Midi (for drumming primarily), Sonar 8, and putting a fist through my LCD

[Pinky]

Hello all,

I'm going to be a bit detailed so bear with me.

For years I've been using one-hit drum parts (snare, kick, cymbals, etc) and progrmamming them by hand in Acid, or using loops with Acid, to accomplish drumming for my recordings. This has been fine sincwe the learning curve is/was minimal, but the time it takes to write subpar drum parts this way has me recycling subpar drum loops instead, just to stay sane.

So I got this notion that Session Drummer, Beatscape, Stylus RMX, something (or anything) should work better than what I've been doing.

Then comes the suck in time.

I've spent countless hours spinning my wheels, 3 hours the other day with a friend who supposedly knows this shit (but I'm doubtful since I've yet to hear a single recording from all that Spectrasonics software he has that sounds great pushing buttons but where the hell is the wave file I can burn to CD?)... and I'm still stuck at square one. FWIW, I'm a senior computer analyst and technician. Technology typically comes to me with very little effort, but learning midi and getting it to work for me has proven to be harder than programming routers, building websites, or modifying databases in SQL.

So I have Sonar 8. I want to utilize some of these drum apps for drumming. I do not currenlty own a midi keyboard, but I wouldn't thnk that would be required. I don't have the rest of my life to spend figuring this out. Is there a good tutorial somewhere that will walk me through not just pushing buttons in, say, Beatscape, but how to get the drums/drum output to actually show up in my project so I can export the mix and have something called 'a song'?

 

[BentRabbit]

Session Drummer 2 (included in Sonar 6 on up) is pretty powerful, and with Sonar 8, once you have your softsynths set up, you can automatically export them to a wav file instead of exporting out to an audio track first

http://www.cakewalk.com/Products/SessionDrummer2/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7OjULZT6HY

 

[c7sus]

EZ Drummer by Toontrack is another powerful engine and sound source, but you may need to get additional MIDI loops/drum sounds in the form of expansion packs to get the sounds you want. The loops that come with EZ Drummer didn't seem that helpful to me.

EZ Drummer will allow you to track as a 2-track or as many tracks for each drum set. The drums and cymbals really sound great, and the latest version isn't quite the resource hog that the original was.

 

[Pinky]

Thanks for the help guys. I gotta it under control (I hope). Even snagged a cheap Korg usb midi controller which works well enough.