Midi Grooves & Fills

I'll be watching this one too.
I'm thinking of transferring many of the great sounding loops from my DR880 and making my own collection of groove clips. Ok they're a bit dated but then so am I.

Sharke: What I have noticed about Groove monkey, is the hi-hats sound machine like, I use them and have done some really cool stuff, however I have a song with a basic straight forward drum beat (boom tap boom tap) and I searched thru all of the groovemonkey, bfd and the grooves included with sonar and could not find any that sounded correct (the hi hats). I even spent a couple of hours trying to edit one groove, but did not succeed. Just so you know, I am not trashing Groove Monkey grooves at all, I love them and use them all the time.  I just drag the groove from the browser to the MIDI track and go, should I be doing anything else (other than adjusting the mixer in the drum program)?

Glenn: I am old school, I like straight forward beats, nothing terribly complicated, just variations of really straight forward beats. I just wish I could buy like 150 generic fills. Nothing wrong with being dated! :)

Beware, just made a purchase from SlamTracks and am not able to download anything. May be a minor issue, however don't purchase until you hear back from me!

There are a number of different vendors that provide drum grooves and fills. Check out the vendors listed over on the DigiFreq Deals page, which provide 10% off all their products...
http://www.digifreq.com/digifreq/deals.asp

Scott

--
Scott R. Garrigus - http://garrigus.com
* Author of the Cakewalk Sonar and Sony Sound Forge Power book series: http://garrigus.com/?PowerBooks
* Author of the Cakewalk Sonar ProAudioTutor video tutorial series: http://garrigus.com/?ProAudioTutor
* Publisher of the DigiFreq free music technology newsletter: http://digifreq.com/?DigiFreq
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I know you are just looking specifically for the MIDI data, but I recently bought EZ Drummer for a really low price and added on three drum kits (Nashville, Vintage, and Classic) which were also on sale.  Each of the drum kits, including the default Pop/Rock kit that comes with EZ Drummer has a large set of grooves and fills (e.g., Intros, Verses, Choruses, Fills) and any of the data can be used with any of the kits.  I find their grooves to be very natural and usable.

One caution: GM drum mapping will work with EZ Drummer but the EZ Drummer grooves may need to be edited to work with GM mapping.  Example: F#3 in EZ Drummer is a hi-hat just like it is in any GM kit; however, EZ Drummer may also have other hi-hat hits on different notes that you will need to translate for GM kits.

This is not really what you are looking for, but if you are interested in EZ Drummer for other reasons, I think you will like the grooves.

Well, the SlamTrak guys got back to me and I did get the packs I purchased. I get nervous sometime cuz everything is email and pay pal, there is no phone or address. I also browsed around to find information on them and everything was like a year old so I was hoping they didn't go out of business.  But I got the grooves and I am happy. They have some pretty cool stuff, each pack was $20. So cheap to find out. I already played with some of them, they specialize in Metal and Hard Rcok, they even have some "AC\DC" grooves which is way cool. And they sound pretty good.  I went back thru all of my groove mokeys stuff and found a folder full of fills from the Rock Essentials or the power rock packs. I guess I didn't pay attention to where they were installed.

What makes a hi hat sound natural? Obviously every hit can't be exactly the same velocity, and the timing may fluctual a bit. I have attempted to create grooves and can never get the hi hats exactly right. Like I said earlier, when other instruments are mixed in, they sound perfect, but for drum intro or a spot where there is just vocals and hi-hats, they sound mechanical to me.

Konradh: sometimes I have to do some "re-mapping" as well. Each hi hat in BFD has 9or 10 variations.

@ konradh - hey, you got the classic -what do you think?  I'm still saving the money to send you for it..
 
The grooves that come with EZ are very good.  You can buy them separately f very little but, as konradh said, they will need some remapping.  They also do pack of only fills.  All very good, played by top notch drummers.
 
I think EZ or Superior is worth getting for the sound too.

Let's say I slap out some drum parts on my pad controller. Being a human the hits are going to be slightly off no matter how good I play. I can use a program (like Sonar) that takes those hits and puts them in prefect time. That's called quantize.

It's a little more in depth than that but as far as I know that's the basic gist. If you open the Step Sequencer in Sonar you'll see a Quantize function (I think... it's been a while). The opposite of quantize is Humanize which makes the notes slightly off time.

Cheers.

so when Sharke referred to the midi groves as being "unquantized" (above), the midi notes are not directly on the beats? cool, i learned another detail!

Thanks!