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MIDI Drum Traps 'n
Tips
How to make your Drum tracks
Come Alive
by the TweakMeister
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Browse all the
drum stuff at zZounds
Alesis SR16 Drum Machine
 As one of the most popular drum machines ever made,
the SR-16 has been used by everyone from songwriters to live
performers to remix engineers as their drum machine of choice. The reason is
simple: it features a great selection of 233 realistic, natural drum sounds,
offered both in dry form and sampled with our incomparable digital reverbs.
Our exclusive Dynamic Articulationª feature enables a drum sound to change
its tonal content as it's played harder for truly realistic performances. Tweak Reports: I was first in line
for this one at twice the price--Great choice for natural sounding drums.
If you are doing dance stuff pass on it. This is a mainstream box.
It has "the sound". You can hear the texture of the shell on these drums.
There is no resonant filtering though. But that "dynamic articulation" is
really well implemented. The soft hits are really soft and the hard ones
really cut. When you want your drums to sound like drums, this is the
babe. Makes a good 2nd brain for a trigger kit, if you can go over
MIDI. There are no trigger inputs, but the MIDI response is quick. Its
actually amazing this box has been out since 1994. Alesis hit a home
run here!
By the way the SR18 will be out soon to finally put the sr16 out to
pasture. I don't recommend buy an sr16 unless you know it is all you
want.
Alesis
DM5 Drum Module
Building on the immense popularity of the D4 |
Roland TD20S V-Pro Series Electronic Drum Kit
More:
Electronic Drum Sets
Problems
Its been long said that to get authentic
sounding drum tracks in your midi compositions you have to "think like a
drummer". This is not as easy as it might seem. Go listen to some
midifiles that are out there, where the composer can't hide behind audio drum
loops. The art of midi drumming is becoming a bit of a lost art. But for
the really true professional doing mainstream, rock, top 40, country, i.e., all
the stuff that makes money, drum loops simply will not cut it. And
bringing in a drummer and miking the
kit--hours down the drain, often leaves no option but to do MIDI drums. It is
possible to get authentic, live sounding drum tracks from a keyboard, sound
module or drum machine that may fool the ear into thinking you have a real
drummer. But to get it, you need to really know drums like a drummer does. And
interestingly, many of the techniques drummers use to get their signature sound
are things that are difficult or at minimum time consuming to do with midi
sequencers. Here's a short list of drum accents:
Cymbal chokes, flams inside of rolls, playing
light "ghost hits", playing cymbals with soft mallets, rim shot in the middle of
a roll, exploiting the timbral variety of a drum by going from soft to hard
hits, tapping back and forth from the center of a cymbal to its periphery,
playing the snare slightly ahead or slightly behind beats 2 and 4 often
differently for each bar, playing with brushes on toms and cymbals, double
hitting a drum with two sticks, one slightly behind providing a "snap".
That's the short list. And the important thing about good drummers is that
they they don't repeat these accents all the time. They put them in
whenever they think they can get away with it, not only at the fill.
Example of a Tweaked
drum pattern (mp3 128 k)
Solutions
Dynamics:
The drum is an intensely dynamic instrument.
Even with the very best midi multilayered drum module, it will not come close to
the natural dynamics of a real kit. The solution to this is to have
several keymaps of the same kit, one played soft, medium and loud.
You can switch between them at different points of the song. This is often a
better answer than using a typical velocity switched kit
Velocity editing:
Most good modules and drum machines have
velocity routed not only to volume, but to a low pass filter. This makes
the hard hit brighter as well as louder. The trick here is to go
into the event editor of your sequencer and make sure every hit has its own
unique velocity number. If you must use looped patterns in your sequence,
make sure you do this before you hit the loop command. This is extremely
important on cymbals as real cymbals never sound the same twice.
Offsets to the Snare.
The drum pattern gets it's feel from a number
of factors. The feel might be described as "uptight" "tight", "in the
pocket", "laid back" "loose"--there are many more ways to describe them.
Much of what gives the pattern feel is the position of the snare relative to the
center of beats 2 and 4. For a tight, near jazz feel go into your event
editor and select all the snares and move them a few midi ticks ahead. Do
it while you are playing the pattern to you can instantly hear the result.
For a ballad feel, usually a tad behind the pocket, move the snares the other
way. The groove will relax.
Stop the Hi Hat machine
Whenever there is a drum fill and only use a
pedal hat. This is what happens with a drummer if he needs his sticks to
go somewhere else. One thing drummers do not do, ever, is to play the same
hi-hat pattern from the beginning to the end of a song without stopping.
So why did you loop the same hi hat track throughout your composition?
They also don't use the same tom roll every 8 bars.
Tweak's Electronic Drum Kit is a Yamaha DTXpress and acoustic snare and
cymbals
Limit yourself:
Drummers, by nature, have only two hands and
two feet. This means at any given moment in time, there should be no more
than 4 notes sounding. Drummers instinctively know this and if they are
going to get a great drum sound they have to do things with these 4 hits to make
them really stand out. Drummers don't have 64 different percussion
instruments they can play simultaneously. With MIDI, you are rather
unlimited. This is a problem that leads many a midiphile astray! Its
a great idea to impose limits on yourself so every song does not sound "over
drummed" If you force yourself to think this way, you will appreciate what
drummers do with a trap kit of 10 basic sounds and 4 notes.
Quantize on!
You've probably heard that to get "natural"
sounding tracks you need to turn quantize functions off and keep them off.
Don't buy it! Let the Tweak correct the record here. Very few of us
have the ability to lay down a consistent drum groove on a keyboard without some
form of correction. The trick is to fully use quantize tools to the max to
get the authentic drum sound. What you should try to avoid is quantizing
the entire drum track. Instead, select only individual drum lines and
quantize them. For instance, quantize all the kiks and perhaps all the
closed hi hats, but leave the rest unquantized. Then go back and see where
your snares are. Quantize some of them, but manually adjust others to be
ahead and behind the beat and add flams on certain hits. Your sequencer
has a "groove quantize" function. This allows you to consistently add
offsets to 8th, 12th and 16th notes. Perfect for tweaking the kik and
hats. However after quantizing your work is not done. Now you go
back and manually add the accents, leading notes, the flams, the soft notes, fix
the rolls and change velocities on any hits that sound the same. Do the crash
cymbals last and experiments with sliding it ahead and behind the downbeat.
Sliding it ahead a few ticks often adds incredible excitement to a climax, and
moving it behind makes it sound like a royally expected crash.
Use Alternate Drum Controllers:
I just got a Yamaha DTxpress midi drum kit and
it has really changed the way I think about drumming forever. There's allot of
different options these days and those really serious about make great drum
tracks might consider them It's a lot easier to think like a drummer when
you are one! One of the big advantages of A MIDI trap kit is that you have
to play it like a drummer--you get to feel the rush of bashing to the song,
kicking it in the butt to make it move, playing harder when the break
approaches, slamming the cymbals exactly when needed. And the really cool
thing about these controllers is that, unlike real drums, you can play them all
night long at a reduced volume or with headphones, and that you don't really
have to be a great drummer to immediately dig the benefits. Put your
sequencer in loop recording mode and just do the kicks, the snares then hats,
etc. Then quantize away all your errors. There will still be enough
uniqueness left over to have a living and breathing drum track at the end.
 
Threads
Happy Drumming!
Rich the TweakMeister
Go to Page 2 How to
write Original
Drum Tracks Fast and Furious in a MIDI Sequencer
Go to Page
3
Tweak's Cymbal Page
Drum Lessons
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Cool Quote:
"Percussion music is revolution. Sound and
rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth
century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation.
Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom"
John Cage Silence (original quote1939)
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Choose a Mixer
How to set up a Mixer
Picking the Right Monitors
Making the Perfect Mix
Using Pan Controls
Using EQ
Mixing in Software vs Hardware
Guide to Control Surfaces
Mastering at Home
16 vs 24 bit Demystified
Basics of Surround sound
Catalog: Studio Monitors
Catalog: Mixers
Using Waves Plugins
Mixer Calibration
Review: Mackie 1402 VLZ Pro
Review: Mackie HR 824
Review: Behringer MX9000
Setting Up Surround on an 8 Bus Mixer
Configuring a Recording Rig-Page 3
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