Biting the bullet!
At some point in this equation your going to have to bite the bullet and address the learning curve.
You already have all that you need to achieve the desired results. Here is a copy of a previous posting I did which should be of help. For your situation, keep everything in midi till you have the timing and feel to your taste. Then move on to the all important sound. Spend time with this, and you "WILL" get a result. The secret is your patience.
“Real” Drums
This may or may not be news, or useful but here goes. I know a lot of you guys have got this covered, but some won’t, so hence the step by step approach. I do not consider myself to be all knowing on this one and the mere mention of the word “midi” has me running for garlic and a crucifix, the reason I write this is because I just wish someone had told me this a long time ago and saved me the time and frustration of sussing it out for myself.
I use Cakewalk Pro 9 and the SoundBlaster Audigy
(any SB card will do, it’s the Soundfonts you need)
Take one midi drum pattern that loosely fits the style your looking for. (Import or open into track view). Then cut, dice and splice to make a complete drum track, adjusting tempo where needed. So now you have the drum track sorted but it sounds like shit because its playing GM drums which would not convince a five year old.
Now, how to make it sound real. (Timing & Sound)
No drummer plays like a machine, so you’ve gotta humanize the pattern by moving things round a bit. Check to see if your sequencer has a “humanize” function in the midi fx section. If not your gonna have to do it manually by “shifting” “sliding” (whatever your particular sequencer calls it) one way or the other, the individual notes in the piano roll view.
Now you’ve got the timing and feel to your taste. Which in itself is a very objective and personal thing. Here’s the biggie “the sound”.
All hail the great god Soundfonts.
Firstly your gonna need some, good ones preferably and free would be even better. This is the best site I know for free Soundfonts.
www.thesoundsite.net
Check under Soundfonts/Compressed (less download time) oops nearly forgot, before you go downloading any your going to need the utility to uncompress them called SFPACK which you will be happy to hear is free from the same site in the utilities section. It’s basically winzip for soundfonts.
Scroll down to the drum section at the site and download whatever works for you, try lots of different kits (there are plenty to go at) as the “sound” factor is a very personal thing. The one I tend to use a lot is Drums Douglas Natural Studio Kit V2.0 (22,719KB) once you’ve got it downloaded you’ll need to uncompress it using the sfpack utility, and save it to wherever works for you. At this point I can only tell you what I do in Pro 9 this may differ in other sequencers. Come to think of it, there may be easier ways of doing this, this is just the way I do it.
Open the midi drum track you’ve already worked on and place it in track 1.
Now got to “Options” – “Soundfonts” – “Attach” locate the drum kit and hit “Open”.
You now have that Soundfont loaded on bank 1 – hit “Close”
Now open “track properties” by double clicking on “source” in the “track pane view”
Channel = 1. Bank = the Soundfont you loaded. Patch = the kit you want to use.
Bank select method = Controller 0. Port = Soundfont device.
Now hit OK and listen to the track………Mmmm that’s better.
Maybe it’s not quite how you want it, maybe some sounds are missing. Not to worry, there is lots more to do yet. Go into the “piano roll view” where you will see all the different notes laid out and a piano style keyboard to your left. Click on the keys to see what sound is attached to which key and more to the point what notes are attached to a blank key and need moving. (sometimes they will be just where you want them, and sometimes not, depends how they where made up) Click a key to highlight all the notes on that line, then click, hold and drag up or down to the key that has the sound you need ie: snare, kick or whatever, Making sure not to move it left or right in the time frame. Now you have all the notes assigned to the sounds you want and the drum track should now be sounding a whole heap better already. That’s the ground work done, now we can get creative.
Select the midi drum track and go to “Edit” – “Run Cal” – open the Cal folder and select “Split notes to track”. Assuming the track you want to split is on track 1, Source track = 1. Final destination track = 2. Destination channel = 1. Destination port = 1. Click Ok and you should have the drum track split to individual tracks and all playing the chosen Soundfont. Then record each track to audio, left, right, stereo channel, whatever. (Arm a track to record audio, solo the track you want to record and make sure your recording from the midi channel or “what you hear” channel) Repeat this till you’ve got them all. Take the time to get your recording levels as good as poss, as this is a far better option than “Normalizing” everything later. This will get you nice big fat wav files and the levels can be done in the mixer. At this point you can mute all the midi tracks and keep them where they are for reference or re-recording. Or delete them all if your happy with what you’ve got. Now open up your mixer and start messing with levels, recording automation and the like. The great thing is, that now you have real drum sounds individually laid out on there own tracks and there are in audio format. Now you can spend many happy hours messing around with all your favorite plug-ins, Reverb, Comp, Gate, EQ and all, until your reach sonic Nirvana.
Having said all that:
This in no way is ever going to beat a good drummer sitting at a good kit, all miked up and run through a desk. But the point is we don’t all have that option available to us, and need to do the best we can from within what we’ve got. Which in most cases (certainly mine) is one guy sitting in a room, with computer and associated bits and pieces. I aint saying this is what you should do, I’m just saying it’s what I do, and it works for me.
If there is a better or easier way, please let me know, I need the help.
Hope this helps somebody somewhere.
Alan
