Programming Believable Drums

By Jason Johnston - the Rebel Leader

Can you program your own realistic sounding drums without (gasp) a drummer? Some say yes, some say no. Here are a few tips to help you get at least a little closer.

Start at the Source

Programming drums is all about triggering samples with MIDI information. The same rules apply to working with a real drum mer for a recording: You want some rhythm. You want some feel. You want a kit that sounds good. In the world of MIDI this entails having a sample based plug-in of some sort. Our two favourites around the rebel base are Addictive Drums and Battery 3. You can also find drum samples as part of other larger sample libraries like Sampletank and Dimension Pro. It is important to start with a decent enough source sound, or you will just be frustrated if you are trying to make them sound realistic.

Ready-made or Play-it-yourself

Some plug-ins come with MIDI beats built in, like Steinberg's Groove Agent 2 or the aforementioned Addictive Drums. These beats may not be exactly what you want, but they will sure get you grooving in a hurry. With any of the drum sample plug-ins you can also used pre made MIDI beats by companies like Groove Monkee. And then there is the long, often painful, but always rewarding direction of programming the beats yourself. You can do this by using a MIDI controller to trigger the sounds. A typical drum layout on a MIDI controller is found below.

An easy way to program is to play your best through the whole song and then go back and cut and paste the parts you like.

Make Some Frequent Mistakes

You can quantize your drums, which is something that forces the MIDI information into a particular grid, but remember: real drums sound like they are being played by a real person. And real people make mistakes. Don't forget to either leave in some mistakes or make some frequent ones if you have quantized your track. Not big ones, just small changes to make the track sound human. Take the snap off in Cubase or put it to Slip mode in Pro Tools and just slide around and humanize a few of those MIDI hits.

Share Your Reverb

One great way to blend your MIDI drums into the rest of your track is to create a "send effect" with some room reverb, then send not only your MIDI drums, but also a little bit of the other instruments to the send effect. Let them mix and mingle and create the illusion to the listener that they were all once in the same room together.

Supplements

If your drum sounds are not cutting it, maybe it is time at the end to supplement them. Many programmers will record some real cymbals, percussion or snare drum over top of their programmed drums. This can a lot of difference if you take the extra effort.

Wrapping Up

These are just a few of the drum programming tricks and approaches I have used over the years to try to create realistic sounding drums using MIDI. And the best part of all: There is no need to rent a van!

Backing Up A Pro Tools Session

By Jon Tidey - codename: Static

This will explain what you need to do in order to properly export a Pro Tools session to back it up or to send to someone else, with complete confidence that nothing will be lost in the process.

Open ProTools and push Ctrl/Command O and select the session you want to archive. So everything looks nice and organized fit all the tracks to the screen and Alt/Option A to view the entire session.

You may want to consolidate any regions that are chopped up, or anything that doesn’t start at the same time as the other tracks. This will also allow you to take the audio files and mix in another DAW. To do this select from the start of the session to the end of the region and use the hotkey Shift Alt/Option 3 to consolidate the track. This will create a new audio file, any fades will be written to the file, effects will not be however. If you are sending this to someone else this is a really good thing to do.

Next you will want to remove unused regions and audio files from the session. Go to the region list (right side panel) and Ctrl/Command Shift U to select the unused regions. Ctrl/Command Shift B will bring up the Clear Regions dialog. You want to remove only. This will minimize the amount of files that need to be copied.

So now comes the part where you save it to a new location. Push Ctrl/Command 2 to verify the session sample rate and depth. Go to the File menu and select Save Copy In…

Note that the Session Parameters should be the same as the current session. In items to copy you MUST click All Audio Files. You don’t have to click: Don’t copy fades files, but it makes the saved session smaller, and missing fades are recreated on opening anyway. Saving the session plugin folder is a good idea if you saved anything to it during the mix, you should have. Keep Copy Of on the file name to indicate this is not the original session. Make sure you are saving to a different drive than the one you are working off of, remember you want your backups on a different drive always. The exception would be if you are saving the session to burn to a DVD. Optionally, you may want to add the date to the file name as well.

Click Save and it will begin writing everything to the new location. This can take a while depending on the size of the session and computer speed. Thats it.

You can now take this Protools session to anyone else in the world with a Protools system and begin work again in seconds.

The Download on Digital Music Files

by Jason Johnston Pretty much all music is digital these days. Sometimes the file formats they come in can be confusing. So here's the download on digital music files. There are basically three kinds: Uncompressed audio formats (often referred to as PCM formats) are just as the name suggests — formats that use no compression. This means all the data is available, at the risk of large file sizes. Compression is not like the "audio" type of compression, but a digital format where it takes out redundant information. Exactly like the way pictures are compressed for viewing on the web. A .WAV file (typically a Windows format) or an .AIF audio file (typically on the Macintosh) are examples of uncompressed audio files. Lossless formatting applies compression to an uncompressed audio file, but it doesn't’t lose information or degrade the quality of the digital audio file. The WMA audio file format uses lossless compression and so does Apple Lossless. Lossy compression will result in some loss of data as the compression algorithm eliminates redundant or unnecessary information — basically it tosses what it sees as irrelevant information. Lossy compression has become popular online because of its small file size, it is easier to transmit over the Internet. MP3, OGG and Real Audio files uses a lossy compression. You can use a variety of programs to convert digital audio, from top end pro software like Steinberg's Wavelab to the more affordable and easy to use Cakewalk Pyro Software. In the end, the type of audio file conversion you might use depends on the final destination of that file: MP3 - Upload to sites like Myspace.com, Sonicbids, your own website.

OGG - Like an MP3 however it is a free licence to use it, but somehow not as common. You will often find this in the "linux" circles and on the "creative commons" websites. AAC or WMA - Not recommended, unless you want to be stuck in iTunes or Windows Media Player Real - stream audio using a "real" player WAV or AIF - (16 bit 44.1 kHz) to burn onto a CD

What does 16 bit 44.1 kHz mean? That is info for a later article on digital audio. This should get you making digital music without too much fret about the formats for now.