On 01 Jun 2005, at 00:12, Mike Carlyle wrote:

That's about 90 US Dollars, right? Sounds like a bargain. On the other hand, I have a few other 90 dollar needs to fulfill before ordering up such a sample collection.

About USD 73 with the discount, but yes, it's relatively more expensive in the States thanks to the weak dollar just now! Come to think of it, that's about how much I save myself if I wait and buy the Tascam US-122 when I'm in the US (though a Rode NT1a works out about the same in US or UK last time I checked .... Go figure! :)

Cheers, Carl

-- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/

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

On 13/06/2005 23:04, Ben Kennedy wrote:

Just wanted to pipe up that last week I bit the bullet and ordered by copy. I'll be looking forward to what you come up with, Carl, and will be glad to help out how I can. I expect that this will provide impetus and a good real-world scenario with which to do some serious improvement on the drum kit editor (e.g. bulk import, multi-sample instruments for different velocities, etc).

Just got my copy of the DVDs; I expect it will take me some time to check out the basics of what's there.

One thing I've been thinking about is that while it may be useful to have half-a-dozen or a dozen samples of different velocities spread evenly over the whole "velocity range" (from very soft to very hard), it may also be especially worth including extra samples concentrated around a "often-used velocity".

For example .... Like, if you wanted to use 8 levels of velocity in your snare samples, you might occasionally use level 1 or level 8, but a lot of your composition might be using level 6. Of course, playing a single sample for level 6 all the time might start to sound unrealistic on playback, especially in rolls and fills where you'd start to get the "machine gun effect" of numerous identical samples repeated in quick succession. A given kind of snare hit in ns_kit7 might have a range of 30 or 40 samples at different velocities -- great if you're using e-drums but enough to be kinda overwhelming if they're all available through DB's UI! But you could pick out 8 samples of velocity levels spaced evenly over the range from hard to soft and then for your "level 6", pick 4 or so samples of very similar velocity to give some extra variation to "level 6". Thus, when you checked your snare in the DB song editor, you'd see a range of hits availble like: Sn1 Sn2 Sn3 Sn4 Sn5 Sn6a Sn6b Sn6c Sn6d Sn7 Sn8

That would give you a relatively manageable way of picking samples running the whole range from soft to hard, but make it easy to get more variation in your "most-often-used" velocity level. The apparent volume of the level 6 options wouldn't be that different, but they would be much less likely (I'm theorizing) to sound like a machine gun to the ear because they would be genuinely different hits.

Cheers, Carl