Nice song Mike.
I'd echo what Carl said - I think you can dispose of your vocalist - your voice is in fact great! You remind me a bit of Michael Stipe. Its particularly good when the harmonies come in. Seriously, you should be singing as well as playing.
I banged this on my mp3 player this evening, set to 'repeat' and had it on a loop for ages and can't really find any fault. Its the best example yet of a believable 'real drummer' sound - that technique of slight speedup works really well. I'll be looking again at the nskit - it has a great 'clean studio sound. Any chance you could send the drum db over for me to look at for tips?
Cheers
Sion Morris Liverpool
www.cinnamondesign.co.uk/music/music.html -------------------------------------------
http://webpages.charter.net/mcarlyle/sounds/comealive-01.mp3
My singer didn't show up so I gave it a go myself. I don't know if I'll be doing much more of this kind of singing. I'm going through the "I hate my voice" thing.
The drums are all Doggiebox using nskit v.7. I really like the polish and natural feel of this kit. I need to tone the toms down a little bit, but one thing at a time. This is an example of "pushing the tempo" during the chorus to make the thing feel a little more human.
I had posted this before, but at the time it had no vocals and was fairly bare bones. This is an all new version using my new gear (MXL 990 mic, M-Audio monitors, Tascam US-122 interface, Fender Pro Junior... the list goes on.
On 15-Mar-2005 11:16, Sion Morris wrote:
Its particularly good when the harmonies come in.
Yeah, I like the harmony vox, too. Very smooth! :)
(I gotta learn to get a good mix for harmony vox on my pieces, which I haven't really done yet, but I've been kicking around a few songs that are intended to have 'em, so I can't escape the learning process :)
Any chance you could send the drum db over for me to look at for tips?
Mike's ns_kit7 dbkit is in the DB file library: http://www.doggiebox.com/library/dbkits/nskit_v7_linked.zip and his corrected URL for the dbsong is http://webpages.charter.net/mcarlyle/comealive.dbsong
I _knew_ I heard a little buzz roll at the start of that post-solo fill! :) Interesting stuff with the hats, too, sprinkling in some open and pedal hits amongst the closed-hat patterns.
Cheers, Carl
I try to play the hi hat like it might really be played, of course. I know that I can't be beating on the hi-hat and riding a cymbal at the same time, for example. The pedal also kicks in during any sort of lengthy fill that might otherwise occupy my virtual hands.
Thanks for the post Carl. I was about to go digging around for the db song link again!
On Mar 15, 2005, at 6:32 AM, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:
Any chance you could send the drum db over for me to look at for tips?
Mike's ns_kit7 dbkit is in the DB file library: http://www.doggiebox.com/library/dbkits/nskit_v7_linked.zip and his corrected URL for the dbsong is http://webpages.charter.net/mcarlyle/comealive.dbsong
I _knew_ I heard a little buzz roll at the start of that post-solo fill! :) Interesting stuff with the hats, too, sprinkling in some open and pedal hits amongst the closed-hat patterns.
Cheers, Carl
-- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/
-- Zygoat Doggiebox discussion list - http://www.doggiebox.com To unsubscribe, view archives or change your options: http://lists.zygoat.ca/mailman/listinfo/doggiebox
____________ Mike Carlyle Wilbraham, MA USA
On 15-Mar-2005 23:52, Mike Carlyle wrote:
I try to play the hi hat like it might really be played, of course. I know that I can't be beating on the hi-hat and riding a cymbal at the same time, for example. The pedal also kicks in during any sort of lengthy fill that might otherwise occupy my virtual hands.
Up to now, I've tended dropped hats and kicks entirely during what I imagine to be two-handed fills -- though, yeah, I suppose there's no reason a dextrous drummer couldn't keep it going with the foot pedals while flailing away at the snare or toms. Can any drummers comment on what they do with the feet, if anything, whilst executing that fast, phrase-ending fill?
Cheers, Carl
i usually keep 1/8th notes going on the hi-hat, or 1/4 notes on the bass drum, or alternating 1/8ths on the bass and hi-hat. for me it is a bit of a crutch as it allows me to keep a steady pulse going from with to branch out with my hands.
On Mar 18, 2005, at 2:40 AM, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:
On 15-Mar-2005 23:52, Mike Carlyle wrote:
I try to play the hi hat like it might really be played, of course. I know that I can't be beating on the hi-hat and riding a cymbal at the same time, for example. The pedal also kicks in during any sort of lengthy fill that might otherwise occupy my virtual hands.
Up to now, I've tended dropped hats and kicks entirely during what I imagine to be two-handed fills -- though, yeah, I suppose there's no reason a dextrous drummer couldn't keep it going with the foot pedals while flailing away at the snare or toms. Can any drummers comment on what they do with the feet, if anything, whilst executing that fast, phrase-ending fill?
Cheers, Carl
-- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/
-- Zygoat Doggiebox discussion list - http://www.doggiebox.com To unsubscribe, view archives or change your options: http://lists.zygoat.ca/mailman/listinfo/doggiebox
Three things, observed yesterday, while writing the drum part for a new song:
One - creating the song structure:
First section, Intro, no problem. Then I click on the '+' button to add a section - nothing. I click on Option+Command+N - zip. The Song dropdown works fine. Exactly the same with Playlist. Any idea why the buttons don't work? (Apologies, if someone else has raised this.)
Two - exporting the audio
I export the finished drums to an exisiting song in Logic Express. The tempos (tempi?) in Doggiebox and Logic are both set at 100 bpm, but the Doggiebox track started to run away from the rest of the song. With Logic, you can adjust the tempo of existing MIDI tracks to that of any imported audio. As the drums played faster than the MIDI tracks, I did so. The Doggiebox tempo clocked at 101.5 bpm. No biggie, but if I'd had some existing audio in the song, I would have had to go back to Doggiebox and reduce the tempo, in order to get a match in the original. Again, any idea why?
Three - volume issues (probably not a Doggiebox question!)
I boosted the volume in Doggiebox, using the slider to about 95, and when I played the imported track back, it clipped like fury. Around the 80 mark it was fine. I presume this is all down to the individual recording setup, but is there any indication of what the Doggiebox volume scale means in relation to any other measure?
Still a great piece of kit!
Speaking of hiccups in the latest build, I did a lot of DB work over the past weekend -- trying to be as rough with it as possible :) -- and have noticed a few quirks.
Particularly, I find that getting aggressive with the UI causes crashes :) If I've got some things selected and then quickly throw them somewhere they're not supposed to go and/or click a bunch of other things in rapid succession, the UI often packs up with a spinning beach ball of death or sometimes DB just closes. This can happen too if a long-fading sample is still playing back and I try to start messing around with other sections and generally smack the UI around while DB thinks it should be doing something else.
Similarly. I find that getting cocky and adding hits to the pattern editor while it is playing back has unpredictable results. Often this works fine, but other times DB will start to "skip" or lose beats, and if it gets sufficiently fed up with this treatment, DB just crashes again.
I actually found there was plenty I could do to make DB crash :) so I would like to suggest the addition of an "autosave" feature that you could set to do a snapshot of any open dbsong/dbkit every some-configurable-number-of minutes. That would be useful even in a stable, non-beta version, just as it would for lots of word processing apps.
There seemed to be some weirdnesses in the various select commands. I never quite figured it out, but sometimes Select All at least didn't seem to work for me. Anyone else find the select commands acting weird?
I found myself getting Patrickcarl events even after starting a new dbsong from scratch and then copying/pasting sections within it. They still seemed to be mostly occuring on beat 3, for whatever reason! Likewise, I also still found that trying to replace one variant with another still sometimes (but not in a way I could predict) causes the second icon to overlay the first (the first then being revealed if you try to erase the hit).
I often found that I wanted to delete a given bar from a section, but couldn't do this (AFAICT) by selecting the bar and hiting delete or backspace or whatever. I could only do it by Cmd-Xing to cut the bar in to the clipboard and then forgetting about it. Should the delete key work here like this?
I often found I wanted to have two sections open for easy viewing, like if I had made one section and wanted to see it for reference when making a variant. You could kind of do this by placing the two sections adjacent in the play list, selecting them (so that both display in the editing window) and then editing the new variant there. But perhaps there's a better way to do that, though I'm not sure what it might be .... some way of popping an individual section open in it's own window or something? Though you wouldn't want the whole gubbins of the editing UI in a window that you wanted use just as a visual reference ....
Oh, well, some thought there, anyway. I got lots of stuff done in DB over the last week, though. A couple of drum tracks ready to form the bases of new demos and the beginnings of several other songs being roughed out :)
Cheers, Carl
ps -- and though I said I could play the tambourine live myself, I don't actually _have_ a tambourine :} and decided one of the tracks I was working on wanted one, so I stuck the Garageband tambourines into my ns_kit7 dbkit along side the GB cowbell :)
I also got a PatrickCarl - it wanted to assign a drum, I didn't need, when I reopened a song after closing. I just assigned a sidestick and it played in place of a snare hit. Deleted one instance and left the others. No biggie.
Yeah, I find some weirdnesses in the Select operation. Trouble is, I just curse and work round it and forget the exact circumstances afterwards. Not much help to Ben and the guys, I'm afraid.
Sorry.
Adrian
----- Original Message ----- From: "Carl Edlund Anderson" cea@carlaz.com To: doggiebox@lists.zygoat.ca Sent: Monday, March 21, 2005 11:34 AM Subject: Re: [Doggiebox] Latest beta (IE7)
Speaking of hiccups in the latest build, I did a lot of DB work over the past weekend -- trying to be as rough with it as possible :) -- and have noticed a few quirks.
Particularly, I find that getting aggressive with the UI causes crashes :) If I've got some things selected and then quickly throw them somewhere they're not supposed to go and/or click a bunch of other things in rapid succession, the UI often packs up with a spinning beach ball of death or sometimes DB just closes. This can happen too if a long-fading sample is still playing back and I try to start messing around with other sections and generally smack the UI around while DB thinks it should be doing something else.
Similarly. I find that getting cocky and adding hits to the pattern editor while it is playing back has unpredictable results. Often this works fine, but other times DB will start to "skip" or lose beats, and if it gets sufficiently fed up with this treatment, DB just crashes again.
I actually found there was plenty I could do to make DB crash :) so I would like to suggest the addition of an "autosave" feature that you could set to do a snapshot of any open dbsong/dbkit every some-configurable-number-of minutes. That would be useful even in a stable, non-beta version, just as it would for lots of word processing
apps.
There seemed to be some weirdnesses in the various select commands. I never quite figured it out, but sometimes Select All at least didn't seem to work for me. Anyone else find the select commands acting weird?
I found myself getting Patrickcarl events even after starting a new dbsong from scratch and then copying/pasting sections within it. They still seemed to be mostly occuring on beat 3, for whatever reason! Likewise, I also still found that trying to replace one variant with another still sometimes (but not in a way I could predict) causes the second icon to overlay the first (the first then being revealed if you try to erase the hit).
I often found that I wanted to delete a given bar from a section, but couldn't do this (AFAICT) by selecting the bar and hiting delete or backspace or whatever. I could only do it by Cmd-Xing to cut the bar in to the clipboard and then forgetting about it. Should the delete key work here like this?
I often found I wanted to have two sections open for easy viewing, like if I had made one section and wanted to see it for reference when making a variant. You could kind of do this by placing the two sections adjacent in the play list, selecting them (so that both display in the editing window) and then editing the new variant there. But perhaps there's a better way to do that, though I'm not sure what it might be .... some way of popping an individual section open in it's own window or something? Though you wouldn't want the whole gubbins of the editing UI in a window that you wanted use just as a visual reference ....
Oh, well, some thought there, anyway. I got lots of stuff done in DB over the last week, though. A couple of drum tracks ready to form the bases of new demos and the beginnings of several other songs being roughed out :)
Cheers, Carl
ps -- and though I said I could play the tambourine live myself, I don't actually _have_ a tambourine :} and decided one of the tracks I was working on wanted one, so I stuck the Garageband tambourines into my ns_kit7 dbkit along side the GB cowbell :)
-- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/
Zygoat Doggiebox discussion list - <http://www.doggiebox.com> To unsubscribe, view archives or change your options: <http://lists.zygoat.ca/mailman/listinfo/doggiebox>
On 21/03/2005 08:53, Adrian Delso wrote:
I export the finished drums to an exisiting song in Logic Express. The tempos (tempi?) in Doggiebox and Logic are both set at 100 bpm, but the Doggiebox track started to run away from the rest of the song. With Logic, you can adjust the tempo of existing MIDI tracks to that of any imported audio. As the drums played faster than the MIDI tracks, I did so. The Doggiebox tempo clocked at 101.5 bpm. No biggie, but if I'd had some existing audio in the song, I would have had to go back to Doggiebox and reduce the tempo, in order to get a match in the original. Again, any idea why?
Did this problem, whatever exactly it was, ever get fixed? I remember various people reporting some problems with tempo drift, and I think i I remember some fixes regarding tempo drift in several releases since IE7, but wasn't sure what the full story was.
I've been messing around with GarageBand and Cubase as compositional tools, finding easy to cut myself a few short basic segments with DB to use as copyable/pasteable/repeatable drum loops in GarageBand or Cubase. Then I can pretty brainlessly change my mind about how long that bit in the pre-chorus or whatever is while I'm composing the song, and once I'm happy with it I can go back to my DB part and make cleverer drum part with more little performance and tempo variations for use in the proper recording. But I did wonder whether anyone had confirmed that when DB was told to do 100bpm, he consistently and reliably holds it to 100bpm?
Cheers, Carl
-
Adrian Delso -
Carl Edlund Anderson -
David Holloway -
Mike Carlyle -
Sion Morris