Help an idiot get started with drum programming

[spkguitar]

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[cruisemates]

If you get Reason or Sampletank you will get midi drum kits. There is a decent kit with Reason Adapted which I think you might get free (or very inexpensively, anyway). You play the kit with a midi keyboard. If you don't have a midi keyboard, buy one. These days almost any electronic keyboard (yamaha, casio, etc.) you can buy for over $80 comes with midi capability. One of these and a few midi cables is all you need to get started.

Hoenestly, all I have is a $150 Yamaha keyboard with the small keys, but I just use it to trigger Sampletank and/or Reason and it works great.

[fabco]

Using the ReDrum sequencer built into Reason Adapted with a midi controller (keyboard or pad) is the easist method that I have found to add some quick drum tracks. Plus, you don't have to buy anything extra to use it.

The Adapted version of Reason that ships with ProTools has a pretty good drum pattern generator, but is limited to a single drum midi track in ProTools but I think you get as many ReDrums in your rack as you want if you pay for the upgrade to the full version. When I have more than one track assigned to a single ReDrum, the volume is not individually controlled like I want. The last volume changed changes all.

So, rather than staying with the pattern generator, it seemed simpler to me to get a keyboard or pad midi controller. This gave me the ability to play drums along with tracks that would have too much "feel" or tempo drift and are hard to ever get sync'ed up with a pattern generated drum track. It gets you back to your ability to beat on something with your fingers, and doesn't depend so much your ability to program.

Luckily, SampleTank and DrRex can be added for a reasonably minimum three tracks of play or record on the fly midi drum tracks, giving you a kick, snare, and turnaround or cymbol track that can be individually controlled in volume.The tracks can even be layed down separately so that even paople that don't play the drums can easily keep up by recording only one drum track at a time. You can record to a click or pattern generated track, or to previously recorded tracks that tempo drift all over the place with equal ease. The downnside is less control of drum sounds available, because SampleTank or DrRex didn't have the sample sound you were looking for or as much to choose from, plus you have more places to look.

Perhaps you could rewire the Reason Mixer to individually control the volume of the Kick and Snare, etc, but I haven't yet tried it. I'd like to find some better sounding drum sound samples, but careful hunting around in the supplied libs will find you some fairly realistic sounding ones, and there are even more drum sound samples available out there on the internet, but I haven't yet tried them either. It seems to be a huge task going through the huge amount of stuff out there, just to listen for a certain snare or tom tom sound that you or your drummer thinks is just right.

Anybody know of any drum samples for ReDrum, DrRex, or SampleTank that they think are better than the default sruff that comes with it, or have a better idea than this for drum tracks?

[cruisemates]

I have to say - I read about people playing their midi drum tracks along with a session "live" a lot in these boards, and I know for me that would never work, even with a click. It is much easier for me to record maybe 7 bars of midi, first kick, then add snare, hi-hat, etc with midi-merge. and then quantize it (to 8th or 16ths). Then I do a 1 bar fill (start with kick & cymbol on beat 1, then toms on 2,3 & 4) and then add that in as the 8th bar of midi.

Do that, and then copy and replicate the full 8 bars for 4 to 5 minutes and you are basically done. It takes 15 minutes, and probably less than 5 minutes if you know the process by heart.

No way would I sit there and play a kick drum with a midi key all the way through a song, why bother? The beat is going to remain virtually the same throughout most songs (you can always vary it and add a ride cymbol for the choruses).

[fabco]

I feel I should amend part of what I said above because it is not correct. Even if you use separate items in the Reason rack, like DrRex and Redrum together, you still do not get individual volume control like you do using a saparate program like Sample tank. The only way I have found to get individual volume control on your snare and bass drum for example, is to rewire the rack to the Reason Adapted mixer to give individual volume control at the Reason Mixer.

Some have alluded to creating more than one Reason rack on multiple audio or aux tracks, but as far as I can tell, there is still only one instance of the Reason rack running, and therefore the last volume set for any, sets it for all. This may not be true for the full version of Reason, but it seems to be so for Reason Adapted that came with my system.

[spkguitar]

Some have alluded to creating more than one Reason rack on multiple audio or aux tracks, but as far as I can tell, there is still only one instance of the Reason rack running, and therefore the last volume set for any, sets it for all. This may not be true for the full version of Reason, but it seems to be so for Reason Adapted that came with my system.

In this circumstance, you would use the faders on the AUX tracks that are returning individual instruments to control individual instrument volume, not the faders on the MIDI tracks. And it's not more than one rack, it's more than one rewire connection to the rack (even in Adapted). You can have up to 64 individual channels.

[ScorchedEarth]

In order to route individual drums from Reason to individual tracks in PT, all you need to do is wire the individual outputs of ReDrum directly to the Reason Hardware Interface and bypass the Reason mixer entirely. In PT, you open as many audio tracks as you have drums and put Reason as the plug-in on each track and then assign each instance of Reason to it's own Rewire channel instead of the L+R outputs and you should have individual control over each drum in Pro Tools.