[LAU] howto: making drums

[Stephen Cameron]

--- schoappied <schoappied at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Do you use hydrogen or midi to make drum parts for your songs?
> 
> Are there nice drum hydrogen files available? where?
> 
> Are there nice drum midi files available? Where?
> 
> I'm looking for a howto to make nice drum parts in midi (rosegarden) and/ or 
> hydrogen. Is there a good tutorial on the internet somewhere?
>

Hi Dirk,

I use gneutronica for drums ( http://gneutronica.sourceforge.net )

Full disclolosure, I'm the guy that wrote this program.  Not sure
if anybody else uses it much these days.

It doesn't seem to work very well on Fedora core 8... I'm suspecting
gnome changes screwed up performance, but not sure.  It did work well 
on Fedora core 3 and 4.

It's mostly meant to use as a MIDI drum sequencer, to drive external
MIDI hardware.  However, it can drive softsynths (e.g. fluidsynth)
and I think it can drive hydrogen as well, iirc (been ages and ages
since I thought about that, as it's sort of pointless -- though ages
and ages ago gneutronica could do timing things that hydrogen's 
sequencer was incapable of -- and may still be incapable of -- I don't
know.  (This deficiency of hydrogen at the time was the reason that
gneutronica was created, incidentally.)

But, back to how to make drum tracks, which was your main question.

I'm not a drummer (and I suspect, neither are you, or you wouldn't
be asking this question.)  Here's something which I found helpful,
me being someone who was writing a drum sequencer program but also
a person who knew next to nothing about playing drums, or composing
drum parts.

http://www.tweakheadz.com/how_to_make_original_drum_tracks.htm

It doesn't help you to write a great drum part, but it does
help to provide a systematic way to expand a simple pattern
into a whole song's worth of drum material in a rather
fast and painless way.  The other thing to know is a simple
backbeat.  Bass drum on beats 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4.
(Of course there are endless variations, but that is sort
of the fundamental axiom of most drumming -- probably you 
already know it.  (probably experienced drummers cringe to
hear me put it that way.)

Also, gneutronica has a feature which allows you to cut and
paste ASCII drum tablature directly into the program.

mxtabs.com used to have loads of drum tablature, but, ironically,
about the time I added the ASCII drum tab feature into gneutronica,
they got a big copyright takedown notice... rats.  At least I
was able to get some testing done before it all disappeared.  I'm
not even sure the site exists except as a squatter's domain at
this point -- in any case it seems very different from what it was
in 2005.  Still, there might be some drum tabs out there on the
net from which you could learn.

You might search youtube... I've seen a couple tutorials on making
drum tracks with sequencers there.  Not that they were great, but 
maybe better than nothing.

Hope that's some help.

-- steve


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