Speaking of drum machines...

[onelife]

8 minutes ago, Red Ant said:

Well, this one ended up released as a single with my "placeholder" drum track still on it... complete with my little "Bonham kck drum triplets"  The plan was to have Glenn Sobel play the drums, but he was out with Alice Cooper, and when we sent him the track to learn, to "re-play", his one-word reply was "why?"

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ydvlolyumg238jr/Over You Final Master.mp3?dl=0

One of my "tricks", if you want to call them that, is to quantize ONLY the hits that fall on each 1/4 note, and free-hand the rest, including velocities. I've done so much drum programming that I've gotten really fast with "adjusting single notes manually", but its still fairly labor intensive. Not only that, the real "trick" with programming is to think like a drummer. 

 

LOL, I didn't see your post until after I posted mine.

[Red Ant]

5 minutes ago, Anderton said:

I tend to avoid electronic drums, the Chris McHugh drum loops from Discrete Drums (sadly, no longer available) are beyond wonderful. Actual drummers are convinced I hired a drummer, because in a way, I did. But I also know how to work with loops to make them come alive. Just rolling out a loop does not work.

That said, electronic drums are a different instrument with a different purpose. There are some genres of music that almost demand it. However, I have to say that my whole attitude about "click tracks" changed 180 degrees when I figured out how to add tempo changes to make a song "breathe" after the fact, on the two-track mix. I wrote about this in the last Sweetnotes, I can't find it online anywhere but I wrote something similar for my web site. 

 

 

They really are, given judicious amounts of editing to fit whatever piece of music one is working on. But to be honest, I feel with some of the new VSTi kits and good programming, you can achieve similar results. That being said, I'll take a good drummer over programming EVERY time. 

[redEL34]

I have several apps for that. But by far I prefer Addictive Drums. Split across the channels, like a real drum set.

[onelife]

1 minute ago, Red Ant said:

They really are, given judicious amounts of editing to fit whatever piece of music one is working on. But to be honest, I feel with some of the new VSTi kits and good programming, you can achieve similar results. That being said, I'll take a good drummer over programming EVERY time. 

I sometimes compare playing music with surfing - the difference being that the musicians create the wave as well as ride on it.

A live drummer will ride and react to the wave along with the rest of the band whereas the drum machine will do its thing without listening.

[Red Ant]

2 minutes ago, onelife said:

I sometimes compare playing music with surfing - the difference being that the musicians create the wave as well as ride on it.

A live drummer will ride and react to the wave along with the rest of the band whereas the drum machine will do its thing without listening.

Its the difference between having a conversational partner and having a conversation with myself, for me. 

[Red Ant]

3 minutes ago, redEL34 said:

I have several apps for that. But by far I prefer Addictive Drums. Split across the channels, like a real drum set.

I only bother with that if the drums are gonna be part of a final mix. For stuff like backing tracks that I often post here, the internal mixer is just fine. 

[redEL34]

2 minutes ago, Red Ant said:

I only bother with that if the drums are gonna be part of a final mix. For stuff like backing tracks that I often post here, the internal mixer is just fine. 

I hear ya, the internal mixer works fine for 99% of anything. It’s just good practice, and something I never get to mess with in real life, so it makes it more interesting. Especially when you get your own choice of effects. It’s as real as it’s gonna ever get for me, anyways.

[Zeopold]

I’ve had loads over the years, first one was a Boss Dr rhythm in the early 80s

Last one I bought was a Zoom RT 223 . I still use it triggered off my V Drums but forgot how to program it years ago

[Etienne Rambert]

Alesis HR-16

I used it side-by-side w/ its sibling the MMT 8 sequencer. 

What fun it was back in the day. 

Kawai K-1 &US- made Ovation acoustic-electric guitar. 

There was nothing I couldn’t do. 

[Tom Hicks]

1 hour ago, Etienne Rambert said:

Alesis HR-16

I used it side-by-side w/ its sibling the MMT 8 sequencer. 

What fun it was back in the day. 

Kawai K-1 &US- made Ovation acoustic-electric guitar. 

There was nothing I couldn’t do. 

I had that very pair, HR16 and MMT8.

 

Then a lightning storm fried all the memory in my HR 16. So I went down to the public library and checked out a book by Louie Bellson, and programmed his patterns into the HR 16.

[Notu]

My first was a Boss DR-5 "Dr Rhythm Section", sort of an early groovebox. The pads were in the shape of fretboard and it had many semi-decent GM-type instrument presets. The sequencer was very easy and intuitive. Great for sketching song ideas.

Now I use the MPC Live as the hub for everything. I do miss the immediacy and limitations of that DR5

[arcadesonfire]

I often wish I could think like a drummer. I’m so busy trying to write an interesting chord progression or develop an interesting timbre/effect, and then I just repeat the same rhythms I’ve used on previous songs. The drummer in my old duo was really big on creating memorable beats that would last in the audience’s head. Wish I had that instinct. 

[Hoot Owl]

I have a Boss DR-3 but, like countless other boxes, I've never used it.

I've got so much useless-to-me crap laying around that I want to throw up.

 

[Etienne Rambert]

20 hours ago, Tom Hicks said:

I had that very pair, HR16 and MMT8.

 

Then a lightning storm fried all the memory in my HR 16. So I went down to the public library and checked out a book by Louie Bellson, and programmed his patterns into the HR 16.

You made good use of it. Alas, I have no recordings I made w/ mine. 

 

Ha! I was wrong. I found one. You May recognize a stock loop I embellished upon. 

 

BOSSA PARISIENNE

 

[Tom Hicks]

2 hours ago, Etienne Rambert said:

You made good use of it. Alas, I have no recordings I made w/ mine. 

 

Ha! I was wrong. I found one. You May recognize a stock loop I embellished upon. 

 

BOSSA PARISIENNE

 

I like it!

 

I dug up one of my old drum machine demos and just posted it. An original song composed by a bass player friend named Scott.

 

https://m.soundcloud.com/tom-hicks888/hill-to-climb

 

[Etienne Rambert]

You got better recordings than I did - back in the day w/ that thing. That’s a good recording. 

I remember buying my MMT8 new and trying to reload sequences in it w/ a tape cassette. 

That was before Alesis came out w/ a disk drive for the machines.

 

64k barely gave you enough data for a song - let alone a full live set.

The HR-16 was pretty loaded w/ useful loops though.

 

 

[RoadRanger]

I use http://hydrogen-music.org/ to muck about with, most recently to program beats from cover songs that one of my drummers was having a problem hearing/learning. I've used earplugs since 1980 so am often the only one with decent hearing in one of my bands 😕 . Also useful to do a scratch track to finalize a song's structure so folks can go off and learn/rewrite it before playing it live or recording it and/or use it as a fancy click track to replace .

[Phil O'Keefe]

I've never heard of that program before. Is it available for both Mac and PC? What are some of the things you like about it? 

[RoadRanger]

3 hours ago, Phil O'Keefe said:

I've never heard of that program before. Is it available for both Mac and PC? What are some of the things you like about it? 

Linux too! It's pretty easy to create an entire song with if you are at all familiar with them old hardware machines. Lots of kits available if you are into that, can do velocity, dunno about jitter or whatever they call introducing some randomness into the timing. OTOH can't be used as a plug-in so probably of little interest to youse guys .

Here's the first minute of the track i did to help one of my drummers count-in "Breakdown" and also get the funky beat. I purposely left it "mechanical" and sparse so's not to show him up LOL:

BreakdownStart.mp3