The Song Fight Bulletin Board

has anyone found a decent free drum thang or loops?

It's the Dracula topic! Every time you think it's dead, it rises again from the grave. Also, there are hundreds of spins on the same basic idea and more often than it not, it's awesome.

Anyway, I've decided to take some very good advice to improve my drum programming. (Thank you, RangerDenni). I like my software (leafDrums, FTW, until I can drop $150 on EZDrummer - maybe my birthday this year, who knows....), and I love my samples, but I always find my percussion parts are... ho-hum. Yay, I can program a backbeat, and fiddle with it to make it interesting here and there. But more often than not, I'm underwhelmed, or the fiddling just make things messy instead of dynamic, especially fills and tying phrases together.

So, to make a short story long, I started digging into various samples and cool beats. At first, I began noting cool riffs from various songs and tagged them "To study," and I also grabbed a whole bunch of neat loops from SampleSwap. Alas, I am nearly drum illiterate, and don't have the training to deconstruct a drum part by ear. Is that a floor tom or just a kick? A snare, or what? Hi-hats versus ride cymbals mystify my ears. Mind you, I intellectually know the difference, I just can't pick it out in fully-produced a track. Maybe not even in an isolated one. Moreover, deconstructing the exact rhythm of each part... oi.

So, after perusing the old "Drumming Without a Drummer" thread and some fresh Googling, I've come up with a new strategy: I've downloaded a mess of freeware programs who already have a ton of pre-programmed patterns; and their output looks a lot like the leafDrums interface. Ah-hah! So THAT's what a cool rock rhythm with a fill in the 8th bar looks like!



From here, I can get a better sense of what it feels like, too, and how to add those little touches to make each groove my own.

nyjm wrote:I like my software (leafDrums, FTW, until I can drop $150 on EZDrummer - maybe my birthday this year, who knows....),

Toontrack is doing a promotion right now, so a lot of retailers are selling EZdrummer for $80.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=c ... =sea&ion=1

Oh, really? Hrm...

Okay, I'll bite, but a quick question:

Are this and this the same product? I have an account with Musician's Friend and good dealings with them in the past, but I don't want to drop $80 on the wrong software.

nyjm wrote:Are this and this the same product? I have an account with Musician's Friend and good dealings with them in the past, but I don't want to drop $80 on the wrong software.

Probably.

The specs are the same.

For what it's worth, I use SuperiorDrummer and I adore it.

Really, the best fake drummer is your own education in how to program drums, and good sample to use, regardless of software.

I still just use the drum sample banks that came with Logic and basically just click around on the piano roll to make shit that sounds suitable.

(suitably SHIT yes)

Just a quick update. I totally jumped and got the program. LOVE IT. I still need to get more used to the finer points, but the samples are great and it's quite intuitive.

Generic wrote: For what it's worth, I use SuperiorDrummer and I adore it.

agreed. it's just fantastic. if you're nerdy and enjoy programming, the only difference between this and miking up a kit yourself is

a.) it sounds better, and
b.) the "drummer" doesn't bring its girlfriend to practice

fluffy wrote:I still just use the drum sample banks that came with Logic and basically just click around on the piano roll to make shit that sounds suitable.

(suitably SHIT yes)

indie live kit still sounds good to me. route that stuff out to separate channels for processing, and you can get some solid, non-logic-indie-live-kit sounds. some of the other kits are still pretty killer to me. i may never tire of ghost town.

Yeah I mostly use indie kit and electroclash remix, depending on the sort of thing I'm doing. electroclash is usually coupled iwth some ridiculous effects chain too.

I know I've said this elsewhere, but the one I use is called GURU. It seems to have been replaced by a new program, but I don't have drum machine budget right now.
-bill