The Song Fight Bulletin Board

My drum programming sucks. No matter how much I try, the only way to improve would be to actually learn to play the drums. But then if I could play the drums, why bother programming, when I could record them live. The other way would be to hire a drummer. But being a desktop muso, both of these options are out. What I have been doing with my songfight songs is to use a sample cd called Retrofunk, which consists of loops and fills. You get about half a minutes worth of loops and fills in one track. That's enough for a song really. I cut that up with Recycle and put the recycle files into the sequencer. Then I can play by guitar or my bass along to that. Thing is, I only have that one CD, so the drum parts are all a bit funky, which is great if that is what the song needs. I've tried quantizing the recycled loops but the results aren't that great.

So any tips or recommendations? What I need is a sample CD with loops and fills in a slow/medium tempo rock ballad style. But other pointers would be good too, like bossa and reggae.

Cheerz

Buy Future Music or Computer Music for the free loops CDs which come with every issue. Futuremusic has a very good series every now and again (drum loops up to vol 6 I believe) - my song this week uses one of their kits

j$

You can also pay a visit to <A href="http://www.smartloops.com/">SmartLoops</A>. I recommend the Dry Studio Kit, which is now available in Apple Loops format as well as ACID. They have some downloadable freebies there as well.

ken wrote:http://www.drumsondemand.com

Those look awesome. Have you used them, Ken?

MATT MALLEY of Counting Crows says:
“I discovered Drums on Demand while producing a demo, at my friend Chris Cutler's home studio."

Chris Cutler's home studio!? An amazing percussionist using this, huh?

Just had a look at that drums on demand and it looks really good. That could keep me going for many songs. They do it in ready made REX format as well, saves me having to cut them up myself, but then that's part of the fun. Thanks for the tips guys.

Since you have Reason....

Something else you can do is borrow a friend's drum set, or take your recording gear there, and record different drum sounds with diferent mic positions, etc. Then cut up the recording into sample sized bits and import into the nn-xt sampler and presto! A custom drum kit.

I am planning on doing this with my neighbor's drum set.

Granted, this is a bit of work, but at the end you would have your own custom set and people listening wouldn't be able to pick it out and say "oh that's a NS kit" or whatever. It would also be a good way to agment to Reason drum program as well, so you can still use the pattern selections and controls.

As for bossa / Brazilian music I have found Brazilian musicians to be extremely innovative. In one Joao Gilberto song, the percussionists is playing a phone book, and in song by Caetano Veloso the percussionist, Carolinhos Brown is playing a set of pvc pipe.