Best way to do Rock drums electonically

[genejhsn]

Drum soundfonts & MIDI

Any program that can sequence midi will do. The rest in up to you. You have to like, compose the feel and emotion into the parts yourself.

I agree wholeheartedly. I do not like the standard GM drums that are on most soundcards. I use Cakewalk PA 9 for recording on my PC and use soundfonts for my drum sounds. I have been using drum kits from Sonic Implants for rock and they are indistinguishable from real drums, despite what others have commented here.

In order to program realistic rock drums - or any other style - you have to be able to think like a drummer and know how to program that into thte MIDI drum track. It takes knowledge and skill. I use the staff view in Cakewalk to write out drum parts in standard musical notation on the staff. The biggest issue with feel is using velocity settings. Drummer do not hit every drum or cymbal with the same force and that is how you get the "feel".

I have read over and over about how MIDI drums suck because they don't have the feel, or how you have to mess with the timing to get the feel of a "real" drummer...a real sloppy drummer, maybe. As for myself, I lke a drummer that can actually keep perfect time having played with too many that can't...

Again, it's knowledge and skill. If you are not willing to put in the effort to learn how to do it right, your results will be less than satisfactory. If you have never programmed MIDI drums, you will not likely learn it overnight, but if you are willing to put in some time, you can use them very effectively. I have the advantage of having learned how to read music, especially drum adn percussion parts when in elementary & high school, so I can use standard musical notation to do my drum parts & fills. Virtually any rhythmic oddity you can think of for a fill can be duplicated in MIDI with standard musical notation.

One great advantage is that you can do a basic beat, copy and paste,record other tracks, then go back and add fills and accents after recording other tracks and add to the "live" feel. that way your "drummer" isn't playing the same fill every 8 or 16 bars.

 

[genejhsn]

hope this helps
http://www.alandmoore.com/TheoryOfDP.htm

I checked out this article and it has a lot of very useful information. The only thing I would add to it is that the use of soundfonts addresses the velocity issues raised in this article. I am not equipped to do sampling myself so I rely on soundfonts for my drums and I have found that I have to make practically no compromises to get good results.

Also, a GOOD drum kit soundfont - there are some (many!) that are not so good - is already stereo imaged and multi velocity samples so each drum or cymbal sounds different at different velocity settings.

 

[thembuzz]

Again, it's knowledge and skill. If you are not willing to put in the effort to learn how to do it right, your results will be less than satisfactory. If you have never programmed MIDI drums, you will not likely learn it overnight, but if you are willing to put in some time, you can use them very effectively. I have the advantage of having learned how to read music, especially drum adn percussion parts when in elementary & high school, so I can use standard musical notation to do my drum parts & fills. Virtually any rhythmic oddity you can think of for a fill can be duplicated in MIDI with standard musical notation.

One great advantage is that you can do a basic beat, copy and paste,record other tracks, then go back and add fills and accents after recording other tracks and add to the "live" feel. that way your "drummer" isn't playing the same fill every 8 or 16 bars.

I wouldn't recommend using MIDI drums - as you pointed out yourself, MIDI sounds rubbish, unless you're programming the drums from an external sampling device. If you're programming on a computer, your best bet is to get something like Fruity Loops and use sampled hits in .wav or .aif format. If you start using MIDI, you're limited to whatever drum sounds already exist on your computer's soundcard, or in whatever external MIDI unit you've got plugged in

 

[genejhsn]

???

I wouldn't recommend using MIDI drums - as you pointed out yourself, MIDI sounds rubbish, unless you're programming the drums from an external sampling device.

???

I am doing exactly what you recommend, except I can do it all from within Cakewalk and need no external sampling device.

I am using soundfonts. In case you are not familiar with them, they are the aural equivalent of printer fonts. In a word processor, if you want to change the appearance of the typeface you use a different font. In digital audio recording, you can use different soundfonts for different instruments. You want a drum kit, use a drum kit soundfont. For horns, use a brass section font, etc.

Using soundfonts removes the limtations of the MIDI sounds in a soundcard. In the case of drums, these are exactly what you recommend, digitally sampled hits which are triggered by the MIDI sequencer.

I have tried a lot of free soundfonts and have found some very good ones (for anyone who is interested, www.hammersound.net is a good place to download soundfonts). The particular soundfonts I use now for most of my drum tracks I bought from Sonic Implants (http://www.sonicimplants.com, check out their freebies...). They are sampled at different velocities so you get not just the difference in volume by using MIDI velocity settings, you also get the timbral nuance that goes with it. A drum sounds different when struck softly then when struck with much more force.

If you're programming on a computer, your best bet is to get something like Fruity Loops and use sampled hits in .wav or .aif format.

I don't really have any experience with fruity loops, I'll take your word for it. I am certain there are other ways to effectively use sampled sounds than I am doing.

I am and have been programming drum parts on the computer using Cakewalk and soundfonts. I do the sequencing from the staff view within the program itself without having to deal with external programs or equipment.

If you start using MIDI, you're limited to whatever drum sounds already exist on your computer's soundcard, or in whatever external MIDI unit you've got plugged in

This is most definitely not true. BTW, I haven't started using MIDI, I have been using it - successfully - for some time now. Soundfonts operate internally to Cakewalk, no external unit needed. High quality, easy to use.

Mainly I record rock and blues. The Sonic Implants drum fonts give me the solid sound I want with a lot of flexibility. I also have their brass and reed section and orchestral brass fonts. They also have some free soundfonts on their site which are also high quality, although I have to modify the volume levels in the Vienna soundfont editing program to suit my taste.

It is extremely convenient to program a nice tight snare drum roll in MIDI using only a single note on the staff. Or a nice fat crescendo cymbal roll done with soft mallets! How about a cowbell that you can pick the size and pitch? All of these were free from Sonic Implants site.

When I started messing with soundfonts, I thought I might have to make compromises, something I just hate to do. I have found that I have had to make virtually no compromises to get what I want using soundfonts. Being a picky virgo, I am quite particular.

To use soundfonts, the computer's soundcard must support them, not all do. Entry level would be something like a Soundblaster Live.

Some soundfonts do suck worse than standard MIDI! I have hundreds that I have gathered from the internet. Some are great, some aren't. It depends on the quality of the original .wav samples and how they are looped (and probably some other things I don't know about!).

You can make your own soundfonts using your own samples or modify existing soundfonts with Vienna. I haven't messed with Vienna much except to adjust some volume levels as mentioned.

I have used soundfonts for drums, bass, brass & reed sections, orchestral strings, horns & percussion, tablas, tamboura, background vocal oohhs & ahhs, and various percussion instruments. The only standard GM sound I can recall using is the vibraslap.

An interesting thing about soundfonts is that they can also be made to have loops assigned particular notes. These can be any kind of sampled sound - not necessarily a musical instrument or musical sound - and not have to related in pitch to the note to which they are assigned. When the MIDI sequencer sees that note, it will play the loop or sample.

The "Africa" soundfont that comes with Soundblaster cards is an excellent example of this. On the same staff - I do composition in Cakewalk's staff view much of the time - I can program percussion drum & percussion loops, male & female vocals, guitar licks on a single track.

Sound fonts. I love 'em!

 

[lykwydchykyn]

I checked out this article and it has a lot of very useful information. The only thing I would add to it is that the use of soundfonts addresses the velocity issues raised in this article. I am not equipped to do sampling myself so I rely on soundfonts for my drums and I have found that I have to make practically no compromises to get good results.

Also, a GOOD drum kit soundfont - there are some (many!) that are not so good - is already stereo imaged and multi velocity samples so each drum or cymbal sounds different at different velocity settings.

Good point; I should probably update the article a bit. Not only soundfonts, but other sample formats allow this kind of setup.

Thanks!

 

[fakeness]

Fruitloop is not good for rock

Fruitloop is no good for rock
i usually use Cubase+ Reason to create good emotion on electronic drum.

It takes a lot of knowedge of midi to make them sounds alive : P
keep an eyes on those function of "Breath, Dynamic, Expression"....they are the key point

 

[-indie-]

normally I would agree on sampling for rock drums being complete shit, however I recently tried the bfd plugin by audiohead. it is quite realistic, however it will take up about 50 gigs on your hard drive. One of nine inch nails engineers recorded all the samples apparently, and I really tried to hate the thing but it really does sound quite good.

 

[rvs0002]

Skip all that looping and sampling and do what I did...get Complete Drums. It's a cd with 18 tracks (16 bit wav's) in hard rock and heavy metal styles, and whats cool is it is complete songs. They are just basic verse chorus verse chorus type layouts so they are easy to write to. Instead of spending hours trying to build drum tracks, you load one up and rock. You can check it out at http://www.johnnylokke.com/completedrums/ and there are sound samples out there too.