Drum programs

[jtplayer]

Hey all,

I'm curious to know how many of you out there are adding drum tracks to your songs via midi or a software program like Acid. If so what have you found is the best or easiest way to do this.

I write and record a lot of acoustic based stuff, and it seems that frequently, after I get a song fairly complete, I can hear where drums will really fill out the tune. I've tried using my midi keyboard and adding drums using my soundfont samples, but that's a dicey proposition (for me anyway). I've also tried using Acid, importing the song into Acid and trying to find an appropriate loop. For me that's been a nightmare trying to determine the tempo so I have a starting point for finding loops. I've used the beatmapper in Acid, but that's been of no use to me.

So if anyone out there has found a sure fire way to add drums to a prerecroded song, I would sure like to know how you did it (short of hiring a real drummer of course [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img] )

Thanks in advance

JT [img]images/icons/cool.gif[/img]

[Steve Moore]

If a song is recorded to a click, adding/modifying drums after the fact is a snap (tempo is consistent and lined up on measures). If not... you must input the information in real time (play along on MIDI keyboard or drum trigger/pads).

[mfym]

There is a function in the Edit menu called 'Identify Beat', that should do the job for you, but it's not for the faint hearted. It works sort of like grid mode except that you can stretch out the grid until it matches your tempo. I'm not saying this will work, just that it can.

If your tempo is absolutely steady (which it probably isn't) it'll work better and if you want to give yourself alot of work, you can make it work.

I only know how I got it to work. I had recorded a midi file in slip mode, each track recorded separately, and then needed to fix the timing which was awful, so I chopped up each track down to the individual note (use strip silence, sparingly, for this), created an audio click track in a 16th note resolution and used identify beat to create a grid. You will lose any feel the song may have with this technique. You will have to experiment a great deal to get the grid set up exactly to the click track, but it's fairly simple to click on the first region of the click track and shift click the last region of the click track that corresponds to the beginning and end of your song, and then use identify beat to create the grid which will most likely be out of time for the song. Use the setting in the identify beat as a guide for setting the grid and when it matches the audio click track, you've done it. I hope this makes sense.

To summarize, you should:
Create the audio click track first, and match the click to the first beat of your song.
Create the grid with identify beat and match it to the audio click track.
With the grid, create you drum tracks. For any beats that don't match, slide them around in slip mode, OR chop up your waveforms with strip silence and align (quantize) them to the grid and add drums. If you have alot of room ambience (which strip silence would remove) or want to keep the feel factor, chopping up the waveform won't work very well.

You will have to be in bar and beats, and grid mode for identity beat to work.

If this has only confused you, then that makes two of us. This is a combination of techniques and, as I said, is not for the faint hearted.

Still, I hope this helps. [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[jtplayer]

Mfym,

Thanks for the reply, it is greatly appreciated. In response, no you did not necessarily confuse me, but you highlight the fact that there really is no easy way to come back and add drums to a completed song.

I guess I was hoping for an easy way out. It seems the best thing to do is just start with my loops and build the song from there. It just seems that most of the time the songs reveal themselves acoustically and I build the arrangements without really thinking about drums. Oh well, I guess I just need to change the way I do things.

As a side note, I have been looking into Multi Loops or Smart Loops as an addition to Acid 3.0. It's not that I'm unhappy with Acid, I just would like to have more tools at my disposal.

Has anybody out there used either of these programs. If so, what do you think? Would you advise one over the other?

Thanks

JT [img]images/icons/cool.gif[/img]

[mfym]

You can add the drum loops later at any time (with alot of work). The most important thing to remember is to start in grid mode and with some kind of click, and it will be much easier to add them (that and rock steady timing).

[soundsurfr]

The only way to do this effectively without going completely out of your mind is to record your acoustic ideas to a click track and note the tempo (BPM). If your acoustic track is not following a set tempo - even if it's off by a few nostril hairs - (in fact that's worse than if it's WAY off), then your loops will not line up, your drum machine patterns will not fall into place, and even a live drummer you bring in later will have trouble following along with the track.

The net result is slop, and slop usually sounds like slop. You have to get into the habit of playing to a metronome if you want to add percussion to your stuff later. If you don't want to be locked to a rigid tempo, then you have to play along with your percussionist in real time, and you have to both be good enough to follow each others cues. When it works, that usually results in the absolute best sounding music, but you ain't gonna get into that kind of stuff with Acid loops or a drum machine.

There is a way out of the out-of-time track problem, but it involves painstakingly mapping drum beats to rythmic downbeats in your acoustic track, almost hit by hit. If you ever have to do this once (as I have), you'll never want to do it again. It's not exactly a "creative" process.

The nice thing about loops as opposed to a drum machine is that many of them are played by real drummers whose natural micro-deviations from rigid time make the percussion track sound more *real* without sounding sloppy. Hard to do that with a drum machine.

Good luck.

[banana boy]

I spend a lot of time doing similar stuff ...
What I'm doing is the following: I play around with ACID first and jam to the loop I think fits best, then I'll export a few measures of this 'best-fit' loop to do the acoustic recording against. BPM's solid, the grid mode works well, then I go back to ACID to play with alternative loops and fills to match the song's full arrangement, re-export a very-close-to-finished drum track stereo wave file (after playing with levels and tweaking with Waves plug-ins from inside ACID) and drop the drum track right into PTLE. On a few occasions the loops I end up with are very different to the sample I started with, but at least the song's in tempo and often a slight rhythmic variation between the drum and rhythm guitar (eg different 'swing' or 'shuffle' feels) can be quite interesting - particularly if the BPM's solid and both are there on the downbeat.

[Greg M]

I know there are many routes you can take to add drums, but here is what I did. First, I made some drum loops of each piece in a drum kit. I recorded single hits and groups of four hits at 120 BPM while listening to a click. You can use just about any program you want to do this - I think I used ACID Pro 3.0.

In ACID, I set up a "click" track using a kick drum single hit loop at 120 BPM. I play along with this and change the tempo to match the one I want for my song. I then usually bounce this to disk (Render in ACID) to produce a track long enough for my song. I then import this into ProTools and manually set the tempo and switch to grid mode. This track will set the tempo for every thing in the session while recording and will be deleted when I finish with the session.

Now, the drums. You can use ACID or Protools at this point. For ProTools: In grid mode, I create a track for each piece of the drum kit by importing the loop single hits to the session. Line 'em up, trim 'em, copy/paste, do whatever you you want to create the drums.

If you are familiar with midi and you like the way your midi drums sound, it's probably easier than with loops.

A comment: I made my own drum loops because I had a hard time finding loops that fit my songs. This method sounds pretty good, can be a lot of work, but sounds no where near as good as recording a real drummer. The quality of the loops is fine, but I'm no drummer (I'm a guitar player). I do this to get a good idea of what the song will sound like with drums. If I like the song, I'll have a drummer friend of mine add real drums. He is a ProTools user also, so it's really easy to go to the next step.

Hope this helps,
Greg