The Song Fight Bulletin Board

This is for those of us who don't play drums, and don't own a drummer.

I try (when I have time) to layer drum loops and programmed samples to create as intriguing a drum part as any other. Living in an apartment building and working largely late at night prevents the use of real drums of any sort. But all too often I only get as far as a vague reference to what I've got in mind, and at best a complimentary rhythm track.

So I'm wondering how many people program or perform every note of their drum tracks (remember, not real drums), as opposed to laying down/layering loops and arranging them with occassional samples for accents/phrasing?

How many people do the pure loop thing? and how involved do you get with phrasing, breaks, etc.?

Every drum hit on every song I've done has been lovingly drawn in by hand in the cubase piano roll editor. I don't understand why people would use prefabbed loops when it's so simple to just draw in exactly what you want from scratch. I mean, why limit yourself, unless there's a compelling reason?

For Tapegerm songs I will use pre-recorded drum loops. Why? Because they were made by other people for my/our use, and I like their styles, and they can make sounds that I can't necessarily do or don't want to take the time to create myself. Often I will layer them if it's not too busy. Actually, usually.
For my solo songs I will often create drum loops on the drum machine, instrument by instrument and layer those. If it needs more variation you can munge up separate loops or even entire drum tracks in VSTs such as SupaTrigga, or VReorder, or whatnot.
Don't generally use prefabbed loops - i.e. ones made by people that aren't in Tapegerm (loops sold on CD).
-bill

obscurity wrote:it's so simple to just draw in exactly what you want from scratch.

Well, for one thing, I'm not a drummer. I don't think like a drummer, don't fill like a drummer, don't drool like a drummer. Hell, I play guitars, base, keyboards, hand percusion, do weird sound scape editing and sing. It would be nice to be able to "draw exactly what I want" but this is one of those cases where I know what I want more in a general sense, and talking to my loop/sample library is getting pretty close to what describing it to a drummer used to be like (actually, with few exceptions, its even better).

Sample loops (actual recordings of real drummers playing riffs or grooves) have their own human idiosyncrasies that "programmed" drum patterns can't match. And they are far more subtle dynamically (I know "human groove" applications add subtlety, but it ain't tha same). Except in the hands of a master programmer (Frank Zappa, etc.) I'd go with sample loops most of the time. This all changes when your music demands precise arrangement and therefore has no room for repeated phrases, etc. That's where I really need to work with a real drummer, and most of what I do is basically rock/pop based, not Elliot Carter. And sometimes I do get in there and tip the scales to piano roll editing.

I set up a playback loop in Cubase for each part of my song (the chorus, the chord progression in the verse, etc.) one at a time. Then I set up a drum kit in Reason, and I play drums on my keyboard along to each loop until I come up with a beat. Then I'll record the beat, without any fills or anything, and fix it up and quantize it. I'll copy and paste those different beats to fill out the song. At that point I use that drum track to record all the instrumental parts of the song (guitar, bass, etc.). I think I play better playing along to even just beats like that as opposed to a click track. At some point I'll go through the drum part and try to add in fills, cymbal hits, and some variations here and there. I'll also try to make sure the velocity of the hits isn't too unnatural (hi-hats/rides all at the same volume, etc.) if I have enough time. If I have still more time I will get even more detailed, or if there are parts where the instruments are really off from the drums I might fudge the timing of the drums a bit so they match the instruments. I've been doing it this way for a long time. What I really want is to be able to play drums, for real, but at this point, with a small effort, I can have OK sounding fake drums. Usually it's not worth the significantly greater effort it takes to make the fake drums sound better than OK, but it's possible.