Midi Drum loop newbie: DAW Automation question

[tothemax]

I'm starting to get familiar with MT Power drums for creating loops. Normally when I'm doing tracks I use a drum machine but it's too much work to add in fills so I end with different variations of a constant beat (Zoom RT-223). With the MT PD, the drum tones are really decent and the interface it really easy to use. You can drag and drop 1-4 measure preset rhythms and build drums sections up to 3 measures, then drag that into your DAW and it creates the midi. That's about as much drum beat building as I'm up to, but you can add intros, fills, whatever and it's an hour effort (not days).

Anyway, I'm getting better at joining the sections together so that I get a pretty clean verse and chorus section (loop). Next step is to add some dynamics, which I think requires automation - which I get the concept but is pretty new to me. The video link below is pretty good, I like this guy for Cakewalk as he is pretty thorough.

This covers automation. With the MT Drums I get a bunch of midi tracks, and they are all at the default volume (threshold?). I'm sure there is way to group the instrument tracks together, again I'm pretty jazzed that I actually built a useable midi drum track.

Any pointers would be appreciated...

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[silky smoove]

Rather than automating I would edit MIDI velocity values to increase the number of samples utilized by the VST’s round Robin, assuming it has one. Dynamics in drums change more than just the volume and a good VST will capture that. Editing MIDI values can be tedious but it really helps when trying to make something sound natural.

 

[seamonkey]

Here's another Midi drummer that might save you some time and effort.
Rayzoon - Makers of Virtual Drummer Jamstix

You feed in the midi loops and it mostly plays them, but with a Drummer's personality.
When you put in the song sections: Intro, Verse, Bridge, Chorus, ...
It'll work out the fills between the sections.
There's a "Power" control that will vary how busy the drums play - like a HH, BD on 1&3, and side-stick on 2&4 on quiet parts, to full out busy beats during loud parts.

This can be automated with just changing the power setting knob a track with a slider.

Or there's an included utility that can listen to the output of the DAW and feed this back to the power control to allow it to automatically follow quiet to loud parts of the song. It's like having a drummer to listen to how quiet and loud the band is playing.

 

[tothemax]

Had some time in the studio this morning and got a chance to play around with Born to be wild and use some automation. I actually set up a second pedal board with a MXR Carbon copy delay and a Joyo Ultimate OD for that overdriven guitar tone. The track is a little on the busy side and I ended up doing a live double on the vocals... It turned out kind of like a ZZ Top & Satriani meet Steppenwolf sound. Anyway it was fun putting it together, and a good learning experience.

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[tothemax]

A couple of things that I'm noticing is that the overall volume is pretty low, and it gets a little muddy. I realize these things take time to learn. My original tracks were not too bad level wise. I've taken my Behringer board out of the signal chain and recording directly into the Tascam US16x08 (was using inserts from the board into the Tascam). The Tascam preamps seem to be significantly cleaner, much less clipping. I do have a quasi dead-box set up for guitar with an AC15 amp, the amp is mic'd and framed in with moving blankets. It records well but there is some bleed through if recording vocals and guitar together. I'm not overly pleased with my bass sound, I'm using the XLR DI from an Ampeg BA210 into the USB. I may need to revisit the gain staging tutorial. As always any tips would be appreciated.

The midi is really hard to see in this screenshot. Having started with Cubase, and a short trial with Reaper, I'm finding that the Cakewalk product (formerly Sonar) seems to be fairly easy to interpret.

One other thing in my practice studio I don't have a set of monitors (other than the PA) so I do all my initial recording and mixing with headphones. Not sure if that would make that much of a difference, but I hear quite a bit about the importance of monitors.

** When I get some time to play around I will try the Jamsticks Demo, product sounds cool and might be a great tool.

 

[Krisfield]

I use Automation a lot for drum tracks and drum buses. Like volume, panning, and effects. Best way I think, is to learn about Automation or any mixing technique, is with a template with no audio in the project.