Virtual drums

[Geri O]

First, I’m not too happy with the idea of virtual drums, but I’m recording at the house with no drums, so I need to dive into virtual drums for a bit.

I’ve spent a lot of time learning Logic over the past 2 weeks. Today, I spent the day working with the “drummers” in Logic as well as Ultrabeats and I’m not real happy with either outcome. So far, (and being a drummer myself anyway), I’m leaning towards just laying down a click, playing in all the drum parts via controller, and quantizing them. The stuff I’ve begun to work on is for demo or purposes anyway.

Had anyone had what you consider to be pretty good luck with virtual drummers in the DAWs? There’s times that I miss Linndrums, Yamaha RX7s, and the various Roland drum machines. But the sounds are soooo much better now. (And now, you know how friggin’ old I am!...).

Thanx.

 

[seamonkey]

It's valid.
There are a lot of excellent finger drummers. There are video's and courses available for finger drumming.
Some are just dang amazing.

On the other hand, For a good starting track for drums it's hard to be Band-In-a-Box and the RealDrum tracks it generates. It's not cheap, but it's fast.

 

[mdlewis]

I’ve spent a lot of time learning Logic over the past 2 weeks. Today, I spent the day working with the “drummers” in Logic as well as Ultrabeats and I’m not real happy with either outcome. So far, (and being a drummer myself anyway), I’m leaning towards just laying down a click, playing in all the drum parts via controller, and quantizing them. The stuff I’ve begun to work on is for demo or purposes anyway.

I've been using Logic for a number of years and have some experience with using the program to do programmed drums. What did you find lacking? It's become incredibly easy to add decent percussion in the most recent versions imo.

 

[kevindahl]

What kind of music are you writing/recording? I am not a drummer but I have been programming since the early eighties. Nothing is more tedious than trying to program a decent drum part that actually has groove. If you are doing hip hop or EDM type of stuff sure program a 8 bar groove and lay it down. I write pop and rock mostly.

I primarily use Superior drummer and just drop the midi parts into the DAW. There are third party MIDI but the ones that come with SD are great. I have also purchased some songwriter packs. If I have to do some editing then I go in to the MIDI part and add or delete what I want. I have also used BFD and addictive as well. Wasn't a fan of BFD, addictive is ok.

I have never used Logic, I use Cubase. I wish I had these drums way back when. I still have my Alesis HR 16 drum machine in my Garage.

 

[Mcgiver69]

If you have the space you can always get yourself a e-kit and connect it to your drums programs and play the parts yourself. As you are a drummer this would be easier to do than programming the whole thing.

 

[Geri O]

Okay, I spent the day working on my patience and staying with the Drummer in Logic, as well as pleasing in drum parts on my tiny iRig keyboard. I'm getting a better handle on understanding and making the Logic drummer work. It just takes patience which is harder to come by. And I'm still learning the mechanics of Logic, which I'm loving, by the way. I'm working on tracks for the country music artist that's my regular gig. She's a songwriting machine and for every song she records professionally, there's probably another dozen that don't get any attention. So I'm trying my hand at "producing" some demos on those songs. Also, I'm working on my own instrumental originals (yeah, I know, who ain't these days...). And there's a jazz pianist that I'm gonna work with, learning a BUNCH of stuff with that experience. EDM, Americana, hip-hop, industrial, just not my generation.

I wanted to tackle Ultrabeats, but geez, there's a lot to it. I"ll just take some more patience and get on it. I still like the idea of programming my own drum sequences, or "patterns" and "songs", as we called them back in The Day.

Superior Drummer looks absolutely awesome, but I have to make sure I can justify that much drumming power. At least I can write it off.

I've actually made my recording rig pretty mobile, using a MacBook Pro with Logic, a pair of Yamaha HS80s, and my X32 rack as the interface. The X32 rack interface makes monitoring for the musicians very easy. And I can get it all easily in the back of my Nissan Armada. I did a couple of things a month ago with live drums, guitars, and horns before the "lockdown" went into effect (you know, the "lockdown" where there's more people running the streets than ever...). Those sessions came off pretty well for local sessions and efforts. That's the preferred way, if I have the time. Funny, I certainly have the time, but we certainly don't need to attempting live recording session at the moment, do we...

 

[mdlewis]

There is a learning curve to Logic for sure. I don’t use ultra beat - it’s just too slow to program for me. It seems more designed for EDM than for the kinds of stuff I usually work with. I’m doing similar sorts of things it seems to what you would like to do.

What I have ended up doing are these sorts of things:

1. Sometimes I just use a midi instrument track and a drum set instrument and input drums by pads or just direct midi entry. The producer sets are very complicated and give you enormous control over each drum and each “microphone”. I seldom use them because they involve so much tweaking.

2. These days I tend more to use an active drummer, using different regions for each part of the songs to customize the play (more fills, more swing, push the beat etc, have the kick snare follow the bass or some other track). Sometimes I’ll add a simplified bass line to drive the kick snare that I actually mute in the playback in favor of a more complex or syncopated one.

3. Sometimes when I need to add something when I’m using an active drummer, and this is quite useful for song writing, I’ll drag an active drummer track to a midi track and edit it in detail such as to add a roll, symbol crash, or eliminate some hit that I don’t want there.

 

[Bassdirty]

.. I still have my Alesis HR 16 drum machine in my Garage.

I had that one. Was pretty good actually, and TBH, I still miss it once in a while..

 

[Discount Bassy]

Beatbuddy pedals are pretty convincing. Also Drums on Demand beats with the files humanized a bit for timing errors. Beatbuddy even has a "sobriety" function that allows a range of error corresponding to the inebriation level of the drummer.

 

[Jacobfred]

First, I’m not too happy with the idea of virtual drums, but I’m recording at the house with no drums, so I need to dive into virtual drums for a bit.

I’ve spent a lot of time learning Logic over the past 2 weeks. Today, I spent the day working with the “drummers” in Logic as well as Ultrabeats and I’m not real happy with either outcome. So far, (and being a drummer myself anyway), I’m leaning towards just laying down a click, playing in all the drum parts via controller, and quantizing them. The stuff I’ve begun to work on is for demo or purposes anyway.

Had anyone had what you consider to be pretty good luck with virtual drummers in the DAWs? There’s times that I miss Linndrums, Yamaha RX7s, and the various Roland drum machines. But the sounds are soooo much better now. (And now, you know how friggin’ old I am!...).

Thanx.

I use Logic's drummer pretty frequently, working rock/pop stuff. If the grooves are what's lacking for you then I recommend finding a decent basic groove that fits as a sketch, converting the file to MIDI and editing appropriately. Also don't be afraid to cut drummer sections down by bar in order to change intensity, complexity, or fills.

If the sounds are more of an issue then I'd recommend using the "producer kits", it places each component of the drummer onto it's own track under the drum bus so you can process and mix accordingly.

I do find myself curious about Native Instruments Abbey Road drummers and Superior Drummer from time to time though...

Edit: I didn't realize how late to the party I was. Glad to hear that you were able to experiment and get some workable grooves!

 

[Geri O]

I use Logic's drummer pretty frequently, working rock/pop stuff. If the grooves are what's lacking for you then I recommend finding a decent basic groove that fits as a sketch, converting the file to MIDI and editing appropriately. Also don't be afraid to cut drummer sections down by bar in order to change intensity, complexity, or fills.

If the sounds are more of an issue then I'd recommend using the "producer kits", it places each component of the drummer onto it's own track under the drum bus so you can process and mix accordingly.

I do find myself curious about Native Instruments Abbey Road drummers and Superior Drummer from time to time though...

Edit: I didn't realize how late to the party I was. Glad to hear that you were able to experiment and get some workable grooves!

I did, but I’m still welcoming all ideas. I think I’m gonna spring for Superior Drums here shortly. And maybe a set of drum pads so I can actually play in what I’m looking for with drums.
Thanks for the interest.

 

[Frank Tuesday]

You can invest in midi loops. There are some nice ones played by real drummers, non-quantized and with ghost notes. Here is one. And cheaper than a decent set of triggers

Premium MIDI Drum Loops with a Human Groove - OddGrooves Drum Loops

 

[stratovani]

There's a channel over at YouTube from a drummer named Jim Dooley, and his channel is full of his drumming at certain tempos and styles that can be downloaded for a small charge. For a learning experience I've been recording myself playing the old Elvis song Her Latest Flame, and I was using the drum and percussion keys on my old Casio keyboard, but the effort was not satisfactory at all, it sounded too much like a machine and not human in any way. So I searched his channel and found what I was looking for, a medium 105 bpm Country beat with brushes. Sounds great, just what I was looking for, and now I'm layering instruments over it. Something to think about anyways.

Jim Dooley

 

[Geri O]

Thank you, @stratovani and @Frank Tuesday, for the tips. Much appreciated!

 

[DirtDog]

EZ Drummer is the cheaper little brother to Superior Drummer. It’s fairly affordable and has more than enough flexibility out of the box. If you really need something specific they have a large number of expansion packs. Works great in Logic.

 

[robot fighter]

If it's any use to you I was recently weighing up drum software options and ended up going with getgood drums. It was on sale significantly cheaper than ez drummer or superior drummer which is what ended up swaying me, but I'm really happy with the sound. I'm still getting the hang of programming my own beats, but you can buy midi packs of pre-programmed beats for various genres and tweak them to suit your tracks which I'm finding a lot of fun.

 

[Rib 13]

MT Power Kit 2 is a FREE VSTi with a Nag Startup screen (that can be disabled with a PayPal donation). It has a bunch of patterns and fills built in....if you can't afford EZ Drummer or Slate Drums ( or even if you have them...I own Slate), it's a pretty darn good VSTi to have, especially for Free. I use it quite a bit myself

MT Power Drum Kit AU VST Drums Sampler Plugin Instrument FREE

I used it on this:
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