How to make your recordings more professional

[Billy's Little Trip]

I basically use my acoustic kit as an electronic kit, for the kick and snare. I have a little piezo mics on those two drums, and I record a track and run it through KTDrumTrigger to create a midi track. Then I feed that to the sampler (VSampler or BFD.)

Hats, crashes, and rides, I play using your method, on the keyboard. Though often I'll just record 8 bars or so, then cut and paste. Then I quantize them, and humanize them a little, assuming it's needed, with a CAL script in Sonar. (Yeah, it might seem odd to quantize then humanize again, but I get better results that way.)

My Hxaro for j$'s SUASD is a good example of using this approach.

Damn it Des, after reading this, I have a lot to learn to even get close to your amateur skills, lol.

[Lunkhead]

Thanks for the info, Deshead. I've been leaning towards BFD, but DrumCore seems interesting, too.

And thanks for the vote of confidence, Jack! Sometimes, with enough work, the drums turn out OK for me, but not very reliably, and not necessarily in proportion to how much effort I put into them. which can be discouraging. I haven't totally given up, though, so prepare to suffer through more of my bad drum programming in the future, SongFight! audience. Mu hu ha ha ha....

[roymond]

Maybe my perception is coloured here, but it looked to me like people were berating jute for disagreeing with deshead's article.

I just didn't think Jute read the article. SORRY, JUTE, IF YOU DID. He seemed to say that these descriptions were OK (which they are for lots of fine reasons). But I feel that the context they were offered in and the detail in the article addressed different things than whether or not an "indie" or "amateur" treatment was OK (which it is). Des clearly made it clear that the points were about how to make a more "pro" sound out of your amateur material, not whether its OK to not make all your music polished and over-produced.

I have clearly dribbled on too long.

I meant no berate.

There I go again.

Really.

Stop it!

OMG, did this discussion awaken Hoblit?

[jute gyte]

The referenced article makes clear arguments and sets the context around each point and offers links to further articles/discussions to make it even more clear. Responding like this seems a little...amateurish.

Yeah, you're right. Sorry guys. I didn't read the article, which would have cleared up my misconceptions pretty quickly (and which I should have read before posting).

That said, if you overuse cheap reverb and have bad fake drums I'm more likely to give you a 'good' on Somesongs!

[starfinger]

Anyway, I use Reason, so I don't have the multiple sample thing happening, which sucks.

lunkhead, i think that the nn-xt sampler in reason can do multisamples. obviously you need a multisampled kit for that to be of use, which I believe is not the case with any of the standard reason kits.

but maybe something like this would suit your needs:

http://www.propellerheads.se/products/refills/rdk/

there is a demo

-craig

[Billy's Little Trip]

Starfinger, that is killer. I can't upload the demo for some reason, but the samples sound incredible.

[Lunkhead]

Starfinger, you're right. I have been using their drum machine, which doesn't have multisample support, but yes, the other samplers has it. I don't know why that hadn't really occurred to me. RDK 2 looks interesting, I will investigate that as an option as well, thanks for the info.

[Dan-O from Five-O]

We're getting a full close mic setup soon, so we'll see how that goes.

What kind of mics are you getting Sober?

[Freddielove]

First off, thanks des for all of this, a lot of knowledge in there.

Lunkhead and Starfinger,

Also remember with the nn-xt you can load any sample you want, so you record anything, wood blocks, pot and pans, etc. I know you know that, but for me that's the coolest thing about it, more work but you don't have to be limited to someone else's kit.

I like to create a submix for a things percussion and then run that to channel 1 on the main board. If you are using the drum machine you can patch each individually to the submix.

Anyway, that's all.

EDIT

Ok that you can save everything into one combinator patch is way cool, I think I will upgrade for that. Thanks for posting it.

Also, dig the Ikea rug in the studio.