MIDI sampled drums and REAL cymbals played by human (NOW WITH SAMPLES)

Just some thoughts Matt, as a drummer / drum programmer. Not intended to be negative in any way.

First, good cymbals are going to cost you an arm and a leg. If you do some basic research on the net, you will see that B20 alloy cymbals are the premium alloy used in most professional cymbals, and B8 the more budget version. As I see (hear) it, budget cymbals can be got away with in a loudish 'bar band' type of situation, but almost never cut it when recording, sounding very cheap and trashy. Of course this can sound great for some chinas and splashes, but generally its not going to sound good. Most drummers who take it seriously and can afford it will spend at least twice as much on their cymbals as the base drum hardware, simply in order to get a quality match and blend in their sound. If you are not prepared to spend that much on cymbals, given the quality of kits, tunings, mics and room environments in BFD and other top line drum romplers such as Superior Drummer2, then you are going to have a mismatch that is going to be difficult if not impossible to match sonically. Also remember you will own one set of cymbals, and yet have the choice of many kits. Each kit will have a cymbal set or three that will sound right for the kit and style of music, it is unlikely that one set of cymbals will do for every situation you are likely to want to perform on your album project.

For what its worth, I believe the key to getting the right cymbal sound lies in the judicious and skillful use of both the microphone bleed and overhead mic positioning in your mix. My advice for MIDI drum programming, come into Sonar as a stereo out track if you are not already doing so and do all the drum mixing within BFD itself, utilising and mastering all the mic bleed and overhead positioning and eq'ing and effects tools within the software itself to get a coherent sound.

If you are not upgraded to BFD2 then I strongly recommend doing that, for far less that the price of a single top line cymbal.

Another alternative, get either an electronic kit such as Alesis, Yamaha or Roland to play in your various grooves and upgrade your skill set. You can always then if required pull in an experienced drummer to lay down particularly difficult tracks and still have the scope to perform your own personalised editing on them pre production.

Another alternative again, if you dont have one, get a MIDI controller such as a Korg PadKontrol to speed up the initial MIDI drum track input. The skills to lay down a decent drum groove come very quickly and in a similar way to real drumming, you adopt a velocity sensitive way of playing the cymbals into the song to get musically closer to  the desired effect, adding your custom edits later if required.


Just my thoughts.

I saw something a while back on this very topic. It was about how to get a midi drum kit/track to sound more realistic.

The whole idea is to set up the track with midi... use loops, or whatever you use to do that. Then using ONLY a high hat and a stick (or two) play the high hat along with the drum track and record it with a mic.

The simple addition of the high hat with the human factor will cause the listener to focus on the human aspect of the "drums" due to the slight timing variation in the high hat.

Its a really cool trick that works and a used high hat can be gotten pretty cheaply.

Great advise already given!

In the late 80's I worked with a Cook islander drummer, he taught me a lot about the finer nuances, slight variations in dynamics, fills where they feel right and all whatever to make it sound more human.  Being a black islander he has a great natural rhythm, and boy was he very fussy, he would nag, nag, nag, me, always nitpicking until I got it right! LOL!

Suggestion:

If you feel that most of your work is fairly much the same style?

Work on getting great hats happening, nice variations of velocity, dynamics and fills, also work on the cymbals.  Get all that sounding great about 5 minutes length of various ideas. Then save that project.

If midi then it's quick n easy to change the tempo, and then the usual cut/copy/paste arrange whatever way to fit the next song and if need be do some alterations but the point is; a lot of the work (performances) is already done.

That said; your album will have a style of drummer (drumming) that is consistent throughout your album, it will seem like you're using the same drummer (give him/her a name??? LOL)

-

The cymbals in BFD/BFD2 can sound quite good. As with anything it's all in how you use them.

In terms of the basic idea though, even with real drums some folks will track without cymbals and then go back and do the cymbals after the fact, because of the much greater control it provides. So, even folks who could easily do it all at once sometimes don't in the studio because it provides better results.

Sabian ought to be pretty good... the guy who owns the company is named Mr. Zildjian.

:-)

Check this OUT>>>>>   this is the video I spoke about....

Drum tips

have fun,   great advice

Hmmm... and even better here is John explaining his new V4 ZenDrum setup. Mine is a V3, so I can't do this stuff. The new V4 can have two to four (depending on the style of ZenDrum you have) pedal inputs. So he has a closed hihat pedal and a kick drum pedal. It really makes it possible to do so much more since you really now have the same four independent things going on that a real drummer would.

I wish I could do that, but the V4 upgrade would cost me $400 plush shipping, and then a couple good pedals and it would probably be $650 or more, and I can't afford it.

All of the BFD hihats have more hits than that. Most of them have 90 or upwards, some the full 127. BFD's drum kits are extremely extensive. The ones that come with BFD itself are a little less so, because they don't want to have to ship 15 DVDs. But they sell expansion packs with the higher quality ones, and the ones that come with BFD2 itself are higher quality that the default ones that came with BFD1. BFD2 specific kits have lots of articulations per kit piece as well.

In terms of the sound, the BFD2 kits are not processed. They are like recording drums raw, well but raw. So you aren't limited really. Just as you would with a real kit, you process them to get the sound you want, which can be a pretty wide range for any given kit. For some people that's the appeal of BFD, and for others who want something quick and simple it's not so appealing.

I have something very similar but it has 88 keys

BTW, here John explains his V4 ZenDrum, which has more capabilities. He's doing what I want to do, but I can't afford to upgrade mine right now. He is using a hihat and kick drum pedal, which makes it a whole differnt sort of deal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFGFfsJUPsQ

I have a Alesis USB e-drum trap kit, a MIJ Tama Starclassic performer birch kit with 7 toms and lots of cymbals, 9 custom made Ashiko hand drums, a bunch of metal Dumbecks, a Korg PadKontrol and the keyboards.

The Zen Drum looks cool... but I really don't see how the MIDI output is much different than that from a good keyboard.

There are only 127 levels of velocity in MIDI... and even fewer in most sample sets.



I think the hot percussion controller right now is the Mandala *snare* controller.

best,
mike


edit spelling

Rather than being about the midi data itself, it is about how you play and what parts of the body do the playing and how that data is input into the system. A keyboard is an excellent controller but the feel of the action and positioning of the keys may not suit drumming and finger drumming that we are talking about. The keyboard suits harmony and melody and that is what is was really intended to do and it does that so well. Yes we input percussion things from the keyboard but as a drummer myself it is not quite the same as playing holding sticks behind the kit. And playing percussion from a keyboard would be different to playing a trigger that only needs to be touched, not move a key through a distance before getting the sound. They are not alike at all.

Mandala is cool and interesting and more affordable. It seems it suits the use of drum sticks so stick control is required.  Now up to 6 or 7 zones could be fiddly to control with sticks and how well does it handle fingers. But many drummers are handy with stick control so it could be good as well. The 128 zone mode is very interesting and I like the way things can be controlled from centre to outside edge. It is a different concept again to Zendrum.

I am thinking something where more body parts are involved. eg fingers and the types of independence you can achieve with that. Zendrum straps as part of you and you are moving your body, your arms, your hands and fingers and talking to over 24 zones and all with precision timing and control. Playing over very carefully designed and laid out touch sensors. Nothing like a keyboard so then the keyboard simply cannot do anything like a Zendrum. There are some cool videos on Youtube where people have got some great melodic and harmonic sounds set up on them as well. Means interesting scales and chords and melodies not previously thought about or arrived at.

The fingers are probably very capable of creating the rhythms and when you start using your palms and parts of your arm as well then more parts of the body are getting involved now and creating sound. And as they say sounds and music created no other way. I believe it. We are now moving into finger control, speed, independence etc.. Imagine how a great tabla player would go on Zendrum. It means you can record 6 or 8 percussion parts all at once and in one pass. Fast. And because you are using only two hands you cannot really overplay the percussion parts which can so often happen when you lay down percussion parts one by one. Its the sparsness in a way that is also so attractive in the Zendrum. Some people in those videos are not playing that well and they are overplaying also. It sounds great when it is being played sequentially and by someone with fantastic time. Thanks Dean also for that great video link to the Zendrum Z4 setp with John Emrich. That is just incredible!! Yes I think the foot pedal thing would be great and I had no idea about the custom setup of your own triggers as well. That is something.

Playing the actual acoustic instruments is a step better than Zendrum. But Zendrum goes a long way to providing an exciting way to play your music in and with a lot of feel and dynamics and shifting in tone.

On the subject of doing multiple things with one's hands I pointed to a link showing the future of touch screens here:
http://www.musiccomputing.com/motioncommand

Motion Command can sense up to six touches. Watch the videos. See how the mouse and qwerty keyboard are no longer needed. In one video there are three audio clips down the bottom on a track all after each other. With three fingers he picks them all up and places them all on tracks and all at once. Better than the mouse and going to get them one after the other. The mouse pointer is doing only one job at a time and we are using almost a whole arm (hand) to do it. Won't it be great when we can touch 3 or 6 parts of our software and control those parts at once. Workflow will get better then.

Zendrum, I want it and I want it now!

timidi

droddey


well, that's interesting. I tried out BFD a few years ago and didn't really like it. I have EZ drummer, the sonar drum thing (forget the name), and addictive. I was assuming BFD was basically in the same ballpark. I really have a hard time with these drum synths though. I don't know why. I think it's because they are all pretty much designed for hitting hard. I've been leaning towards my old korg and roland hardware synths for drums lately because they pick up nuance a lot better for me. The sounds are no where near the sample based softsynths but at least I can feel something. But, then, I have to deal with the midi lag of the hardware. It's a real head scratcher for me.

Oh, definitely not. BFD compared to the SONAR drum kit thing is like a Ferrari compared to a Honda. It's very powerful and has very high quality drum kits with high velocity level counts and lots of articulations. You can watch some of these videos where John is playing some of the expansion pack kits via an e-drum kit triggering BFD kits. Keeping in mind that these are meant to demonstrate the sounds, not to be entertaining as drumming videos.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO6D0QD0mcg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTEkLYXOKQA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JDig1vVpIQ
 

Well the good news is I'm looking to work on my drumming skills and plan to hopefully get my skills up to scratch in the next few months to play the drums myself. I have a $4000 MIDI kit (the ones with the mesh pads which feel like a real kit) I can borrow from the same friend who is also lending me his Sabian AA cymbals. I then will ensure my cymbal playing is as good as possible and if my kick playing (my weakness) isn't too great I can always fix it in sonar as necessary. I'm feeling pretty confident about this.

I was considering going down the finger drumming route but I really want to work on my drumming skills and get much tighter so I'm glad to be going there. I'm just so lucky to have a friend who is able to lend me all this awesome gear!!!

One thing you will have to if you intend replacing the cymbals is go back into BFD and eliminate ALL traces of the cymbals from the Overheads/Room & Ambience channels. This includes all the bleed settings on all your other drums, otherwise you're going to end up with weird phasing artifacts, stereo imaging problems etc.

FWIW, I think you're underestimating the quality you can achieve with a little careful programming inside BFD, especially if you invest in some of the Expansion packs.