Programming beats into your DAW

Get that song on tape! Errr... disk?
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druunkonego
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Programming beats into your DAW

Post by druunkonego » Mon Jan 30, 2017 9:18 am

The two bands I was playing in for the past few years broke up last year for various unfortunate reasons. For a little while I tried to get some new projects off the ground with little success. It was just too much starting from scratch with a full time job and a toddler at home. So I kinda put the band idea on hold for a little while. In the meantime I've put together a little home studio. Nothing fancy... Built around a Focusrite Scarlet interface that I had picked up a couple years ago but had never really messed with much.

In trying to get the most out of jamming alone I've recently started programming drum loops into Ableton (which I've read isn't the best place to start for this sort of thing but its what I've got to work with). It took a few attempts but I'm starting to get the hang of it. I now have a handful of pretty convincing loops. I won't say that I'm getting good at it but they're getting better. ...Beginning to get the feel for tom fills although my high-hats tend to feel a little stiff.

I know there are pre-recorded stock drum loops out there, but I like the idea of coming up with my own. Especially for when I'm ready to produce my own solo tracks and whatnot.

So, do any of you do this? Do you have any tips ...or suggestions for cheap (free) drum packs?
The samples that came with Ableton are somewhat limited but it's been fun seeing what I can do with them given the limitations.

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Re: Programming beats into your DAW

Post by Larry Mal » Mon Jan 30, 2017 10:13 am

Ableton is fine for this.

But, do you know the basics of how drum beats work? Once you know that, then it's much easier to start writing out beats.

Let's take the backbeat, which is the basis of rock and roll. The backbeat is the kick drum on the 1 (the "downbeat") and the 3 (of a four beat measure), and the snare occurs on the 2 and the 4. The hi-hat plays eights or sixteenth notes, one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and so on. That's easy enough to write in on any piano roll type MIDI editor.

The backbeat tends to emphasize the one, which a lot of music does, so most singers will start singing on the one of a beat or measure. Your fills and snare rolls will lead up to emphasizing the one, so your rolls will start on beat three or four, and then culminate very often in a crash cymbal on the one.

And of course this is grossly simple, you can change things dramatically by adding even a very slight thing, or taking something away is also a great effect. There's a thing in reggae called the "one drop", where the drummer does not play anything on the one, which is pretty cool and leaves it up to other instruments to fill in the one (or not). There's some Led Zeppelin song or another, maybe Whole Lotta Love, where the drummer leaves off the snare on the two periodically if I remember correctly, and since less is very often more with music it adds more power and interest when he does play the snare.

And of course there are worlds of other types of music with other types of beats, there's the "four on the floor" with disco and electronic music in which the kick drum plays on every beat, one-two-three-four. The snare can still play on the two and the four, or not, depending on how you want to proceed. Here's the drummer from the Trammps talking about the four on the floor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYu_kak6lyE" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Jazz drumming is a world into itself and I won't be able to talk intelligently about it much here, but for the sake of discussion sometimes you hear with bop drumming the ride cymbal keeps the beat, leaving the kick and the snare to play fills, or to play syncopated beats possibly.

Anyway, hope any of this helps. Remember that no drummer plays perfectly, so if you want to emulate a drummer you have to add in things that software can't. If the time is perfect, it can seem very robotic, and drummers don't hit the parts of the kit with the same force, a good drummer can emphasize any part of his kit at any time in order to add interest and propulsion to a song (or to pull back). That means you'll have to adjust the velocity of your MIDI notes in great detail, depending on how much care you take.

You ask about software, if you are on a Mac, then Logic is a no-brainer, since the Drummer plug in with that takes care of virtually all of this for you with great results, although it has limitations as does everything else.
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Re: Programming beats into your DAW

Post by druunkonego » Mon Jan 30, 2017 11:51 am

Larry Mal wrote:Let's take the backbeat, which is the basis of rock and roll. The backbeat is the kick drum on the 1 (the "downbeat") and the 3 (of a four beat measure), and the snare occurs on the 2 and the 4. The hi-hat plays eights or sixteenth notes, one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and so on. That's easy enough to write in on any piano roll type MIDI editor.

The backbeat tends to emphasize the one, which a lot of music does, so most singers will start singing on the one of a beat or measure. Your fills and snare rolls will lead up to emphasizing the one, so your rolls will start on beat three or four, and then culminate very often in a crash cymbal on the one.
I'm familiar with a lot of that, but probably wouldn't not have been able to describe it very well as my rhythm vocabulary is a bit underdeveloped.

Beyond the basics I'm pretty clueless. :derp:

I'm definitely having a hard time with the hi-hat stuff... especially the one-E-and-a-two-E... 16th note stuff. I'm wondering if it partly due to the nature of the samples... cutting them into 16th notes and getting different sounds (open, closed, partially open, etc) arranged in a natural sounding order.
Larry Mal wrote:You ask about software, if you are on a Mac, then Logic is a no-brainer, since the Drummer plug in with that takes care of virtually all of this for you with great results, although it has limitations as does everything else.
I'm on a PC. :squint:
My ex-band mate/ex-studio friend used Logic. It seemed like good software but he's a drummer and hardcore about recording drums so I never really saw him mess with any of the rhythm plug-ins.

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Re: Programming beats into your DAW

Post by InLimbo » Mon Jan 30, 2017 12:47 pm

When you're programming the hi-hats, are you adjusting the volume (or velocity) of the hits? If you're not adjusting those, that's definitely going to make it sound stiff. Drummers don't hit everything with the exact same force every single hit, they add a little finesse and dynamics (just like any good musician).

If you've got the hi-hat doing 8th Notes, bring the ones in between the 1, 2, 3, and 4 down in volume. It should sound something like "TST tst TST tst TST tst TST".

The same could be said around a snare hit - add a couple of very low volume "ghost" notes here and there.

The same can even go on the kick - say you have a kick on the 1 downbeat that's lead into by a hit on the 4-and beat. Drop the volume down on the 4-and one and it'll sound far more natural.

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Re: Programming beats into your DAW

Post by druunkonego » Mon Jan 30, 2017 1:09 pm

That makes sense. I've definitely been utilizing some softer hits into the kick and snare to liven it up a bit. I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me to do that with the hi-hats. :derp:

Just for fun, here's the last loop I made. The sound quality is shit cause I just recorded it with my phone so there's some weird distortion going on.
I was messing around with 4/4 but trying to break it up on the 16th notes. :blush:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqL6HoVLUg8" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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Re: Programming beats into your DAW

Post by Larry Mal » Mon Jan 30, 2017 1:09 pm

Here's an interesting article:

https://modeaudio.com/magazine/creating ... I-o43eZOL4" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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Re: Programming beats into your DAW

Post by druunkonego » Mon Jan 30, 2017 1:31 pm

^good stuff. Thanks for the link. Picking up some good tips right off the bat. Some of it's a little over my head so I'll need some time to digest it but that's good too.

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Re: Programming beats into your DAW

Post by soggy mittens » Mon Jan 30, 2017 8:35 pm

groove pool also helps a lot, or just manually moving hits off the grid/roll.

I use studio drummer through kontakt, I've tried a few different methods in ableton, different kits, using found samples and building custom kits, different plugins and NI studio drummer is my fav, pretty darn good.
If OSG has tort me anything...

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Re: Programming beats into your DAW

Post by druunkonego » Sat Feb 04, 2017 7:20 am

^I didn't know about that groove pool thing... I've been watching some Youtube tutorials about it. It seems cool but unfortunatly I don't think I have that feature in Ableton 9 Lite. Manually moving the hits around is probably the way to go for me. I'll have to start trying that.

Kontakt and Studio Drummer might be more than I'm willing to invest in at the moment but I'll keep them in mind if I decide to upgrade in the future.

I've made one the other night utilizing some triplets. Starting to get a little bit better feel out of those hihats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UViElyd ... e=youtu.be" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Thanks for the tips!

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Re: Programming beats into your DAW

Post by Larry Mal » Sat Feb 04, 2017 10:30 am

I mean, you've got a shuffle going on there, but I'd still focus more on nailing the direct nature of the 4/4 beat for a while rather than focusing on triplets and tom fills at the moment.

So, you are using a "piano roll" editor over there, and that's cool. But you might want to look into what they call a "step sequencer", which would have the divisions of the beat broken down a little more clearly. Here is Cubase's:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdCwpJb104g" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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Re: Programming beats into your DAW

Post by ToneFerDayz!!1! » Mon Feb 06, 2017 4:15 am

I like step programming like on the Roland X0X series drum machines (505,606,707,808,909, etc.) for getting a basic feel for how beats work. It's easy to see how all the patterns work together, where the hits are and how to change them. Something like iDrum or DM1 are cheap, use X0X style sequencing and workflow, and make it easy to play around with them on the go in order to familiarize yourself. They're also pretty close to universal at this point, most DAWs have one, so once you learn how they work, you can translate that into beats on another platform.

Larry's suggestions are also a good ones. I spent a lot of time when I was starting out just listening to interesting drum patterns and then trying to recreate them on my old 505 and DM1, because it gives you some insight into how people program or play the drums themselves. Pay attention too to how the parts are mixed- different genres prioritize different aspects of the kit/beat- and it's worth listening to them and thinking about WHY. Like if you're listening to a Chicago-style house beat, why is the emphasis on the kick, and why is it 4 on the floor? How do you mix it so it pops out? So on and so forth.

And check out places like Attack or other electronic music publications- although they skew towards the dance/hip hop side of things, there's usually a lot of really great tutorials on beat making.

For example:

https://www.attackmagazine.com/techniqu ... ago-house/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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Re: Programming beats into your DAW

Post by Larry Mal » Mon Feb 06, 2017 6:44 am

Hey, that was very interesting. Good resource.
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Re: Programming beats into your DAW

Post by MT » Mon Feb 06, 2017 4:45 pm

You could look at EZ Drummer. Great quality sounds and a simple drag and drop approach to drum loop construction. You can even tap in a rhythm pattern and it will search its catalogue for something similar. Or manually program a drum pattern in the midi editor.

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Re: Programming beats into your DAW

Post by druunkonego » Tue Feb 07, 2017 9:48 am

Larry Mal wrote:I mean, you've got a shuffle going on there, but I'd still focus more on nailing the direct nature of the 4/4 beat for a while rather than focusing on triplets and tom fills at the moment.

So, you are using a "piano roll" editor over there, and that's cool. But you might want to look into what they call a "step sequencer", which would have the divisions of the beat broken down a little more clearly. Here is Cubase's:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdCwpJb104g" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

:blush: Very much still getting familiar with the software... Kinda just got excited when I found the triplets division button. But point taken. I'll work on my 4/4.

So it took me a while to find where to access the step sequencer. But eventually I found it :w00t: so I'll be playing with that for a while to get the hang of it.

EZ drummer looks cool. Seems pretty intuitive. Might be more my speed. I'll keep that one in mind when I'm ready to spend some $ on this new hobby.

Thanks for the tips and suggestions! :)

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Re: Programming beats into your DAW

Post by Larry Mal » Tue Feb 07, 2017 10:55 am

You know, I was forgetting about Live's step sequencer! It's so unobtrusive that I almost forget that it is one.

But yeah, try to be focused on the intricacies of the backbeat or a four on the floor, those are deceptively easy beats that allow for plenty of less is more potential. If you can come up with a solid back beat and then a simple snare/tom fill leading up to a crash on the one of the next verse, and ride cymbal action on the choruses, you'll have the tools ready to create beats for a variety of things in the future.

And much like the major scale is a jumping off point for all future musical knowledge, knowing how a 4/4 beat works will help you later on with anything you want to do in the future.
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