Thanks Chuck and I'm sorry we had some disturbance. I've been off and on here since I got interested in DAWs and SONAR in 2007 or 08 and have never had rude, argumentative replies until today. I've also never blocked anyone, until today. Hopefully, things will get back to normal and be smooth again.
 
Am still enjoying your YouTube tutorials. You obviously have a good handle on all this, and more than just drums. I'll see if I can make a short MP3 of some drums and a bass track as a reference point for the basic sound we are getting with loops to this point. I've learned that a little EQ and the right reverb can make a world of difference.
 
Thanks again.
DS
 
 

Anderton, I went through my box of loops and found Rock and Slow Rock (I think those are the name.) vol 43 and 44, I think it is. I guess those are some Greg is on. I need to go back and read everything on the back cover.
 
Yes, Greg is a big ole fellow! I hadn't seen him in years until he was scheduled to do a session at Larry Beaird's in Berryhill by Nashville. It's over there by Blackbird. When I saw that Greg was book I reserved a slot for one song, but I went early and stayed late and we had a lot of good visiting time. I think we were both surprised to see how much we've both "grown" over the past 20 years. As luck would have it, Dan Dugmore was there too, and he's done a lot of steel for ZZ, which seems strange, but I think it was the Mescalaro album that most of it was on. When Greg and Dan got started we had a real ZZ fest.
 
Did you see Hardy when he was in Nashville engineering some of these? I'll see if I can post a pic of Joe and me many, many years ago at Ardent in Memphis. You will be surprised how different he looked back then. I'll leave it as my avatar until you say you have seen it, then I'll change back.
 
Great story! This is like dealing with home folks now!
DS
 
<Edit> Oh, I forgot this. When we were leaving I invited Greg to meet me for supper the next night. He said he couldn't because he was flying out to Los Angeles. I asked why and he just held up his drum stick case and said someone was flying him out there to play drums on some record I guess. I thought that was pretty cool to that see my ole Memphis buddy had made it in Nashville, and people were now flying him around the country to play on records. I have a few more good Greg stories I think you'd enjoy. If you prefer the privacy of email we can do that. If that suits better, pm me and I'll send you my email address.
 

Anderton

JustGotPaid
HaHa! Thanks Anderton! This is too good to be true!
 
I looked up Discreet Drums and see that one of my old Memphis friends, Greg Morrow, who is now a drummer in Nashville, did some of the Discreet Drums. Greg did a session for me in Nashville a while back and is the same ole Greg. I think he was voted Nashville Drummer of the Year last year.

Greg is terrific and talented. I used some of the Greg Morrow library, but mostly Chris McHugh for my neo- album. All the songs on my YouTube channel with acoustic drums use Discrete Drums.
 
But I also have a Greg Morrow story you'll enjoy. I took several multi-tracked loops from his first library and remixed/processed the living daylights out of them to create a collection of super-rude, nasty, industrial loops (they're all over my songs On Mars and Little Pieces). They were eventually released as the Turbulent Filth Monsters sample library (FWIW Depeche Mode are fans of it).
 
So I was at Summer NAMM and there was Greg Morrow with the guys from Discrete Drums. He's a big dude, as you know, and I was introduced as "Here's the guy who did Turbulent Filth Monsters." I fully expected him to say "So YOU'RE the A**HOLE who made my drums sound like ABSOLUTE GARBAGE!!!," and attempt to break my legs. Instead, he told me he thought the loops were really, really cool. In fact he was flattered. I became an even bigger Greg Morrow fan after that . Especially because he didn't break my legs.

Craig, I think the link to your youtube channel is wrong.  It can be found here.

Soundwise
Loops are like molecules, whereas one-shot samples are more like sub-atomic particles. Sometimes we need just wood or iron (wood&wire ) to build useful things and goods, and at other times we need to create/synthesize a new material, like Kevlar, nylon and whatnot to make other goods.
I've plenty of audio loops and sometimes use them to demo guitar gear, but have a hard time trying to find a set of loops that will help accomplish my musical ideas. So i prefer being an "alchemist" and create my own substances rather than being a "blacksmith" or a "carpenter". 

 
Exactly. On the songs where I use loops, I can get away with it only because they fit without having to do much other than chop them into little bitty pieces and put them back together again. However there's also much fun to be had in taking sub-atomic particles and turning them into molecules 
 
I really like multi-tracked drum libraries because you can totally mess them up - I mean, get creative with them. I'm working on a loop library now and the files were given to me as multitracked drums. Multitracked stuff is too complex for some people to deal with, but mixed loops can be too simplistic, so I'm considering going for more of a "stems" approach. We'll see if that works or not.

Anderton
Thank you! I fixed it in my post.
 
BTW I have not forgotten your request for the "high level" parts from the "Making Your Recorded Vocals Sound at Least Twice as Good" using SONAR that I did at GearFest. However, I've expanded it and will be doing "version 2.0" at AES on Saturday. At that point I'll post a link to the PDF somewhere, or at least email it to you.
 
I really need to finish the craiganderton.com web site (coming soon...as in, before 2019 for sure ) to host these kinds of things. 

Thanks.  So v 2.0 will make vocals sound 8x better (because your original made my crappy vocals sound 4x better).  Looking forward to it.

tnphelps, are you a member of NSAI and/or TSAI?

This may sound silly, but years ago when I started using drum loops I bought several CD's from Beta Monkey. No one ever mentions them these days, but that had a real slushy, live bar-room sound that I liked. No frills, but that's what I wanted on some songs.
 
Did the old Cakewalk Guitar Tracks 2 have something called Drag-n-Drop-Drummer? Or was that something totally different?

Ascap

So, basically, if all I plan to do  with drum midi like EZ Drummer and Superior Drummer is just put together some patterns, similar to building a song with loops, and I won't be doing any work on individual drums or special hits, etc., then there really is no advantage of drum midi over loops. Correct?

Tnphelps, with the "tn" in your name I thought you might be around Nashville.
DS

MIDI loops can be varied over a much wider tempo range than ACID type audio loops without causing artifacts.

You can also very quickly change kits or presets for a very different sound even if you don't want to tweak.

Another alternative is to use a plugin called Jamstix. I have had it for quite a while and it offers some of the benefits of a real drummer (not everything is necessarily on the beat or predictable, for example) but allows for tweaking the accuracy. It also will play drums in such a way that is actually possible for a real drummer to do it (it has knowledge of the fact that a drummer has only four appendages that they typically use for the performance). You can use it with its own drum sounds which are pretty good, or you can use it to drive EZDrummer or Superior Drummer. It's definitely worth having a look.

Justgotpaid - thanks for the kind words. We're still at it - just transitioned to an all-new site this past spring. If you remember the old hard copy CD days, then that goes back a while!
 
We've added a lot of drum loops since then - take a look if only to see what we have been up to since we began serving up those "lushy, live bar-room sound" grooves you dug!