How do YOU program your drum beats?

D

DAS19

New member
Do you do each drum individually and record the kick on a track, then the snare. Ive seen this done with pretty good results.

Do you use a sequencer? Fruity Loops? Redrum?

Do you map it all out midi? If so do you play your keyboard to it at first and then change it around.

I feel there are so many ways to go about programing your beat I just wanted to see how people go about it the way they find best suiting for them.

Sorry if this is the wrong topic I felt like it was the most suited. You cant always find the right topic for your post.
 
I use Reason (Redrum) and click the beats in the green drum machine map for the whole song. Then I solo the kick and export it, solo the snare and export it, solo the toms and export them, solo the cymbals and export them, then all the drums run hard to a Scream unit set to some heavy tape compression and export that. I now have separate tracks for kick, snare, toms, cymbals, and then the parallel compressed track to blend in and thicken it up and make it nice and punchy.

There are some pretty simple beats on our MySpace page www.myspace.com/therentalcars but you can kinda get the idea.
 
Sonar 6 HSXL comes with something called SessionDrummer2.

It's like a real drummer that doesn't complain about a click track!
 
I've been using a soundfont player, and a synth/sampler which send midi to my Sonar sequencer program. I trigger the sounds with an Edirol PCR-300 midi controller. It has 18 "pads" which are designed to trigger "quick hit" sounds, like drum instruments. Works much better than keys on a keyboard, or clicking with a mouse. I just tap on the pad with my finger and the sound gets triggered in the synth. Each pad has one instrument sound. But, I can play two parts at the same time. Like kick drum and snare, or hat and snare. Then I add other parts, one, or two at a time on a second, and third pass. Since it is all midi, all the parts are put together in a single midi track. Then, when I play back the midi track, through the synth, all of the parts are produced, as audio, simultaneously. The result is a stereo track of all of the drum parts, ready to be put into my project with other instruments and vocals. It takes a bit of work. But, it is very easy. I control every aspect of the track. Cheap. The soundfont player is free. Gobs of very good sounding kits available for free.
 
I have all drums on different tracks, sometimes with multiple tracks for each like 2 or 3 snare tracks 2 kick tracks usually one overhead track.

I play the keyboard along with the song in real time from start to finish, then clean it up very slightly, do some light quantizing and maybe throw a note around here or there if it doesn't sound right.
 
I use any number of techniques.. whatever does the job best & easiest..

-Real drumming on an electronic kit
-tapping beats in midi
-programming by hand in midi roll

In the past I've done crazier things, like tapping on a mic and using that to trigger drumagog, or recording my drummer with only 2 mics, but recording him twice, so one take would only be overheads and the other would be snare and kick... actually got a useable result believe it or not...
 
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