Drum Programming

Mr. CooL ICE

My bands demo is near (all home made, no studio) completion but theres the small annoying fact: the drums arent recorded yet. We've recorded electronic drums onto a PC but the sound just isn't right, and the drummer has had a hard time getting his hands on drum mics for the recording. So forget all ethics and reasoning for not recording the drums properly...

Anybody know about programming drums and how it can be done?

Gordon

What equipment will you be using to program the drums? A sampler, PC software, particular drum machine etc?

feylya

Have a look for Fruity Loops Studio 4...

Mr. CooL ICE

Since we are all poor students and not using the studio and not buying any new hardware, I suspect we would use PC software.

Thanks feylya

eoin5

Fruity Loops is excellent, just go to the realistic drum section and put some reverb on and eq as necessary, you can also bring the volume of each drum up and down so that itll sound like the "drummer" means to play soft or hard depending on what you want. you can make a pretty convincing job with it, but ethics...

musician.ie

Also try recording each drum "live" from a touch sensitive keyboard. This will give it a bit of feel. Only use light quantizing after. Every note right on the beat sounds way too mechanical.

Alternatively, you could draw in the notes for the drum part on the piano roll and use a groove quantize to introduce some swing/groove on the timing of the events and their relative volumes.

Gordon

Another thing to remember is getting the velocity (volume) of a drum roll to sound 'real'. Make sure to get the odd notes of a snare roll, for example, slightly louder than the even notes (odd as in 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 compared to even - 2, 4, 6, 8 etc). Due to drummers being predominantly right handed - their right hand will play slightly louder than their left.

markisevil

My tip, to save time and money:

1. Buy a copy of Computer Music magazine -- the cover CD has a MIDI studio and two decent drum machines.
2. Go to this page at Tweakheadz and follow the tips.
3. Use either the keyboard roll and plenty of time or a velocity-sensitive MIDI keyboard to compose your drum lines.

Fusion251

LordChessington wrote:

My bands demo is near (all home made, no studio) completion but theres the small annoying fact: the drums arent recorded yet. We've recorded electronic drums onto a PC but the sound just isn't right, and the drummer has had a hard time getting his hands on drum mics for the recording. So forget all ethics and reasoning for not recording the drums properly...

Anybody know about programming drums and how it can be done?

Providing you recorded all the other instruments along to a click track FL studio 4 will be fine....get your hands on a copy of Future Music the magazine or something similar, they usually provide some good sample kits...

Fusion

musician.ie

FL studio 4 is soooo last week.

Seriously though, FL studio 5 is just out, with downloadable demo and they have a nifty drum machine instrument with some nice premade acoustic drum sample sets. Good luck if you're in 56K land though. I think it was a 36Mb download....

Buddhapadge

I dunno - to me, programmed drums will never sound real. Why not just make a virtue out of necessity and use electronic-style samples? I reckon it could sound good if used properly.

musician.ie

Budhappage - maybe some of the drums you assume are real are actually sequenced? I've fooled a good drummer with midi-sequenced drums, but it took a lot of work to do the drums. I'd have been far quicker micing up a kit, had circumstances permitted this. You are correct that most programmed drum lines sound fake though.

A sample CD of audio rock/pop drum loops is always a good investment. The ones that feature basic loops plus individual hits are very handy - you can use the loops for most of it and sequence some fills in a sampler. Generally acidized loops or recycled loops are best as you can actually change the tempo on these.

I'll shut up now