"Real" drum sounds without a drum kit

  • Thread starter Thread starter gordholio
  • Start date Start date
G

gordholio

New member
Hi guys:

I wonder if anyone can be of help. I write rock songs and record them via Sonar 2. I play the guitar and bass and sing (for what it's worth!). But, I don't play drums. I've been using some of the drum loops included with Sonar, because they do sound good. They're real drums, recorded in a real studio, etc. BUT, now I'm getting pretty tired of the repetiveness of one main drum beat. I'm breaking it up by inserting crashes, stops, breaks, etc., but I'm doing it all in the main Sonar window. It's sounding much better, but this is a hard way to do it. In fact, if a certain crash or odd beat doesn't fall right on a grid line, I MANUALLY place it as close to where it should be as possible.

This is obviously not the way to do it. What do you guys do, bearing in mind that I want rock beats (not, for the most part, techno beats) and I want the sound of REAL drums. And no, I don't have the facilities to learn how to play a real drum myself. :-) Is there an effective tool for chopping up and positioning loops, for example?

Thanks so much in advance.

gordo
 
I'd be interested to know myself. I am a drummer, but my skills with cakewalk are not what they could be. So, if someone knows about this, by all means ...........
 
Thanks, Mad. That makes two of us (dummies?) so far. :-)

gordo
 
Fruity Loops

Many people wrongly think that Fruity Loops can only be used to create electronic music, wile in fact you can make very good sounding rockdrums with it. It takes some time to get to know the program and some practice and skill, but when you get the hang of it, it can sound pretty close to the real thing IMO.
You’ll need some good drumsamples, that can be downloaded for free like these (Tom Hicks):
http://samples.artistcollaboration.com/
You can listen to some songs of mine (mostly covers) to get an idea:
"No Excuses"
http://users.skynet.be/fa260404/Koen/
 
FL is a very intuitive program, if you're willing to take the time to understand it. You can make just about any type of drum sound possible. I would give it a look. The current version is FL Studio, but all it takes is just a regular version of FL to produce some good ol' drum tracks.
 
and if ur like me, u'll want to puke over the design of fruity loops as soon as u open it the first time, while ur trying to exit it by using the taskbar and right mouse button since they didnt even put that "X" where it belongs to..

i'm just like u guys trying to get a good sound by programming drums, and i didnt find any programs that were offering u methods to get them sounding more "real" (little level/time offs would do quite well i guess..)

however, i have found a really easy to use one, maybe someone wants to try it. it's rather unprofessional but small and neat, written by some guy.

http://www.leafdigital.com/Software/leafdrums

be warned though, save ur work often as it like to crash from time to time ;)
but i'll still rather use that one then the ugly fruity loops and all the other ugly programs i've seen
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top