tips on programming drums

redrum sucks. i find it way easier to just work with the grid on cubase/pro tools/whatever, where you can see all the parts at once.

I like to play the parts on a keyboard, (load the samples into NN-XT first,) or pads. Barring that, you can do a couple things--one is to use Dr.Rex or whatever in Reason to get started with more realistic patterns and move those around. The other is to program it with Redrum and then use the Groove/Shuffle function to make it a little more swingy. I think the 1st option will make your beats more real sounding and give you some ideas for how beats "look" in midi.

Jordan, Grozart - sorry if this is too obvious, but have you tried using the sequencer at the bottom of the screen, so you can "see all the parts at once"? That's usually how I use redrum. load the samples into redrum, but then draw in the patterns below on the sequencer where you can easily cut-and-paste, adjust dynamics, etc.

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t214/ZachRScott/Picture1-1.jpg

Woah! I am so stupid.

I'm not sure how many of these tips are helpful for REALISTIC drumming, but here are some offhand things that help with getting something interesting out of Reason (and note that I really like programming in Reason, mostly because the modular aspect allows for so many interesting things):

1. Notice the button in the bottom left that makes channels 8/9 exclusive (i.e., only one can sound at a time). The obvious purpose is so you can make an open hi-hat sample "close," which will definitely help you with realism. But playing around with other kinds of long samples in there (or even using a sample in one channel and turning the volume all the way down on the other) lets you create a lot of effects that have a little more flow, and feel less boxy. For instance, you can take a long echoey drum sound, reverse it, and put it in one of those channels -- so it reverses in and then cuts off right on beat. Any kind of sound that's supposed to have a particular on-beat endpoint (like a crash cymbal that you them mute with your hand) needs this feature.

2. If it sounds "drum machiney" in the sense that it sounds like it's all coming from the same box, try using the individual channel outputs on the back of Redrum, and sending drums through individual effects chains. (Or use the effects-send outputs to send a few sounds -- say, a group of high hats -- through their own effects.) Giving the different drums different spacial placements (with EQ and reverb) or feature effects (phasers, distortion, etc.) can help. This isn't always true if you want a "real drums" sound, since various items in the kit shouldn't sound SUPER different -- but then again the "real drums" samples you get are always as dry and unaffected as possible, and different reverb settings especially can make them sound more like they're in a real room somewhere. (Also, play with reverb as a send effect: if you route all the drums through one very wet reverb effect on the side, you're basically creating a "room sound" version of them, which you can EQ and mix back in for a sense of ... well, a room. Mixing a send like that tends to work better than just running the whole thing straight through reverb and adjusting the dry/wet.)

3. Something I like doing = develop drum samples before starting to program. I.e., if I'm working on a song I'm pretty sure is going to be 135 BMPs and sound roughly a certain way, I can open up a separate Reason file and build patches specifically to make drum sounds I want to play with, ones that move in particular on-beat ways. So in that spare window, I might make a cool-sound snippet that includes, say, 3 of 16 steps in a bar, with a drum sound that cuts off and leaves a synth tone, and the synth tone echoes one -- and then I can just output that as a sound file and put it in the original song as one sample. (Maybe I can explain that better later on.)

4. Have you played with the "curve" value on the Matrix box? You can use it to affect a lot of different things in Reason, like pan and volume in a mixer, or settings on various effects. And because the curve value gets drawn in step by step, it can be kinda handy for making tweaks to drum programming -- e.g., having a heavy reverb sound that you use the curve to suddenly cut out when you want it to.

more later if I think of it...

I just got one of these:

http://img509.imageshack.us/img509/7830/imageuploadimageub1.jpg

I have a few issues with it so far (a bit of crosstalk, my kick trigger is overridden by any pad), but I definitely get a more natural sound than with my MPC 2000XL's pads.

I don't use Reason, tho, so I have absolutely no idea if this is at all relevant to you. Works great with Logic, tho.

Route the cymbals through a ring modulator! Thanks Phil Collins!

Er, which I guess doesn't help in the 'sounding realistic' stakes tho.

This is all great stuff. Really really helpful.

One more thing, I'm trying to work out how to use Recycle and Dr Rex, but I don't really know what I'm doing... I'm sure there are glitches going on, here and there or maybe I'm just making a stupid mistake. Is there a way of halving/doubling a loop's tempo once it's been loaded into Rex? How do I go about writing/editing loops so that they actually sound any good?

3. Something I like doing = develop drum samples before starting to program. I.e., if I'm working on a song I'm pretty sure is going to be 135 BMPs and sound roughly a certain way, I can open up a separate Reason file and build patches specifically to make drum sounds I want to play with, ones that move in particular on-beat ways. So in that spare window, I might make a cool-sound snippet that includes, say, 3 of 16 steps in a bar, with a drum sound that cuts off and leaves a synth tone, and the synth tone echoes one -- and then I can just output that as a sound file and put it in the original song as one sample. (Maybe I can explain that better later on.)

Could you? This sounds interesting.

I found an article the other day about how to route Dr Rex through Redrum so you can change any samples in a loop, but I lost it. It was an excellent thing though and has totally opened up the way the program works for me.

I can give a shot at explaining more, sure, but it might get kinda specific to my process, and maybe not helpful for the way you do things. (The method I'm talking about here would be good for doing things along the lines of Matt Dear or Soft Pink Truth, perhaps.)

So ... let's say I'm developing a song in Reason, sketching in the outlines, and the drums I'm using are just samples ticking away in Redrum. In the finished product, though, I'm going to want the drums to sound more fluid and interesting, and kind of move a little, rather than just following the grid. And let's assume that I'm 99% confident the song won't change from the tempo I'm using.

Maybe I have a snare sound I like, but I want the snare to be able to do other things. Maybe I want one snare hit to have a big whoosh of reverb following it. Maybe I want one that's bit-crushed and then drops off into a random plinky sound, on-beat, so that it goes GRRRR-beep. Maybe I want another one where there's a reversed swooshy sound leading in to the snare, so that it goes whooooo-CRACK.

Assembling and automating all right Reason/Ableton tools to do this within the song would be a pain, and would clutter up the screen and drain processor power. Instead, I can open up another file, set it to the BPM I'm using, and make those variations and on-beat sounds separately. I can take my snare samples and make all those other sounds out of it, using any number of effects that'll do things on-beat. More importantly, I can use that "Channel 8/9 Exclusive" button to make those sounds interact the way I want -- e.g., I can have the snare in channel 9, and a REVERSED, reverbed snare in channel 9, so I can make the reversed one whoosh in on-beat and then cut off when the real snare hits. If you start playing with the "curve" function on the Matrix, and the way it can control effects boxes, you can make things like, say, an echo that filters on-tempo. And if you're running Reason through something like Ableton, you can apply any number of plug-ins that will do things on-beat. This doesn't just mean drum sounds, either -- I can set up a little "fill" sound involving a synth buzz, a random sound effect, a sample ... whatever.

So now, instead of just my plain snare sample, I have a few different versions, most of which kinda move around with the beat, like little fills. I'll render those to disk, open them up in a sound editor, and cut out the sample I want. Now I can re-load those into the original song I'm working on and put them in Redrum, until maybe I'll have a whole Redrum that's holding 6 or 7 different snare samples: regular snare, whooshy snare, snare that trails off into a beep, snare that echoes with a little synth pulse underneath it, etc. Sometimes, while I'm programming, one of those will sound so good that it'll become part of the basic beat/loop. Sometimes I'll just trade one in for the regular snare here and there, as a kind of drum fill, or just to keep the sound moving around and staying interesting -- without having to build, automate, and process every one of those things within the same song file.

^^ All of that might make it sound more complicated or clever than it really is -- this is just a matter of preparing one nice snippet of rhythm in another window and then sampling it into your main work. Way more straightforward than multiple paragraphs make it sound. My only advice on it is to avoid doing any kind of extreme EQ or spatial effects while developing different snippets, so that you don't put them together and then realize they all sound like they're coming from completely different places.

Does that mostly explain it? If it doesn't, maybe over the weekend I can post sound files of the kinds of "snippets" I mean.

I usually have 3 or sometimes 4 channels in ableton devoted to Impulse sets and run all or at least most of them to an aux channel with its own compressor and fx before everything goes to the master. Remembering that Impulse is just a stripped-down eight-sample playback device goes a long way, as does figuring out how to leverage Beat Repeat into doing some of your work for you. work smarter not harder folks

inasmuch as programming the patterns, I just rip off other people.

also when you have a loop in ableton that's matched to tempo, you can chop it to the beat pretty easily by just highlighting the different sections of the bar you want to cut and hitting "consolidate." cmd/crtl+J is as essential as ctrl+c and ctrl+v in Live

Cheers for writing all that nabisco! it makes perfect sense; I've found recently with Reason that to really get into using it, you have to think in lateral ways to get an interesting sound (like your example) - I guess that's what keeps it interesting... As I say, I'm still only just getting my head round it yet I've been tinkering with it for a couple of years.

I bought Drum Kit From Hell a few years ago and still use it a lot for cymbal work. I like to 'play' short phrases on my MIDI interface and then straighten the MIDI out manually in the drum roll for whichever sequencer I'm using.