17 May
2005
17 May
'05
10:34 p.m.
First, on Tue, May 17, 2005 at 12:42:47AM -0400,
LinuxMedia wrote:
Then Steve D wrote:
When I actually have everything set up the way I
want it and get ready
to make music, I will probly eventually look into electric drum pads (or
whatever you call them). I'm assuming they are all midi. Would midiable
drum pads help to make it more musical for you (assuming one could use
the drum pads to trigger sounds via midi and a linux sequence/sampler)?
--- ---
[...] But your email gave me an idea. Rather than use
Hydrogen (which
I really like) or another percussion program to produce drums for any
particular piece of music I'm working on, I could simply use one of
the percussion kits in one of my MIDI tone generators, which maps a
whole array of percussion from bass drums to snares to toms to hi-hats
to everything else, to the various keys of a MIDI keyboard. Then I can
simply use the keyboard skills I already have to "play" the drums in
real time and accompany my already recorded tracks of piano, organ,
etc.
Well, I tried it. I set one of my MIDI tone generators to "rhythm" mode
(which simply means it changes to a percussion kit with various
percussion instruments mapped to individual keys of the MIDI keyboard),
then used the keyboard to "play" the drums and record it live
into Audacity, adding a drum track to my little piece Herky-Jerk.
The good news is that I could play with lots of expression and variation
in tempo, just like a real drummer. The bad news is that it was d*mn
hard! I had to be incredibly relaxed to achieve anything even barely
approximating a stable rhythm or tempo, and I have a new found
appreciation for drummers and their skills.
If anyone cares to hear the rather rough results of this tedious (but
enjoyable) experiment, the ogg file is here:
http://www.xscd.com/pub/music/herky-jerk-drums.ogg
the original, without the drum track, is here:
http://www.xscd.com/pub/music/herky-jerk.ogg
Best wishes,
Steve D, New Mexico US
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