Recording shit.

[alphacorvus]

Does anyone else here use Drumkit from Hell 2?

I have it but I haven't done much productive with it..just some test ideas and kit tweaking.

All this money spent on guitar and recording and I'm still a lazy bastard..ha!

 

[bball_1523]

Battery lets you randomly vary the pitch and amplitude of a drum hit. You can also choose to decay the envelope faster or perhaps have a longer attack time etc. It also lets you use velocities so that you can easily vary samples so that all your hi-hat hits for instance don't sound the same.

Fruity Loops eats dick.

That's pretty much the distinction.

Oh with the panning, I'd say go hard left and hard right. I always go 100% with my rhythm tracks and I put the leads around 30-50 depending.

Compression does just that. It compresses a waveform so that you can chop off some peaks and the more you compress, the more everything normalizes and becomes equal volume. It lets you do things like enhance the attack times, get more volume out of your recording... pump everything hard so that there is a wall of sound. The Bloodbath-ish recording I posted is heavily compressed.

If I'm not wrong, I thought you could do exactly what battery does in fruityloops. you just have to click on the sample options. I haven't used it in a while anyway, and I can't really 'use" these music programs on my garbage computer anyway.

 

[Anarkissed]

I was thinking that too...but I haven't actually bothered with playing around with those options anyway, they confuse me too much! When i'm in a less lazy mood i'll fiddle around a bit more.

I think one other big question would be - would buying a new mike (e.g. an SM57) make things that much easier in the recording process?

 

[Kenneth R.]

having a good mic is key to recording, if you're doing the mic-up method.

as for how cubase does drums: it uses a standard midi event editor. its similar to the big screen in fruity loops where you pop in your colored drum sections, although cubase's is more editable and IMO works/sounds better. you can set a VST instrument to play your midi triggers.

compression is an infinite drop off. you set the position of the "cliff" and it drops everything beyond it. this is used on the bottom end to cut out static and noise from pickups and wiring, and on the top end to cut sharp screaching treble.
it can also be used to limit the maximum dB level of an input, so that you don't clip your source on the way in. it limits the max level of the sound wave and amplifies the rest to near that volume, so you don't lose any sound to "hitting the ceiling" of the recording program's capacity. (0dB). however the drawback is the more you compress, the more dynamic distinction (loud/soft) you lose, since it equalizes a lot of the volume. also, heavy compression can actually drop some of your playing over the edge as well if it's soft, low, or high enough. its a powerful tool that has to be used carefully.

 

[Anarkissed]

Thanks for explaining that in english, Silent Song Although, what does VST mean?

 

[Kenneth R.]

Virtual something? i actually don't know...

what it IS, is a progam that manipulates sound the way that instrument would. a VST guitar would sound close to a guitar as it plays the track. a VST bass would sound like a bassist playing the same part... its made up of a manipulation of a source wave, (shifting and amplifying, cutting, whatever it takes) to make it look (and so sound) like the same wave through the selected instrument. basically, its just a program that turns information into sound. (midi is not music, its info or instructions to the computer "play this note now!" etc). a VST instrument reads the instructions and performs the music, like a computerized musician and instrument in one. you can usually tweak them to suit your needs. you can't record programmed midi, but you can tell a VST instrument to play what you've programmed, and record that.

as we were talking about earlier, Battery and LM-7 are popular VST drums.

 

[atilla000]

Virtual something? i actually don't know...

what it IS, is a progam that manipulates sound the way that instrument would. a VST guitar would sound close to a guitar as it plays the track. a VST bass would sound like a bassist playing the same part... its made up of a manipulation of a source wave, (shifting and amplifying, cutting, whatever it takes) to make it look (and so sound) like the same wave through the selected instrument. basically, its just a program that turns information into sound. (midi is not music, its info or instructions to the computer "play this note now!" etc). a VST instrument reads the instructions and performs the music, like a computerized musician and instrument in one. you can usually tweak them to suit your needs. you can't record programmed midi, but you can tell a VST instrument to play what you've programmed, and record that.

as we were talking about earlier, Battery and LM-7 are popular VST drums.

That's interesting, I've put almost every riff I ever made in GP4, mostly with drums, which means that my pc is full of prog'd MIDI. Unfortunately, I once tested Cubase, and the prog lagged like hell. Is it my soundcard (pretty standard) or does my pc suck? (PIII 500, 256 meg)

 

[Ermz]

Yes, Atilla, it's your soundcard. Cubase was designed by Steinberg, who invented the VST standards, so ASIO drivers are embedded strongly into Cubase. You need to configure the input/output roues of your signals well, along with your ASIO latency before you go sequencing in Cubase. You'll need at least an Audigy 2 soundcard... but most would recommend a dedicated recording card.

Also, that PC won't be able to handle it. It's way too weak. You'd want at least 512 meg of RAM and a CPU well above the 1ghz mark.

Thanks for explaining that in english, Silent Song Although, what does VST mean?

VST = Virtual Studio Technology.
VSTi = Virtual Studio Technology Instrument.

Both a VST plug-in and a VSTi function in similar ways. The instruments however respond to the MIDI instructions in the sequencer window and play them through whatever means they can (in the case of a synth, it'd generate a simple waveform, supported by whatever modifier you've chosen. In the case of a sampler like Battery, it would trigger samples to be played).

This parallels Microsoft's 'DirectX' (Direct eXtension) protocols.

The next part I'll rip off another forum:

'The DX protocols was originally developed to allow the processing capabilities of modern CPUs to incorporate enhanced audio and visual technologies of PCs and allowed DAW software to 'hook in' to the CPU and other system resources.

Steinberg took this concept a stage further with their VST protocols.

Initially, these technologies appeared in DAW apps in the form of audio processing plugs (digital delay, reverb, compressors, etc) - which were then developed and released by 3rd parties and could be used in all DAW apps supporting the protocols. But we wanted more...

Then came the VSTi and DXi - with the "i" standing for "instrument" in both cases - which makes these terms kinda self-explanitory insofar as, in addition to audio processing plugs, there now appeared "virtual instruments" which could also be used in any DAW apps that supported the technology...

There are other, similar protocols - such as "ReWire" - and support for these is becoming more commonplace... Reason, for example, is a "ReWire" capable device which can 'plug' into Sonar, Cubase, Nuendo (I believe) and others...

Then some bright spark at Steinberg came up with the idea of a protocol to enable their Cubase product for real-time online collaborations via the Internet - I forget what the system was called, now - something like FireNet, or something similar.'

The rest of the post goes on about VST System-Link. This is a new technology allowing Steinberg users to link up as many PCs as they want and use their collective processing power to handle different processes. Quite ingenious, really.

 

[Shadows Skulk]

Battery lets you randomly vary the pitch and amplitude of a drum hit. You can also choose to decay the envelope faster or perhaps have a longer attack time etc. It also lets you use velocities so that you can easily vary samples so that all your hi-hat hits for instance don't sound the same.

Anyone know if there's a way to do that in Reason 2.5?

 

[The Invoking]

You can do all this in fruityloops too btw the way, its just easier to do so if you use the piano roll option.

 

[Ermz]

Is it really worth it though? I wasted so much time on that program, that it isn't even funny. When you can sequence the drums right into your main DAW, with a sampler dedicated to percussion, things become so much easier.

 

[AmirH]

I'm gonna have to just read the cubase manual closely and practice then because programs like frooty loops are exactly why I don't even try programming my own drums.

 

[atilla000]

While I was playing a little with Cubase I found how to add MIDI tracks, but I never found how to import the MIDI files from my GP4 tabs. Can't be that hard, uh?

 

[Dark Hunter]

I got a problem... When using Amplitube with cubase, when I put a lot of disto (not max...) I can't have a nice fade out, it just stops suddenly. Anyone have a solution for this ?

Anyway, Moonlapse, how did you do to make your drums sound that "mechanical" (I mean, this typic death metal sound) ?

 

[Ermz]

You have to export a single instrument as a MIDI file atilla. This meaning deleting every track but the one you want to import into Cubase, and then exporting from GP4 into MIDI.

Dark, your problem lies with the noise gate. There is one in built into Amplitube... you need to take it down nearly all the way if you want a smooth fade-out, but this may cause noise to pervade your recordings.

Way I got the drums sounding like that was just working on them a bit. I ripped the kick from Vinnie Paul's kit from Vulgar Display of Power and the rest was the drumkit from hell. The rest was just EQ and amplitude work.

 

[Dark Hunter]

Dark, your problem lies with the noise gate. There is one in built into Amplitube... you need to take it down nearly all the way if you want a smooth fade-out, but this may cause noise to pervade your recordings.

Way I got the drums sounding like that was just working on them a bit. I ripped the kick from Vinnie Paul's kit from Vulgar Display of Power and the rest was the drumkit from hell. The rest was just EQ and amplitude work.

Thanks a lot, you seem to always have the answers I need... You rock

 

[Kenneth R.]

You can do all this in fruityloops too btw the way, its just easier to do so if you use the piano roll option.

changing time sigs and getting a realistic drum sound with fruity loops out of the box vs cubase/lm-7/battery out of the box is a lot harder to do.