Glad to help Tom

What you say about adding a drum track sometime in the future makes a great deal of sense.

It's highly unlikely that I'll ever get a real drummer on my tracks so at the moment, I'm completely happy with my MIDI solution for my new stuff.

However, exactly as you've said, once I get the time, I intend to go back to my older stuff and replace the drum loops with purpose done tracks with EZD.

Steve

ORIGINAL: Frank Basile

Drag and Drop Drummer from years ago is now Smart Loops. The DDD interface is gone, but the loops that came with DDD... Dry Studio Kit and Percussion Kit, are still Smart Loops products that are now "ACIDized", which means they will conform to the tempo of your Cakewalk project (As Steve explained)

So like it or not, I'll hafta buy somethin. Pewp

I'm a big fan of acidized loops.  They are simple to use, readily available (some free, some very cheap) and they sound good (for the most part).  I have a lot of Beta Monkey loops and they have a lot of shuffles.  Also the tempos run the gamut from very slow to double kick speed metal type stuff.

When I first started using GTP, I thought I needed to have my drums mapped out, intricate and well, based in reality (can a drummer do this?).  I set about asking a lot of questions and got a lot of interesting opinions but nothing that got me any further in my own abilities.

Finally I just stopped worrying about all that and found as I made tunes with loops, I began to figure out how to make them work for me.  I found that I could easily slip edit clips to get just the one sound I wanted.  I could cut them and place them in order to create more intricate drums than the unedited loops could provide.  I wasn't creating anything super complex but they worked for my tunes.

My biggest discovery was that if I wrote a tune around one or two or three loops, I could go back after the tune was substantially done and rebuild a new drum track which was way more fun that trying to manipulate them during the creation of the tune.  Lots of times the end result was a much more dynamic song.

Anyway, I got a lot of good comments about my drum tracks even though they were a hodgepodge of kits.

A lot of sites like Beta Monkey, Smart Loops have free loops for download too.

Good luck to you.