What do YOU use to make drum tracks?

[vaiman]

The last 2 drummers I worked with drove me nuts as neither would play to click.
Both awesome live players, but in the studio...

AD for me, I sometimes manually programming beats for intro's and weird breaks etc but I usually end up editing a preset for the main parts.

Its only drums anyway, who cares?? It not like they are guitars

 

[plague_rider]

Real drummers, real drums, close miced, sample replace.

Everytime.

This

Otherwise I use redrum in reason... but only as far as ideas and simple beats to be honest...

 

[shred101]

Again, redrum on reason at the minute. I used to use a ZoomRT323 but im moving away from loop based stuff because its too hard to get decent variations and stuff out of unless you use like, 100 loops per song which renders it pointless anyway. You may as well just program the song as one whole track.

I generally just grab the guitar pros of my bands stuff, put em in midi and export em to midi to start me off and ill work from there. I always go through the whole thing and totally dequantize it to get a more human vibe out of the tracks because I hate over quantized stuff.

Loads of tempo mapping too. Usually push it a bit on choruses and stuff and lay back on the quieter segments. Also use the dynamic variation features of reason on each section so like, if its for a blast beat section ill try and make each hit at a slightly different velocity and make em quieter from the normal hits. Then Ill record each instrument on my desk either through a valve preamp or some basic input patches and stuff to get some more character out of em and to filter em a bit.

I think if you're going for a more human vibe you have to remember that drummers have endurance and consistency to take into account no matter how good they are and that tempo/dynamics/consistency can never be absolutely 100% like on a bog standard drum machine track.

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

dude...do you leave the tempo map like that?? or do you delete the points where the song didn't have an intentional tempo change??

Once the drums are programmed I smooth everything out, yes. That kind of tempo mess sounds off even with programmed drums. It's just to make programming the drums easier. The tempo changes stay the same though, as you can see there are like 3-5 changes in that song overall.

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

I think the drums in Reason's NN-XT sound a LOT better. You guys should check those out if your using reason.

 

[shred101]

You can use the same samples in either from what I can tell.

 

[TheDarkProject]

dude...do you leave the tempo map like that?? or do you delete the points where the song didn't have an intentional tempo change?? by the looks of that screen shot there should only be a small handful of obvious tempo changes. i always want the end result tempo map to be how the song was intended, NOT how was it played, yanno? can cubase "warp" a song onto grid like that?

I once went through this method and derived a tempo map for "Blinded By Fear" by At The Gates, and I can tell you that it's all over the place, speeding up and down within single sections, one repeat played 5% faster than the previous, fills being significantly faster than the section they're ending, and so on. I don't think it harms the song at all.

I think that this, like deciding whether a song is overcompressed or not, is not something you can make meaningful decisions about based on just looking at a graph or a waveform or whatever visual representation you have. You just have to listen.

 

[Force666]

Loren, i see you drop a marker at every bar, but how do you warp the tempo? With warp tabs? Sorry dude, but could you elaborate...possibly deserving it's own thread.

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

Oh, the drums get turned into superior drummer shit so once they are programmed smoothing out the tempo is as simple as deleting all the tempo changes.

 

[Force666]

Well what I meant was...If you drop a marker at every bar, how do you translate that to the tempo map (as it is in the picture you provided)? Is it like create warp tabs from markers or something? And if you do that, do you just click and drag the bars to conform to the markers?

The part i'm not understanding is if you just drop markers, that doesn't actually change the tempo, so i'm just wondering what the missing step is. Was hoping maybe you could post a step by step (if it's nothing major, didn't sound like it was too involved)

 

[Jormyn]

Jamstix Metal with the Accent slider turned down + better kick/snare/tom samples + going through afterward and deleting any random cymbal hits that JS decided to throw in. So far it's worked out pretty well.

 

[rfahey86]

If you can afford to buy The Metal Foundry SDX it is a sure win. The beats are MUCH better than DFH for sure. Plus all of the samples are 24bit as opposed to 16 bit (DFH). The beats are much heavier and don't sound as generic as the DFH beats. You can also choose between strait and swing beats. I find a beat that is pretty close and just tweak it a little bit. The fills are awesome as well. It runs through Superior Drummer 2.0 so you can use the humanize features it includes. You can also adjust it according to left and right hand. I think most of the samples sound even better than the Steven Slate drums. Also when you use EZ player you can change the drum maps from DFH to Superior automatically rather than using the DAW settings.

 

[digitaldeath]

Jamstix Metal with the Accent slider turned down + better kick/snare/tom samples + going through afterward and deleting any random cymbal hits that JS decided to throw in. So far it's worked out pretty well.

The last time I looked at Jamstix, the GUI nearly made me uke:!