Original instrumental song - comments appreciated...

[RR0849]

Henrik - can't remember getting a sample. But that doesn't mean you didn't send one earlier. LOL!

Trem - It's hard to say about those clips cause the kick and snare are unlike what I'd want. Also the density of the sounds and the way they cut through when there are other instruments is important to me. So a demo where at some point there's also bass and guitar (not all the time) would be ideal.

I always do midi sequencing on PC (Cakewalk) which I feed to an external sound module (Roland TD6). So programming to me is really fast as I've been doing it so long. Most of my covers I've sequenced myself - I just play the song for a couple of beats on media player and then copy what I hear etc. It doesn't take much time once you've used to it. I assume these softwares take midi in?

Hydrogen is free so if it's nearly same quality then that should be a no-brainer. The samples I found sounded good but so far didn't hear any hard rock stuff.

Thanks all for suggestions! Really appreciate it!

[Endrik]

You can always "steal" samples from your favorite recordings and combine them with other samples and stuff. You can cut and paste the kick and snare parts to add bigness and real feel.
Most samples sound too "small" for me. It's always cool to combine things. For example for a rock kick drum you can mix together a rock kick sound for primary tone, a jazz fusion kick for attack and a vintage style floor tom sound for bigness and resonance. Same thing with snare, for example a jazz snare for basic tone, rock snare for bigness, distorted hip-hop snare for crack. And then make "fake room" tracks, a couple of tracks of the beat with plenty of verb, low on the mix and panned in all over the place. Of course, for that you can use those cool, big and roomy samples which you cut from some record.

[jackson1]

Endrik, thanks for the heads up on the NI Abbey Road drums. I wish I had the time necessary to really check it out, but at the moment I don't. I am all ears if you at some point would give us your opinion on it.

I agree totally on combining samples. In my current project, I think we will end up using three snare sounds combined on most tracks, to get us where we want. In the beginning I worked on one snare sample, eq'ing it trying to find the correct sound etc. But when I tried layering more snare sounds with the wanted features like attack, body and decay, I was sold. It is far more easy and the result is superior. You have to pay attention to the tuning of the layered drums, of course and correct it if needed.

[Trem]

Trem - It's hard to say about those clips cause the kick and snare are unlike what I'd want. Also the density of the sounds and the way they cut through when there are other instruments is important to me. So a demo where at some point there's also bass and guitar (not all the time) would be ideal.

I always do midi sequencing on PC (Cakewalk) which I feed to an external sound module (Roland TD6). So programming to me is really fast as I've been doing it so long. Most of my covers I've sequenced myself - I just play the song for a couple of beats on media player and then copy what I hear etc. It doesn't take much time once you've used to it. I assume these softwares take midi in?

Hydrogen is free so if it's nearly same quality then that should be a no-brainer. The samples I found sounded good but so far didn't hear any hard rock stuff.

Thanks all for suggestions! Really appreciate it!

Right, i didn't think it was but it's just the project i had ongoing so was easiest to give you an idea of what you can do with it. It will in the end fit in the mix, i use a frequency analyzer from the get go to at least get me in the ballpark and leave notches for the other instruments to have room but there will be more tweaking when i get to that point for sure.

Like Endrik said you can layer and replace as in with the kick in that track, there also is more than one snare layered there as well as created my own overheads and room sounds on seperate busses. I chose Superior because to me it seemed to have the most options to work with. The comparison of mixed and non mixed was to show you can create whatever you want really out of the base sounds. There are rock sample packs with fat warm bass drums and thick snares, snappy snares all that. Superior has the ability to completely mix the drums within it including all bleed options. I toyed with it but end up finding as is the case with guitar tracks i prefer to just record raw and do all processing within the daw using the plugins in reaper which are really good, as well as the plethora of free ones out there. All the processing and a lot of the bleed on those drums is all manufactured in reaper, i didn't use much of the superior feature set, i just found it more liberating to get a totally dry sample and do it in reaper. Def try all the demos of the programs out there and find the one that works best for your work flow.

[RR0849]

This topic has really gotten me motivated to put some time into "fake drums". Both Henrik and Endrik it's time for you to post some samples too. They say so much more than words and after that it's easier to understand what you're trying to achieve with layering, room sounds etc. For the record I'm a big fan of room sounds and drums that sound "melodic".

We did 100% real drums on the first DoF CD recorded in two different sessions. I really loved the first sessions sounds although we used the exact same kit and gear the second time. We just couldn't repeat the sounds the same way. Then for our EP we recorded again in the same place but Jeff Waters put in a snare and kick drum sample. It sure sounds more pro but there's something missing also. It doesn't kick ass in the same way as some of Jari's drum tracks did in the first album and some of the "melodic" vibes of his playing were lost.

[Endrik]

Not sure what you exactly want to hear. I program drum tracks to get down the idea and the groove of the tune I'm working on, later it's played by a real drummer anyway. I mostly use Garageband on my MacBook, easy and simple to put down the ideas which pop in to your head.
Ok, for example I've been working on this psychedelic downtempo tune which requires huge drums and tons of low end boom for the bass.
Right now I ended up using 7 programmed drum tracks, 9 tracks of programmed bassline tracks, 2 programmed melody tracks and 2 guitar tracks using Guitar Rig. Later it will be remade with real drums, bassline with real bass using many lines (clean, distorted, with octave effect etc.) + the low end of my electric organ, a real Fender Rhodes or Nord.
Anyway for the drums here's the track list.
1 - Seventies kit, the whole beat with cymbals, kick drum is doubled with floor tom, two snares, compression, a little overdrive and verb added
2 - Seventies kit, the beat without snares and crash, kick drum is doubled with floor tom, compression, a little overdrive and verb added
3 - Studio Tight kit, only the snare line using two snares and a tom, compressed and a lot of verb added, very low in the mix
4 - Seventies kit, only the snare line using one snare and a floor tom, compressed, heavily distorted, plenty of verb, low in the mix
5 - Seventies kit, the whole beat where the snare line using two snares and the crash is much louder than rest of the things, kick doubled with floor tom, compressed, heavily distorted, verb added
6 - Just like track 1, only a lot of verb added, low in the mix and panned to left
7 - Just like track 1, only a lot of verb added, low in the mix and panned to right

I barely touched the EQ on the drums by the way.

Here's the result

http://fs10n5.sendspace.com/dl/03d0c8a37dad6f5c55ea13084f3833b2/4d931f7f2677eeb3/pxillk/groovy1.mp3

Then I cut samples from this tune http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oMppCqDOUE to get even bigger and nastier sound

And here's the result

http://fs10n5.sendspace.com/dl/bc48336cddc6bd518a0e9c6facb1da1f/4d9320075153af5e/9d1041/groovy2.mp3

[jackson1]

Jani: I've sent you an email with a sample.

[RR0849]

Big thanks for the samples! I really like how you've made them breathe and how realistic the room feel is. Of course the slow tempo helps to make things sound bigger and there's no overlap problem with hihat. Nice song too - Soundgarden goes spaceprog.

I quickly tried Hydrogen today and unfortunately the Windows version didn't work out at all with the midi in. I now started to simply tune my Roland kit by using a real drum track that I like as a reference. Seems to work well so far. Some pitch changes to samples, careful reverb tricks etc.

Something that really helps a lot is adding dynamics to midi notes by hand but that's way too time consuming. But there's really no other choice to get a realistic groove / accents going.

[RR0849]

Jani: I've sent you an email with a sample.

To Yahoo? Nothing yet but looking forward...

[jackson1]

Yes, yahoo.com

[RR0849]

Nothing yet... [email protected] is my email.

BTW I haven't thought of using overdrive earlier but that seems to add the same touch that the real mics do when they are close to the source. It's fun to be tweaking things again.

[Endrik]

Something that really helps a lot is adding dynamics to midi notes by hand but that's way too time consuming. But there's really no other choice to get a realistic groove / accents going.

Yep, that's what I do. It's really important to program the "human feel" or the "imperfectness" of human's control over the level of all the hits. That's what makes real drums sounds good, if a human would play like a robot, everything with the exact same velocity, it would sound like crap.
Messing with dynamics is very tricky specially when I make funk, jazz, fusion or drum'n'bass beats. There's a lot of ghost notes and whatnot going on.
But still programming and using samples isn't totally satisfying. You can make the same drum sound very different by hitting on different spots on it. And also the angle of the hand and the stick varies the sound, specially when hitting the snare with rim-shot.
Most of the samples are made by hitting the skins on the center. Some great rock sounds are archived by hitting over the center. Some really crisp funk drums are archived by hitting near the rim, it's the way how Bill Bruford or Manu Katché get really amazing snare sound.
Big difference how you play the hat, funky sound on top with the tip of the stick or fat sound by playing on the edge of the hat with the shaft of the stick. Same thing with crash and other cymbals. The sound changes dramatically but all the samples out there have very little variation.

[Endrik]

BTW I haven't thought of using overdrive earlier but that seems to add the same touch that the real mics do when they are close to the source. It's fun to be tweaking things again.

Using overdrive or distortion is cool because it also... well... distorts. Most of my favorite recordings and drums sounds were recorded in the 60's and early 70's (also the big band/swing drums in the 40's and 50's). The equipment was noisy, all analog, analog consoles, analog tape etc. It all compresses and adds slight overdrive. There were a lot of cool compressors used too where the engineers made the signal to drive. It all made the sound big, warm and cool.

The hip-hop or trip-hop method where the drums are heavily distorted is cool too, you can mix them together with cleaner sounds, the distorted track gives more edge, warmth and resonance.

I love how the guys in Portishead make records. They hate clean sounding recordings. They record a real kit which is played by Clive Deamer (also in Robert Plant's solo band) in a weird sounding room. They record it to a 2" tape. Then they transform the track to a vinyl record. Then they sample the vinyl record with all its scratchy noises (like hip-hop producers used funk vinyl records). And then during the mixing they also process it. Very cool sounds. Tons of natural compression not this modern over-processed sounding thing.

[RR0849]

Got Henrik's sample too - thanks!
Cymbals tend to be the easiest giveaway against real drums but otherwise really realistic stuff!

I've gotten a lot of new ideas from this topic. I've never approached drums in any other way that just either real drums recorded with minimum tricks or machine drums as is. I'm going to start to mess things up a bit now and see what happens.
Big thanks for all the comments and knowledge shared!

[jackson1]

The expression "fake drums" is misleading, in my opinion. What you hear are real drums, recorded by proficient studio engineers on top studio gear. I would call them sampled drums. Any given drum sound you hear in my example is a high quality recording of a real drum or cymbal being played back.

Now to my point: if you dislike a particular crash cymbal, the reason is not that it is "fake" or not real. It IS real. The reason is simply that you don't like the recording method or you don't like that particular cymbal or the way it is played/hit. Or the way it is mixed or mastered. The quality of the cymbal sound is not affected by the fact that it is a sample being triggered by midi.

Then there's the whole "feel" thing, that's where the big differences are, in my opinion.

The first drum machines I would call fake drums, because they used analog sound synthesis and sine waves emulating the sound of real drums. Not samples. Later machines used samples but inferior in quality and bit rate/depth.

Cymbals in particular were poorly reproduced.

Are you perhaps biased because of this?