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Hi!

So I'm back to actually producing/recording music instead of just making patches on various synths and pedals, and I'm just now getting into the world of programming drum VSTs.
Before now, when I wasn't doing much guitar/vocal based music, I would just programming static samples as beats and whatnot, but early in the year I picked up Addictive Drums 2 and have been having a blast with it bringing some demos and full tunes to a higher caliber.

Anyone else in here use this workflow? My understanding is that a bunch of metal players will use programmed drums in their music, either for replacements or just full-on tracks.

I spend a lot of time programming drums and I hate it

In my main band I just do it for demos so I don't put much effort in. Whenever I have to make it sound more like it like a real drummer I find it exhausting. Addictive Drums is fantastic though, I use it all the time.

Yep. I use AD2.
I write all the notation in Guitar Pro then export the midi to AD2 (had to map stuff to get it to play right though).
I then adjust the velocity of the hits, and humanise stuff a bit.
I write all my own music in Guitar Pro, so the drum programming is a natural part of the workflow. I struggle a bit outside of that context.

In the end it's decent for demos.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSP7vEva8Ho[/youtube]

This is a killer instrumental metal tune, written by a killer guitarist. It's not with AD2, but to me it just shows the problem with programmed drums. These drums are programmed pretty nicely, and software has gotten a bit better since this was recorded, but I'm just completely allergic to that sound these days. So um.. it's a good idea but there are so many awesome drummers out there. If you're playing to a click I'd just send the notation to a rad session drummer. Hannes Grossmann is a god-level drummer and he'll do a song for 300 euro, including writing recording and mastering all the drums.

just another option, I don't know I just wanted to point out how much I love working with the MPC. If you can ever settle on a set of samples and just explore all the available features they actually designed it so its easy to recreate drummerisms like the feel of ride cymbal(swing feature), closed- middle-open hihat (decay switch), ghost notes(velocity -> attack) a bunch of other things. Its a really fun drum machine.

Interesting, MPCs have looked cool to me for years. I also like using hardware sequencers but I use them for more electronic stuff and go to DAW for trying to make decent sounding "drums" drums.

I agree with goroth in that I can never make anything anywhere near as good as a proper drummer. But in making my solo stuff I don't have a budget to pay anyone so I go with what I can do

coldbrightsunlight wrote:Interesting, MPCs have looked cool to me for years. I also like using hardware sequencers but I use them for more electronic stuff and go to DAW for trying to make decent sounding "drums" drums.

I agree with goroth in that I can never make anything anywhere near as good as a proper drummer. But in making my solo stuff I don't have a budget to pay anyone so I go with what I can do

I feel like in more electronically oriented music it may not be that big of a deal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m def gonna be using the humanizing features in my DAW and in the plugin itself though. Also taking advantage of the massive fucking midi library and that a lot of my editing/part writing can be done right from the same window.

How does AD compare to superior drummer? I’ve been using the latter.

Never used superior I'm afraid.

IBNYX wrote:

coldbrightsunlight wrote:Interesting, MPCs have looked cool to me for years. I also like using hardware sequencers but I use them for more electronic stuff and go to DAW for trying to make decent sounding "drums" drums.

I agree with goroth in that I can never make anything anywhere near as good as a proper drummer. But in making my solo stuff I don't have a budget to pay anyone so I go with what I can do

I feel like in more electronically oriented music it may not be that big of a deal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m def gonna be using the humanizing features in my DAW and in the plugin itself though. Also taking advantage of the massive fucking midi library and that a lot of my editing/part writing can be done right from the same window.

Really late response to this I totally agree! A lot of my music at the moment is electronically oriented for that reason. Humanising things is something I'd love to, and I was playing with midi banks from recorded parts recently and it was very fun having the more natural timing

I used Toontrack Superior Drummer 2.0 to program drums for some aggressive and heavy recording projects in the past and also all the pedal demos I ever made. For some things I started with midi packs and then customized them, edit things together, made my own fills and whole parts from scratch, etc. and it worked pretty well. I have SD3 now, but I haven't actually had a chance to use it yet. I will probably program something with it, when I get on writing solo music again.

Any Midi packs for SD2 you would recommend? I'm mostly just writing drum tracks from scratch which is kind of limiting as for more complex stuff, I'm not a drummer and its difficult for me to program in more musical/drummer like sounding stuff.

An out of print book by a drummer for drum machine programming was written back in the 90s, by BADNESS!

https://www.amazon.com/Drum-Programming ... =8-1-fkmr0

There are some pattern books out there but this book gives some of the WHYs in drum programming from a drummers perspective, in super simple language. I don’t know that there is any book like it. It is platform agnostic. There are some rhythm pattern books that are worth looking into.

JereFuzz wrote:An out of print book by a drummer for drum machine programming was written back in the 90s, by BADNESS!

https://www.amazon.com/Drum-Programming ... =8-1-fkmr0

There are some pattern books out there but this book gives some of the WHYs in drum programming from a drummers perspective, in super simple language. I don’t know that there is any book like it. It is platform agnostic. There are some rhythm pattern books that are worth looking into.

Awesome, thank you for the tip!

I found a pdf on a reputable site, FWIW:

https://archive.org/details/DrumProgram ... keADrummer

crochambeau wrote:

JereFuzz wrote:An out of print book by a drummer for drum machine programming was written back in the 90s, by BADNESS!

https://www.amazon.com/Drum-Programming ... =8-1-fkmr0

There are some pattern books out there but this book gives some of the WHYs in drum programming from a drummers perspective, in super simple language. I don’t know that there is any book like it. It is platform agnostic. There are some rhythm pattern books that are worth looking into.

Awesome, thank you for the tip!

I found a pdf on a reputable site, FWIW:

https://archive.org/details/DrumProgram ... keADrummer

Glad I could help. Give me some thoughts after you've browsed it.

Ooo that does sound interesting. May peruse later. Thanks for pointing it out!

coldbrightsunlight wrote:I spend a lot of time programming drums and I hate it

In my main band I just do it for demos so I don't put much effort in. Whenever I have to make it sound more like it like a real drummer I find it exhausting. Addictive Drums is fantastic though, I use it all the time.

What’s so painful about it? Don’t you just call up patterns from a bank of patterns to create your song? I’d imagine the hard part is creating a new pattern or slight variations of a pattern to add variety to a drum track.