On 01/06/2005 09:07, ADRIAN DELSO wrote:
My normal approach to drum programming was shattered, just by watching a real drummer. How? Well, I finally realised how wrong the concept of the drum 'machine' is. No longer will I start with a ticking metronomic CHH and a kick on the 1 and then embellish it. I think I'll try a guide vocal and some chord changes to a click, which will then be deleted. Drums will then be treated as another melody instrument, rather than a rhythmic framework. May not work, of course,but could be fun. Is this how you guys work and am I simply stating the obvious? Views?
Well, I guess it depends; plenty of great music has been made with extremely basic percussion parts, and plenty with extremely clever percussion parts, so I guess one plays or programs what one thinks the music calls for. I certainly start come the perspective of a non-drummer who is (or was) nominally willing to settle for a very boom-chick-boom-chick backing track. I only started paying more attention to what drummers do and what I like in drumming when I started trying to program drum parts (which only happened once I started using DB). I now love watching and listening to drummers -- seeing when they pull back to do something very basic, seeing when they add something really subtle but cool, see when they go for something really wildly over the top and indulgent -- it's all grist for the mill :) I do still tend to start composing by a "standard rock beat" into place and see how my riff feels with it. Then I start pushing the drum part away from "metronomish boom-chick" and try to get it meshing more with what I want to hear. Sometimes I go the other way and start by trying to reproduce the feel of a drum part I've heard, then write a riff for it, then go back to re-tweak the drums to sit better with the riff, and so on. As a composer of not overly complex rock/pop songs :) I can get away without extremely clever drumming more easily than, say, a jazz composer -- but of course I can always go back and change a drum part (or anything else) whenever I get some new idea. My main trouble now is that I've gotten comfortable enough with using Doggiebox that my ability to work up a drum track is outstripping my ability to find the time to record the rest of the song! :) I've got a whole raft of partial and entire drum tracks that have yet to get hitched to the rest of their music (even if the music is recorded somewhere, somehow, it's not necessarily tied to the drums). That's why I'm now _really_ keen to get an audio interface, so I can sketch out songs on the computer, right over an AIFF from DB, without needing to take time to set up all the cables and connection for my DAW. Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson mailto:cea@carlaz.com http://www.carlaz.com/