Sequencing drums?

S

signpainter

New member
Warning, I am not a drummer! But, having said that, I tried a friend's drum machine, but couldn't get the hang of going from what I wanted to hear to programming it in, so I bought a Yamaha DTExpress kit because it just feels more natural to beat em! Well, not being a drummer, my drum tracks are pretty sloppy. I am thinking I could:
Play the drum track (sloppy as it may be) and send it via MIDI to a midi sequencing program. In the program I could clean it up (quantisizing), then with the cleaned up MIDI sequence, shoot it back to the kit so the MIDI played the kit, and the kit would be recorded.
Soooooo, any suggestions on "affordable" software to do this?
Thanx for any suggestions,
Signpainter
 
You should try downloads.com or a similar site. There should be several freeware or shareware midi sequencers that would suit your needs.
 
I would probably download a few different ones and then see which is the most intuitive to you. They shouldn't be very large files.

By the way, if you don't already have one, you will need to get a midi cable system to plug into your computer's joystick port. Shouldn't cost more than $20-30.

One note about quantizing: You may have to play with your quantize settings a bit to get your drums correct. Even then you'll probably have to go in and edit some of the drum parts manually. When you quantize a part it moves the drum strike to the nearest note value that you specify. So, if your drum strike is right in between two note values, it may move the strike forward to the next note when it was really meant to be on the previous note. As you get better at playing the drums this will be less of a problem.

Good Luck!
 
PS. Should you decide that you don't care for any of the free midi sequencers, I would probably look at Cakewalk Express for $80-90. It would certainly handle all you want to do and more.
 
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