Re: Amateur Tunes
 

hey,

could you talk in some detail about how you got these drum sounds? Did you program this stuff on a midi controller/keyboard? I'd love to be able to do this stuff.

lots of great stuff chris/gene et. al., very good work as usual.

bp

Re: First tunes
 

Scott,

I am planning to have the choir in their acoustically better music room next Monday-Wednesday. I am probably going to use something from there, if not I have this concert full of Christmas music, and this song is a very strong candidate !

Thank you for listening, and your kind words !

Take Care,
Gene

Re: Let\'s Hear Your Latest
 

Thank you all for the response, I will try to get the flute part more "humanized" (with some breathing) and then will submit for the DUC Christmas CD.

Thanks for the comments and constructive criticism.

Aaron

Re: Let\'s hear your latest stuff....right here
 

I talk to Chuck Campbell monday and they were leaving tuesday morning for a europe.
They be on tour for about a month there.

-Bob

Re: heres one
 

Sounds cool. Nice honest guitar tone-what amp/mics did you use on them? Did you use a stereo pair or mult. overdubs ...curious, please give details...thnx!

2nd tone
 

Riku Rotten Project proudly present Toisto.

Feel free to say anything.

Thanx for listening.

Re: Let\'s Hear Your Latest
 

dfranko,
Very nice, man...good song, and I like the production style...love the vocals. Drums and guitars sound great. Great job.
-Roy

Re: Let\'s Hear Your Latest
 

Dfranko, I wanted to also state, last night I listened to your track as well(actually, it was like a group listen... ) Anyway,
Yes, I thought it was great too how it was (no offense), but rather simple sounding at the beginning, which worked great, and then kicked up the noise a bit for the chorus. It was pretty cool.

Some things I did notice; and It could just be preference, or me losing my mind, but the drums during the chorus, are they real? In my head I hear slight fluctuations of the tempo, but, I could like I am saying, be going insane.

Anyway, It was a really cool song, And I was impressed. Very cool voice too!

=-Ben

Re: heres one
 

Joz,
'whose army'...just great...arrangement, vocals, guitars, drums...all. What's exceptional too is the second half/ending buildup just gets better and better. Very nice, man.
-Roy

Re: Amateur Tunes
 

The drums are done via a Kurzweil Midiboard (circa 1987) into a Roland XV-3080 with an expansion drum chip. All pieces of the kit are captured on a single MIDI track. The XV-3080 emits stereo audio which I route to a stereo Aux track (PT LE5.3.1) with a single EQ that pretty much just boosts the 3.5K and 10K areas to brighten the snare and cymbals. The key thing here is the breadth of expressivity that you get out of the chip. For example, within each "kit" there are 3 distinct hi-hat samples (played by different notes), closed tight, medium, and loose, each with its own 4-layer velocity map. The snare has 2 normal samples (center hit and rimshot) plus a flam and a buzz -- each again with a 4-layer vmap that changes timbre as you hit the key harder.

At first the mechanics are pretty straightforward: I play the basic beat on the keyboard directly against the LE metronome. Next, I add fills and, if appropriate, identify blocks of measures that really should have a consistent pattern and copy-and-paste the best measure across the block. Fills are usually added by first slowing the tempo down. Next, I quantize the whole shebang to crispen it up. Now it gets interesting: I change tempos up and down at select transitions to reflect the non-metronomic behavior of human drummers. When the tempo is at 130, for example, and you've got a wicked snare thing going for 2 beats followed by 16th note rolls down the toms for the next 2 beats, I drop the tempo to 127, then 124, then bring it back to 130. On the next chorus, I'll up it to 132 to add "excitement" without making it sound like the tempo actually picked up. Lastly, I'll pay close attention to hi-hat timbre as the stick moves away from the "cymbal." In general, you'll open up the hi-hat a bit on that last hit as you start to swing your body away to address the rest of the kit, so I reflect that by selectively changing the hi-hat notes. It creates a great sense of realism in the output.

I actually do play real drums so I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that knowing how to play real drums helps immensely, especially in knowing when to lay back.