Playing vs. Loops?

I learned early on to respect drummers.  My brother played and I sat down at his kit many times and just couldn't make it happen.  I was also lucky (?) enough over the years to play with both very good and very poor drummers and realized how much of a difference they make.  And, as with most instruments, good does not necessarily equal flashy.  Keep the beat, support the music, and be judicious with the show-off moments.

I've never used loops or anything to create my drum parts - not even early in the life of a song.  I know how I want the drums to sound, so I do it myself.  However, since I still don't have the coordination to play a kit, I do it with my keyboard, in layers like you mentioned.  Yes, it's tedious and slow, but when I'm done I have drum parts that have actually fooled some good drummers.

However, in the last couple of months I've been fortunate enough to be recording with a real, live drummer.  We started out recording him on an e-drum kit and have just started putting mics on his real drums.  We're still experimenting with mic placement and recording techniques, but the results have us both very excited.

Midi Loops are your best friend. They are the start off point for every song I write, though I fiddle with them incessantly (since I am also a drummer, I can't help myself).

I stopped using drum loops some time back for most of my stuff. Not enough control, and I can achieve what I want with the Midi stuff and still make it sound awesome.

Good drummers are a rare but beautiful breed

Most of the times i sketch something up with my padKontrol and then program the drums. Works perfectly for me but it can be quite a bit of editing to make the drums get the right feel. Slightly offset hits and swing can be crusial depending on the feel and groove of the song (although sometimes a perfectly quantized beat with exactly the same velocity on every hit can be just right for some songs as well, the robotic drum machine sound is not automatically wrong). Don't forget that you can use slight pitch shift changes on the drums as well to get a more realistic sound as real drummers very rarely seem to be able to strike the drum skin on the exact same spot with every hit

What a good drummer could do for your songs is amazing. If they play for the song and are creative, incorporating dynamics, using lots of cymbals, and playing metronome tight, but still creating a killer groove.

You just can't do that with loops, programming, or tapping out the rythmns. Sure if it's really basic poppy stuff, you can get away with it, even commercial records do. But if you want to create real music, with real people, you need a real drummer.

But, that takes finding one, mic'ing all that stuff up (or heaven forbid we trigger, yuck). Tapping out the rythmn on the keyboard (i have pads too)  is so much faster for us in the home studio.

When i first started music and then when i started to speak with americans rappers and artists , they always told me "you have some damn good beats ", or " i need one of your beats......

so they don't even call it a track but beat !! this is for me the most important part in a track !! (of course it hardly depends on the music you make but i can quickly judge a production only by hearing what's done on drums !!)
never use loops here except for some basic techno **** or some percussions , but let's say one or two trackc every 100 tracks !

I totally agree that the beat (drums) can make or break a song! Getting the right groove, getting the right feel for the song is not easy and to make things more challenging; every song is unique.

If one chooses to use loops it may work to a certain extent but not entirely, I read an article that estimated most songs sent to A&R failed because the beat was not quite right either entirely or in some parts just didn't quite feel right.

In fact when I was working with a major label they nitpicked the beat to death, the beat was OK but not entirely.  At the meeting I sat there with the manager and a young person who seemed like an assistant who took part in decisions.  Anyway, they loved the melodies and everything else except the beat, {oh well}  it was back to the drawing board to work on the beat in their studio booked over two weeks to rework the beat on the songs, yes they gave me a demo CD with some beats as an idea of what THEY wanted.

Honestly it takes me more time working on the beat 'the feel' compared to other parts in a song.  All those nuances, subtleties, getting the feel, the vibe, the groove right.  Sometimes I go back and listen and be at pains as to; should it be like this or that? so I give it a rest and come back later in the week. Meanwhile I've got the vocals, piano and bass down beautifully in one take!

There's an old saying; 'keep it simple' and sometimes 'less is best'....

For just one example; half-time on the snare or no snare at all during the verses (but something else drives it along such as; hi-hats and/or rhythm guitar), so when it comes to the big chorus the additions (such as extra kick and added snare) can really make the chorus standout even-more.  The same principle could be applied not only to drums but other instruments also.... Arrangements also play a vital role, and I'm not talking just basic 'song' arrangements intro-verse-chorus, I talking about arrangements of 'all instruments' in just one part for example such as the verse or chorus.

So you see, it's the way other instruments (bass, guitars, piano, whatever) interact with the drums, everything in there needs to be considered....

There are many times I've had to re-record the bass for example because later as the song progressed the bass didn't flow quite right in some parts with the drums and other instruments. Other times I've had to completely remove an instrument because maybe on it's own it was OK but against the other parts including drums it just didn't sit right!

I've had a certain music library kick a song back to me because they didn't like the sound of the drums in the song. The rest of the instrumentation was fine... "but that ride blew me away when it came in" was the comment....  so drums are very important.....

I've generated drum tracks with PRV. And I've used loops too. Both methods are laborious and tedious and very time consuming, and in no way guarantee a good drum track. So last year I started using Jammer for my drums. Not only is it much easier, now people tell me my drum tracks sound good, which was very unusual with the first two methods. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. And it leaves me more time to play guitar/bass and record and compose.....the things I love to do.

I use a Korg nanopad to tap out beats, then quantize. Very easy in Ableton (Sonar could learn a lot from Ableton midi editing, sorry, off subject) to make different parts out of it, in real time.

Anyway that said. Yes, I would still rather have crappy recorded acoustic drums, but I don't have a kit. Trying to talk the wife into that I need one, then she'll say what is that pad and software for then? Oh, but I need a new Orange head first......

Basically, I come from a different world from ya'll, I WANT crappier sounding stuff. The midi drums are just too damn good. That "goodness" comprises my art... LOL..... weird, huh?

ShadDOH


Perfection is our goal, "excellence" will be tolerated...

Everything is perfect. Kind of like people. You, are a perfect "you", never duplicated. An artisitic creation is always a perfect creation, as there isn't a standard to really say different. That would be silly. It's in the eye of the artist of course, the artist is their own harshest critic. It's perfect when you say it's perfect. Sometimes a few shaky notes or out of tune guitar, are, in essence, "perfect".
 
 

Original: Dreambliss

I love programming the drums.  One of my fav things to do.  And of course I'm always tweaking them too.

+1, don't matter if it's laying down a rythmic foundation to build from or adding that final groove to a drumless instrumental getting that groove down is definitely one of the favourites when composing tracks (or as it's called in hiphop which Zo so nicely pointed out "making beats").

mcourter


I've generated drum tracks with PRV. And I've used loops too. Both methods are laborious and tedious and very time consuming, and in no way guarantee a good drum track. So last year I started using Jammer for my drums. Not only is it much easier, now people tell me my drum tracks sound good, which was very unusual with the first two methods. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. And it leaves me more time to play guitar/bass and record and compose.....the things I love to do.

For the main I don't mind doing my own beats because most of the time I know what I want but I may consider Jammer, if it can get most of the job done in less time it takes to make scrambled eggs then I'll be happy.

Jammer comes as MFX, cool that it works with whatever drum-kit sounds plugins ones has in their setup. Seems worth the price.

 
 
 Doesn't matter what you use to create your music with, just so long as you create it. By that I mean you can think of "LOOPS" as another way of strumming a guitar with distortion, or adding Melodyne to your vocals for singing.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with using loops or effects or whatever it may be as long as you are the one creating the song.
 
Where the problem starts is when a person takens another persons ideal for a song and their tag line so to speak. Big, big problems.
 
I have used loops for some of my songs in the past, but the thing is I have a 100% legal right to do so being as I purchased them from a reputable company. Not to mention what I have used on the loops isn't nothing that I can't do myself using VST's or pedal effects live, the thing is it increases the work flow.
 
So many times people forget that a loop can be chopped and or midi can be used also. Not to mention creating a soft synth as a drum sounds.
 
Bobby
 

When drum machines were fairly new, my drummer friend heard one that had been programmed by a drummer to play YYZ.  He said it was excellent and showed the difference between a drum machine programmed by a drummer vs. a non-drummer.

If I had and had the time to study a large library of percussion loops, had a good sense of how to blend a bass kick loop with a high hat loop and add snare, or just knew a loop with the right beat, then yes, building a beat to match what's in my head for a particular song would be fairly easy.

But I'm nowhere close to that so I try to build them myself, which for fully original songs (as opposed to any sort of cover) is a struggle. 

Anyway, I've read good comments about Jammer before so I'm going to go listen to some of Mark's stuff and see if I think it's a good investment for me too.