! who's drumming on that?"

My answer would be..."Me".

I was simply using a (12-bit!) Roland W-30. My secret? Easy. Hard-quantise everything to 16th notes and normalise the velocity on everything. At the end of the day, pop/rock music is so compressed that, unless you're the Dave Matthews band then nobody'll notice your drum sounds. The trick is to think like a drummer: Think of how you'd play a kit. No more than three sounds at once (four if you've got a pedal-closed hat sample). If there's a cymbal crash, then come off the hi-hat for that beat. Use good samples (Clearmountain for choice). Think of how the kit interacts and the levels on which it interacts...with the bassline...with the song itself...with the rhythm guitar...

I know this flies in the face of all the above advice, but it's worked for me and is continuing to do so.
 
great pencil tip! What I've done is expanded on this....I use my toaster as a crash and and old can of tuna as a splash. Don't knock it till you've tried it Plus it's high in protein!
 
TIGERSHARK said:
couldn't you just play them 'live' through your drum machine, instead of creating loops? maybe i misread the post. (i do like the idea of tapping the pencils, though. that's an excellent creative approach.) were you suggesting that as a way around quantizing the loops? you could also just play the patches 'live' straight from the sampler and that could be your click-track AND your base track, all at the same time. (and all without quantization) of course, if you're using smaller imported samples then the afore-mentioned approach would be necessary.

i do like the creative approach with the pencils. :)
Click to expand...

I'm just curious if you've ever mixed a track with ONLY the two pencils for percussion. I think that could be very interesting. I'm not a drummer, but it is amazing what you can do with something very simple, such as pencils.

Hell, my first recordings were done by beating my hands on a wood floor into a cassette machine. Presto! One drum track done!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top