what software would you suggest to program drums?

  • Thread starter Thread starter minofifa
  • Start date Start date
minofifa

minofifa

New member
hey all..

well it's almost time to go back to university which means another 8 months without a drummer. I decided it's time to learn how to program / insert my own drums into my songs. As usual, i've stumbled across a subject that i know nothing about so some advice would be most helpful.

Right now i own Sonar 3 and an m-audio 61 key keyboard. I am wondering what i should research to program my own drums to sync up with my mixes in sonar. I was thinking a program like Reason would do the trick. The drum edit in Sonar seems to complicated and time intensive for me. I want something that is more dedicated to programming drum beats. I also want them to sound as realistic as possible (in other words i don't want a techno synth beat). Do you think Reason or project 5 would be a good idea? How about a sampling program insted like Kontact or Gigasampler. If either of those 2 are like vsampler then i am a bit leary. I find v-sampler very confusing and frustrating to achive great sounds. There is hardly any iterature and tutorials for it either.

So to sum up i'm looking for a program to create drums for my songs that is:
- realistic sounding
- easy to use / learn (willing to commit some time to it)
- will sync well with sonar (via rewire or as a plug in or even if i have to insert a .wav of the drums.

again any advice will be much appreciated, thanks for the help
 
Real drums sound like real drums, I'd try them first. Buy a cheap kit somewhere and mic it, one on the kick and one on the overhead.

Actually, just call Sweetwater. They will tell you everything about what you need.
 
i dont know if there are any better options out there because, honestly, i didnt search too hard for drum machine software. but i was using Fruity Loops for my drum tracks.

basically in fruity loops you CAN do the whole trance/techno/drum&bass kind of thing right off the bat, but finding good clean drum samples can take a bit of time.

i scoured the web and found a lot of good sounding drums. good toms, splashes, kicks. the hardest part to find though was a nice sounding snare with multiple samples of slightly different hits. finding good hi-hats was a bitch too.

but, after i found a good library of sounds to assemble a good kit. i spent a good day or two learning about the more advanced features of Fruity Loops to get things set up the way i wanted.

basically to make things sound human, you MUST spend the time to go in beat-for-beat and make velocity or pitch changes as necessary. if you physically know how to play drums yourself, that always helps.

for example, with snare rolls, most of us emphasize the right stick more than the left stick on certian beats. on those beats, kick up the velocity.

another thing fruity loops is great at is being able to take 4 or 5 snare sounds and picking them at random. so say you have about 8 snare hits. say 4 are regular head-only hits, two are hard hits, and the last two are hard hits + the rim shot. you can put the 4 regular hits on one track and let the program randomly pick between them. that alone goes a long way to making the mix sound less fake.

hard hits are used for accents of course. i also usually double each track with a lighter and ever-so-slightly off-time track for when you hit the snare with both sticks at once.

so there you can see it easily gets very complex really fast. already with the normal track, heavy, & rim shot tracks plus the doubles of each, thats 6 tracks alone for the snare to mess around with.

hi-hats are also nice to have with multiple samples.

so, yeah, fruity loops is cool and lets you go into insane detail. the interface is really simple and easy to use. making beats, tweaking beats, saving them and arranging them into a song is really easy.

i use Cakewalk Pro Audio 9. getting the tracks from FL to PA9 is as easy as figuring out what tempo i want, saving the drum tracks to a stereo wav file, and importing it into PA9 at the proper tempo. done.
 
Real drums sound like real drums, I'd try them first. Buy a cheap kit somewhere and mic it, one on the kick and one on the overhead.
Click to expand...

terrable idea...

so fruity loops you say haven?...

Yeah i could see that working, did you use the step sequencer or is that too simple... did you have to use the piano roll?
I was hoping there would be a program that would be more specific to producing drums but maybe just a general prog will work. thanks for the heads up. -
 
i used the step sequencer. beat-by-beat click-by-click.

i dont recall if fruity loops has the ability to record from keyboard inputs or not. it would be nice to set up a midi keyboard to each track and be able to "play" the beats to begin with to get the general pattern down.
 
FLStudio 4.5 (Fruity Loops) is what you want.

I've been using it for some time now and it is great. I do both step sequencer (laying beats down by selecting buttons) as well as drums tracks from my midi keyboard controller. I found it very easy to pickup and use, and you have a variety of options down the road with soft samplers like BFD, Battery, and DFH Superior which plug-in easily.

Try FLstudio, and some free soundfont drums. Do a google on Natural Studio drumkit and you'll find an incredibly great sounding soundfont for drums.

I've tracked drums that listeners could swear were live, acoustic drums. I do NOT play drums (physically, that is. In my head I'm John Bonham) so I was pleased with the compliments.
 
I used to work with the RM-III and Battery, now it's Propellerhead's Recycle and Reason exclusively....really good stuff, espescially since they added the Scream Distortion unit.
 
Just so you can hear something, here is a highly compressed very short drum sample from FLstudio and the Natural Studio soundfont (which is FREE BTW).
 

Attachments

Recycle and Reason eh.... i do like the step sequencer in reason. I never really did understand the recycle add-on though... it is really expensive compared to the price of reason itself. What exactly does it do and is it worth the money?

As for fuity loops,, i like the sequencer in that program as well. So basically what you are saying is that i need to just find some drum samples i like and then add them to a bank in fruity loops? I suppose i could just use vsampler but it is dang confusing... I wonder how kontact is to use...
 
If you can use a mouse, and know how to push buttons, you're fine.

If you want to get "deeper", you can use the piano roll (which I use) for your midi-driven drum tracks. You can use any sampled drums (BFD, DFH, etc) or soundfont such as Natural Studio.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top