Week 145: End Boring MIDI Drum Patterns!
 
Personally I think this is one of my coolest tips ever, but you can be the judge of that. Here’s the scenario.
 
You have a 2-bar MIDI drum loop that you roll out for 16 bars, so it’s the same two bars over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. No wonder people fall asleep listening to your music.
 
You could go in and tweak notes around to try and make things different, while burning up a lot of time in the process. But hey—we have computers! How about letting Mr. SONAR do the work for us?
 
I’ve often said MIDI FX are one of the most underused and least appreciated areas of SONAR, but they can do a lot. We’re going to use them to banish boring MIDI drum patterns forever by introducing musically useful variations.
 
1. Insert a Quantize MIDI FX into your MIDI drum pattern track. We’ll call this Q1.
2. Insert a second Quantize MIDI FX into your MIDI drum pattern track. We’ll call this one Q2. It’s very important that this one follow Q1.
3. Set up Q2 for the desired quantization—for now, let’s say 16th notes with full Strength and no Swing. In other words, plain vanilla boring quantization.
4. Q1 is the fun plug-in because we’ll have it randomize the start times. Normally this would produce all kinds of crazy and probably useless patterns, but having quantization afterward tames the randomness and can convert the craziness into non-repetitive, syncopated, and very cool drum parts.
 

 
Here are some tips on how to set Q1’s parameters. Make no mistake based on not playing around with this enough: you can create subtle, very natural variations if you want...or you can make it sound like the drum kit is falling down several flights of stairs.
 
Resolution: This should be equal to, or coarser than, Q2’s resolution. The coarser the resolution, the greater the variation. (If Q1’s resolution is finer than Q2’s, nothing significant will happen because any changes will be undone by Q2.) When starting out, I recommend resolution equal to Q2, or perhaps a little coarser—e.g., if Q2’s resolution is 1/16, use 1/16, 1/8 triplet, or 1/8 for Q1.
 
Random: First, make sure Q1’s random function is enabled. The more randomness, the more…randomness. If the Q1 and Q2 resolutions are the same, anything below 50% won’t make a difference because Q2 will undo any changes. If you want some occasional, mild changes, even 51% or 52% can produce useful variations where it sounds like the drummer is throwing in a few offbeats. If Q1’s resolution is coarser than Q2’s, then Random percentages below 50% will make a difference. The Random parameter value is crucial, so play with it to get a feel for what’s happening.
 
Strength: This doesn’t really seem to make a difference, or if it does, it’s swamped by the Resolution and Random settings.
 
Note that when you make a change in Q1, you’ll need to stop and start the transport before the change takes effect. However if you’re looping the drum pattern, then it will “reset” when it goes back to the beginning so there’s no need to start/stop.
 
Also note that Q1 really is random. In order to avoid “the big one that got away” syndrome, you might want to Process > Apply Effect > MIDI Effects and listen to determine if Mr. SONAR has created a truly fabulous drum groove. Don’t worry about unchecking the box about deleting the MIDI FX; if you don’t like what you hear, Undo is your friend and you can try again.
 
But wait - there's more! Q2 doesn't just have to sit there and bring weirdness back into reality. Don’t forget that you can further embellish the quantization effect with Q2's processing—add swing, randomize some more, etc.
 
 

Week 146: The Perfect Fadeout
 
When you want to fade out a song using automation on the master bus, you can either take the time to place nodes exactly where you want them...or you can save much time using this tip for obtaining the Perfect Fadeout. I've been using this technique on all songs requiring a fade for the last couple months, and it works every time. As in, every time! Here's the step-by-step.
 

1. Open the volume automation envelope on your master bus.
2. Add a node where you want the song to start fading.
3. Add another node where you want the song to have faded out, and drag this node down to zero volume.
4. Add a third node equidistant between the fadeout start and end nodes.
5. Right-click on the envelope between the fadeout start and midpoint, and then choose Slow Curve.
6. Right-click on the envelope between the midpoint and fadeout end, and then choose Fast Curve.

 

 
Done! Of course you may want to do weird fadeouts sometime, but when you just want a song to fade out smoothly and in a subjectively pleasing way, I'm pretty sure this will do it for you.