18 May
2005
18 May
'05
7:34 a.m.
On Tue, 17 May, 2005 at 06:33PM -0600, Steve D spake thus:
Damn you. The drums are really good.
I just hate it when people can be so good at something first time.
First, on Tue,
May 17, 2005 at 12:42:47AM -0400, LinuxMedia 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)?
Then Steve D wrote:
[...] 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
--
"I'd crawl over an acre of 'Visual This++' and 'Integrated
Development
That' to get to gcc, Emacs, and gdb. Thank you."
(By Vance Petree, Virginia Power)