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Tuesday, 5 October 2004

Drum programming ::

Last week I started looking at the problem of reworking the drums on a funky piece I did in January. Clearly my first attempt was a placeholder. I went in search of new sounds and ways to think about drumming.

First I started playing with the drum sample sets I already had. That was fun, but it wasn’t going to twist my head in a new direction.

So I chose to indulge in Gear Acquisition Syndrome. There’s nothing like overwhelming oneself with new possibilities, prolonging Playing With Fun Sounds, to postpone Producing Finished Music.

iDrum arrived Friday morning. That became a really long day at work (fortunately I learned that the power was out at the office while I was still coding away at home, and didn’t waste half an hour or more going there and back on streets without traffic lights). Saturday I dug in. iDrum’s factory patterns and samples were in the right direction for this piece, and it offered a big element of instant gratification. One of the factory patterns even fit well.

One or two of the variant patterns are close too...

A really cool feature is the integration with Logic—the “MIDI Drag” icon, when dragged into the Arrange window, drops a sequence containing the current pattern. Awesome.

But the danger of that high instant gratification effect is what happens when one runs into little obstacles like the meter track here.

It’s tempting to just throw up one’s hands. As sketchy (sorry, pun intended) as the original track was, it more or less did the right thing around these odd twists in the road. iDrum actually resynchronized itself following the 3/4, 5/4, and even the 9/8 measures. But when it sees 9/16, it seems to say to itself, OK, this guy is on acid, I am not going to believe any more of his meter changes and just stick to 4/4. That’ll teach him. And indeed, iDrum’s FAQ politely informs us that it only does 4/4. (Updated 8 Oct: it could be that Logic thinks I’m on acid, there’s no way to know for sure without writing a test Audio Unit or asking someone...)

Well, OK, I wasn’t ready to commit to that part so soon anyhow. It struck me that dozens of repeats from even the coolest prefab pattern was the opposite extreme from what I had before, something that fit the shape of the piece but that was undeveloped and had the wrong sounds and vibe.

DrumCore arrived today. This is a great collection of samples of real drummers playing real drums. One gets a wide variety of full grooves at many tempos, and one can construct drum kits from the individual samples (although they seem to be in a proprietary format, so they can only be played by DrumCore).

There was a nice instant gratification effect here, too. A jazz sidestick beat that sounds like it’s right off Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew... that could work well under the intro, before we descend into the electronic maelstrom. Those two Alan White grooves? Either could work on this track, at least as departure points. The full sampled kits will probably prove to be endlessly useful, even if one must use DrumCore’s separate application via Rewire to get full use of them. The “Gabrielizer” feature chops the loops up into bits and shuffles them—I know I am going to spend hours playing with that when I get to the wacky middle part of this piece, where everything falls apart and then gravity pulls the pieces back together.

But now that the instant gratification effect is wearing off, the hard work remains—sifting through the samples, building drum kits, and entering maybe a thousand notes, whether I bang them out on the keyboard, or click them into iDrum or Logic’s editors. The new sounds are just more colors sitting patiently on the palette; they aren’t going to paint the picture for me.

References:
Nothing exceeds like excess (16 October 2004)

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