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Thread Drum help

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1 Drum help
Hi folks,

I'm a guitarist and songwriter, I have a home studio setup on a Win2k machine, using Cubase SX, and a few midi drum packages for simple rythyms.

I mostly write alternative/rock/folk music.

I use guitar and keyboards to write songs, and have fairly strong idea's of how my drums should sound. I don't have space, or time to learn how to play drums, which I would love to do, but it doesn't seem likely in the short term.

Ideally what I want is something that allows me to tap in a rythym on the keyboard, or a drum pad, whilst it loops, and puts that rythym down on some software, that allows me to edit it fairly easily. I'd want to be able to use real drum sounds.

Also something that lets me sample real sounds would be good too, so I could use those in addition to drum sounds.

Does anyone know of anything that does all this, I have been into a few shops and have been pointed toward an Akai MPC1000, but this seems to be aimed very much at toward DJ's dance music, which I like to dabble with, but doesn't really cover what I'd like to do ?

Thanks in advance for any sage advice :)

Dave
2
This won't be much help, but.........

Hopefully someone else here will be able to give you more insight on this....

I'm not a midi man at all, but I remember when I interned at a small studio for a while...

We used Cubase and I'd set up a click track for songs that I wrote. Record a guitar pard. Then using a little Oxygen 1 octave keyboard I'd add a midi track and play the kick drum part, quantitize it to the click.....add midi track, play hi-hat part, quantitize.

I really don't know how you would go about setting it up simply because I only record audio now. Even our track/beat writer at the studio sequences with his keyboard and then I dump to the MX-2424 and work with it like it's audio, but there is a way.............

We'll figure it out,

You got me interested

:)

Good luck

Justin
3
Thanks for the quick response. Sounds like an interesting setup.

What gave me the idea years ago was watching the Making of Peter Gabriel IV (An old Southbank (UK TV) show), which I recently got a copy of.

He had some very cool gear (it was the early 80's) and I think he was demonstrating his Fairlight. Tapping in rythym's of sounds he had sampled - dragging concrete over his patio, smashing TV screens with exhaust pipes in a scrap yard..you know that kind of thing 8)

I was just thinking that by now, there must be somthing simple along those lines...that doesn't cost the 20-30k..

Dave
4
I also use midi for my drums. I either play the basic groove on my keyboard, record it as midi, then add to it in my sequencer program (I use Cakewalk). From there, I either copy and past it around as needed, and add fills and stuff in the piano roll editor. A little time consuming, but it works well.

I also use a program called Jammer Pro for drums a lot. It's also midi based, but works more on a style based generator format. Very useful.
The Axeman (##(===> Cuts From My New Blues CD
5
Mike -

Could you elaborate a bit on how you use your keyboard to record drums midi. I too use cakewalk (and cubase) and cannot figure this out in Sonar 3.

Thank you for any help.