Help using drum samples.

[schismatic]

Hi guys,

I'm a guitarist normally and I want to get some drums into my songs. I'm basically covering a few of my favourite songs and I was wondering how I would be able to use a midi file of the drums for the song with a drum sample library e.g. something like Drumkit From Hell. How would I do this using sonar 5 and battery? This is based on me starting from a .mid file of the drums.

 

[Dogman]

Hmmm.....I use Sonar and DFHS, and it's not real hard....just takes time. I program mine with the mouse in the piano roll view. You set up a map of where the drums are, and just put in a hit whenever you want one. it then plays teh sample from the DFHS folder that corresponds to the midi note. Is that sort of where you are heading?

 

[schismatic]

hmmm not really, but thanks for the reply. what i am doing is just doing a personal cover of a tool song. i downloaded a guitar pro file of it, and from that i simple deleted the tracks for the guitar and bass leaving me with just the drums. i then exported the drums only to a .mid file. the reason i am doing it this way is because the drums on the song are very complicated and have been done very well on the file so i would like to use them. it is my understanding that if i have the .mid file of the drums that i can use them to trigger the drumkit from hell samples. i don't however know the best way to go about doing this. if someone knows the best way to do this, then could they please suggest some suitable software that would make it a fairly straight forward.

 

[Farview]

you just open up the mid file in your sequencer and tell each instrument what sample to play. (ie, tell the snare track to trigger the snare sample)

 

[schismatic]

how would i do this exactly, i'm not really sure what part of the midi is e.g the kick drum. are they number coded or something similar? i wonder if i could somehow replace all the same type of kick's at once with the kick drum sample i want to use. any suggestions? my uni music dept. has cubase, any ideas how i could do it on that?

edit:

i've had a bit of a look round and found my midi durm editor in cubase where each drum part is listed...C1 for bass drum, E1 for electric snare etc. Am I right in thinking that I can somehow send this midi file to a synth module or something like that and use that to change each assignment to the sound sample (wav) that i want to use?

 

[Farview]

Where it tells you which sound is what, you just change that to the DFH sound.

It is really just routing the right midi note to the right sound (or changing the midi not for the part)

The cubase help files can give you specifics.

 

[schismatic]

thanks guys, i've got the kit working now..........next part is to learn how to make this thing sound decent i.e my snare sound terrible, needs some reverb. also on very close notes it sounds terribly synthethic (think fast 90's dance drum rolls!), i wonder how i can change this to sound more 'human'. thanks for all your help thus far!

 

[jec]

Hi ,
I'm a piano player and i had same problems when i first started to build my own drum files.Then I called my drummer and have a nice little conversation about hitting a drums.it maybe sounds funny to talk about something that is so naturally to the drummers but if you really wanna get some good drum files you need to start thinking like a drummer.
First thing that you don't want is that every beat has same velocity,
even a slight changes will do the difference.Second thing that you can try to do is to put some notes off beat(carefully with that) to make it sound lees robotic.U may try to put some low velocity back beats on the snare.
Hope i helped

 

[Mistral]

Yes, using velocities (right click the note, and enter any number between 0-127) will call different samples of the same drum corresponding to a certain velocity range.. ie, 50-75, 75-100, and so on. You can also make the hits alternate between left handed and right handed hits on the snare, (or left and right kicks) and I believe the toms too..

 

[get2sammyb]

Yes, using velocities (right click the note, and enter any number between 0-127) will call different samples of the same drum corresponding to a certain velocity range.. ie, 50-75, 75-100, and so on. You can also make the hits alternate between left handed and right handed hits on the snare, (or left and right kicks) and I believe the toms too..

See I've always been curious how you do something like a drum roll. How do you change the hand?

 

[Markaholic]

id like to know where he got his hands on something like that..id be interested to get a hold of it myself!

Mainly some artists drum midi files..so much easier to just jam w/o having to program a beat to get warmed up.