midi drums for guitarists (a little different post)

[kurt_tietjen]

Im a guitar player that has no real desire to be a great drum programmer. A few of years ago I found a set of midi drum files called DrumTrax -- this was a great solution for me at the time since i was recording on a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder. I've since upgraded to a computer-based system. I found these tracks really easy to use.

A couple of days ago I started a project where i took each of the toolkit and fill files from the collection (100s of drum tracks) and started recording them as audio files so that I could loop them in Sonar. So far I've been happy with the results. I can still tweak all of the tracks, but if i'm just putting some demos together for songwritting purposes this works really well.

Details -- My setup was as follows. Sonar s/w running on a 1.7GHz P4. I use the midi out-1 on my STAudio CPort which is connected to a Boss DR5 drum/rythm machine. I plug the left & right outputs on the drum machine into 2 audio ins on the CPort (this way i can add effects into the chain before i record the sounds). For each of the toolkit files (which contain between 30 and 60 drum patterns), i opened the files up. Next I deleted the click tracks within the midi patterns. I then create 2 audio tracks for the left and right channels on the drums (I could use stereo, but this works) and record away. I'm doing each of the samples at 5 different tempos so that i dont have to stretch the audio files once they're done.

Once i have all of the drums sounds recorded as audio, i begin the painful process of cutting out each of the samples and creating individual files of each of these patterns. It's a long and painful process but it works for me so far.

 

[ChuckU]

Here's another thing you can do...

Use the "Split notes into tracks" CAL for more control. I haven't used it in Sonar, but I did in PA9. I had midi drum tracks created by my drummer playing a trigger pad kit. When I was ready to record audio of the drum module, I went into Cakewalk and used the CAL program I mentioned above. It created a different midi track for each "note". The kick had its own track. The snare, etc.
I then muted all but the drums I wanted to trigger. Then I triggered a drum module from the midi info, and recorded audio of the drum module. I repeated the process until I had separate audio of each drum on its own audio track. This allows you to put different plugins, eq's, etc. on individual drum sounds, gives more control of panning, allows you to sound replace if you want to also.