How to go about programming electronica-style drums?

[Arterial]

Hey guys,

I'm currently working on a project of mine "Technicolour Dreamcode" and I need help on learning how to program drums similar to those of the outro of All New Materials, the last minute.



I'm looking to learn how to do sorta light electronica drums.

Sorry for my noobishness guys.

Thanks for your time.

[EtherealEntity]

I don't know what electronica is - I'd guess it's an actual genre with a set type of beat that follows rules, like other dance genres.

The electronic drums in Periphery, Animals as Leaders etc (check out the intro to On Impulse), tend to be refered to as glitch. This one just happens to be a more coherant beat.

In both these songs, the kicks are pretty simple. Just gotta use the right sample (something not too aggressive). Same with the snare.

It's all in the highs and the glitchy sounds. Take a whole bunch of different hihat samples and high pitched glitch samples. You can do pretty much whatever you want with them.
-Random pitch shifting
-Random panning
-Random rhythms
For the rhythms, this particular song seems quite consitant. In On Impulse, it's a lot more random. Something key to the glitchy sound though, is very short samples. You can cut off the samples to last just one 32nd or 16th. Or you can do very fast successions of these notes that would be unplayable on a real hihat.
A little delay (tempo timed) can sound good too, especially set to dotted note instead of straight.

[EtherealEntity]

Here's my take on the glitch beat from On Impulse, for a full cover video I'm working on.
Glitch.wav

Here is a simple kick sample, cut short. The rest is around 20 various snare, hihat, and glitch/static samples inserted fairly randomly but with attention to the accents in the song. I forgot to mention, velocity is good to tweak too. If you have a fast roll on a hihat for example, increase the velocity of each one gradually. If you're using delay, leave some space for it and don't fill in everything with hihats. Using a delay to fill in the space will sound a lot more natural.

I used Battery to do this, but it could be done with audio samples too. The only feature Battery offered me that could be difficult otherwise, was the ability to modulate. I assigned LFOs to modulate the pan and distortion level on all of the hihat sounds randomly.

If you don't have any samples yet, go ahead and download the BoyInABand sample packs. Battery is great if you are looking for a long term investment. It comes with an amazing amount of samples in the form of full kits for different styles (including real kits great for anything but metal). It's an incredible sampler with unlimited options. I weeded through all the samples and made my own 128 piece kit with 32 kicks, 32 snares, 32 hats, and 32 glitches/fx/other.

[Arterial]

Woah information overload!

Sorry but im a complete noob when it comes to electronic drums...

All I have is Reason 5, but ive been told that Superior Drummer or Drumkit from Hell or something would help me...

Very confusing sorry -.-

[Arterial]

Also I wouldnt have a clue where to grab myself some samples and such =[

[somniumaeternum]

Originally Posted by EtherealEntity

Here's my take on the glitch beat from On Impulse, for a full cover video I'm working on.
Glitch.wav

For some reason it states the location is wrong.. can you double check? Would like to hear some of your drum programming goodness

[EtherealEntity]

Sorry I don't know anything about Reason except that it has a different approach to other DAWS. Maybe someone else can help out.

Superior Drummer is for real drums, not electronic drums. That said, you can make glitch drums with a real kit.

Here's the samples I was refering to that I used to use before I got Battery (if you are interested in Battery - it can actually load any samples you want. Not just drums).
Sample Packs :: Boy in a Band

And another link about Reason on that site that may be helpful in some way:
How to open a boyinaband sample pack and put it into Reason :: Boy in a Band

Originally Posted by somniumaeternum

For some reason it states the location is wrong.. can you double check? Would like to hear some of your drum programming goodness

Hmm that's odd...the link is definately right and works for me and I have had no trouble before. I have noticed it forwards to a Mac advert after a few seconds on the website though so you need to be quick

Here's a direct link though that should work too
Glitch.wav

[Arterial]

What would you recommend that I use Ethereal?

[EtherealEntity]

Originally Posted by Arterial

What would you recommend that I use Ethereal?

Can you be more specific?

[somniumaeternum]

Originally Posted by EtherealEntity

Sorry I don't know anything about Reason except that it has a different approach to other DAWS. Maybe someone else can help out.

Superior Drummer is for real drums, not electronic drums. That said, you can make glitch drums with a real kit.

Here's the samples I was refering to that I used to use before I got Battery (if you are interested in Battery - it can actually load any samples you want. Not just drums).
Sample Packs :: Boy in a Band

And another link about Reason on that site that may be helpful in some way:
How to open a boyinaband sample pack and put it into Reason :: Boy in a Band



Hmm that's odd...the link is definately right and works for me and I have had no trouble before. I have noticed it forwards to a Mac advert after a few seconds on the website though so you need to be quick

Here's a direct link though that should work too
Glitch.wav

Great stuff here; I guess I'll need to check out Battery. I'm not really sure how to incorporate it in my mixes yet but it'd be fun either way

What's your usual workflow? Do you track "regular" drums first, track the guitars etc, then glitch them out? Do you replace the "real" drums or do you use them glitch as like a texture sample?

[EtherealEntity]

Originally Posted by somniumaeternum

Great stuff here; I guess I'll need to check out Battery. I'm not really sure how to incorporate it in my mixes yet but it'd be fun either way

What's your usual workflow? Do you track "regular" drums first, track the guitars etc, then glitch them out? Do you replace the "real" drums or do you use them glitch as like a texture sample?

Incoming essay...

You could use them as an alternate texture, both in songs using real drums (like On Impulse), or songs with electronic drums, like this one:


Alternating between a 'normal' (though still somewhat odd) beat, and the glitchy sections, just like On Impulse.

You could also use them as the main percussion in a song;
5:00 on this track:


I know a lot of electronic drum programmers in dance music and such prefer to use audio samples. They will take drum samples into audio tracks and manually cut them up, reverse them, pitch shift them, etc. That sounds very creative to me and good fun - though more time consuming. I've never tried it.

I prefer to load the audio into a sampler (like Battery) and control it with MIDI. With the right settings (depending on the sampler) you can make the length of the sample dependant on the length of your MIDI note. Usually, when programming drums, a hit is a hit and the length doesn't matter. For glitching though, it's good to be able to insert a short MIDI note and it trigger a cut-off sample.

If I did not have a sampler so advanced as Battery, I might prefer to use audio editing to have more control over what I'm doing. For some aspects, such as reversing a single clip, it probably is easier to just process the audio, rather that automate the bypass on the reverse button of a single sample. You can end up with a lot of automation that way! It's easier to just copy the sample to a new MIDI note and have it reversed over there.

To be honest, I don't think that glitching out of hihats etc. really needs too much attention to detail. Just some short notes and relatively random modulation seems to do the trick. The occasional more thought out part (like manually automating a pitch shift on a hihat roll for example), working with the accents of the song, works well.

I haven't tried too much glitching of 'real' drum sounds. I tend to use the electronic sounds instead. I imagine you can get a bit more of a raw sound out of chopping up some real kit samples, though. (Note: when I say real, that can still be samples within Battery that are intended to sound real, or something like Superior Drummer).

Workflow will vary from person to person as with anything On the On Impulse cover, I sorted the real drums first, then the synth, then the bass, then the glitch drums. Working on the guitars now I use a similar workflow for most things, though they are usually already written in tab form or so.
If I am writing in the DAW whilst programming, recording drafts, etc, then I'd put down whatever comes into my head at the time in draft form. That can become a much messier/confusing approach but can be more creative

[Arterial]

Originally Posted by EtherealEntity

Can you be more specific?

I mean like...what programs should I get and stuff to make doing all this easier?

I'm using a Windows.

As you can already tell, I don't know anything about anything

[theo]

I use superior drummer and the glitch vst plugin to do all of this kinda stuff, albeit it doesnt sound quite as electronica. download some different sample packs and have some synths playing along though and you'd be on the money

[EtherealEntity]

^ I forgot about that glitch plugin. It is good for modulating stuff to sound glitchy. For a glitch beat though, I prefer to write it to sound glitchy from the start.
I think it's a great plugin for glitching out other kinds of sounds, or little parts of the entire mix.

Arterial - The plugin in question is dBlue Glitch (I presume).
I don't know anything about Reason. All I know is, that from using just one DAW (Sonar), I was able to open Logic, Protools, and Cubase, and pretty much know what I was doing.
However, opening Reason confused me a lot. Though I have had less than 10 minutes with it admittedly. I am not aware if it's functions and workflow are the same as other DAWs (i.e. a track view where you place clips on a timeline, a MIDI editor where you can write your MIDI parts, the ability to insert VST instruments like Superior Drummer or Battery, plugins for mixing, etc.)
If it isn't like that, (I'm sure it does actually have plenty of the features I just listed) then I'd suggest getting a proper DAW. I have seen quotes along the lines of 'Reason is not a DAW'. However, this may just be due to the fact that it can't record (maybe a new version can, I don't know). It may not be necessary for you to record, though. There's plenty of people making music with Reason though and I'm sure it's good!

So let's say for now you are happy with Reason as your DAW.
For other programs, you don't necessarily need anything. You can take the audio editing approach that I wrote about above. Just download samples, bring them in, make sure you are working set to grid (32nd note probably best), and start chopping stuff up and applying effects
If you prefer to take the MIDI instrument approach, you need a sampler. A sampler is a VST instrument (like Superior Drummer etc), but which allows you to place your own sounds on each MIDI note (like Battery). You can then program your sounds in the MIDI editor (the piano view). I don't know of any, but searching for 'Free VST sampler' will probably yield results. I expect many of them will have just 8 or 16 pads though. You are likely to want more than that if doing glitch sounds, but try it.
That's actually the main reason I bought Battery as my sampler instead of using the 16 pad one that came with Sonar. My electronic kit track preset had 8 instances of the plugin on one MIDI track to get all the sounds I wanted and it was too much trouble!
I highly recommend Battery. The vast amount of samples it included actually led me to abandon the samples I had downloaded, too. It could also cover your needs for good acoustic kit sounds for normal drums if you wish.

[Arterial]

Okay i'll give it a go when I finish work....

And i'm a bit iffy about getting Battery especially when I have no clue of what i'm doing lol.

[EtherealEntity]

Good luck, be sure to inform what you're up to

Haha sure! It's no toy that's for sure.

Here's a nice looking sampler I've just dug up. I haven't tried it.
Majken.se - Grizzly

Looking at the screenshot, you have 8 pads. At the top of each pad you can load the sample. So from the BoyInABand sample packs, pick a couple of kicks, couple of snares, hats, and other sounds that you like and load them in.

It has some effects there that you can apply to each pad. You can choose the MIDI note to trigger each pad where it says Note:36 etc. (If you are used to notes instead of numbers -


Play about with the effects and see what those do. The filter is an equalizer, if you are not familiar with that word.

Under outputs, you can choose different outputs for each pad. I don't know Reason, but you should be able to choose somewhere in Reason to have seperate tracks for each output (so you can have kicks, snares, etc, on seperate tracks in Reason). For now, probably best to keep it simple and just use one track, but the feature is there if you want it.

I don't know what the triggers section bottom right does without trying it.
The modulation section:
Modulation is good fun. Here you can set LFOs (low frequency oscillators) to a certain speed in rhythm with your song, and have them assigned to modulate a control on a pad (for example panning hihats back and forth across the speakers, or sweeping a filter back and forth).

Play around with it all, and have some fun Battery is basically just a bigger version of this with up to 128 pads, more effects and more modulation.

I don't know if this particular sampler will let you control the sample length with MIDI note length like I spoke of. Some of them will just play the whole sample regardless of MIDI note length. That feature is pretty useful for glitching and short cut off sounds. If not, you can always edit your samples shorter first and then load them in like that

[Arterial]

Yeah, i've downloaded all the samples from the boyinaband page.

I'll DL Grizzly tonight too and see how I go. Having a look at the screenshot, theres so many knobs and buttons...

Man I wish you were in Melb Ethereal, then you could show me this stuff in person! =P

BTW, why are they called "VST Plug-Ins" as opposed to something like.."program?" =S

[EtherealEntity]

That would be handy
Lots of knobs and buttons, but once you've learnt one pad you've learnt them all (for any software) Most of them are self explanatory. Some that aren't:
Position: Presumably the position at which the sample starts. You'll probably want it left at 0. If you have some samples you've made yourself with a gap at the start, that's the time to adjust it (or just trim them first). Or it could be used creatively if you don't want to hear the start of the sound.
Decay: Presumably how it sustains.
BP/LP/HP: Band pass, low pass, or high pass filter. Types of EQ. Band pass works on a band of frequencies in a certain area, like one band on a graphic equalizer. Low pass filters out the highs below a chosen frequency, letting the lows pass. High pass is the opposite of that.
Reso: Resonance of the filter. I know what this sounds like but I have no idea what it actually means

Modulators:
Top left of the modulator you'd select the pad that you want to work on. E.g pad 1 kick drum
Below that you choose what you want to modulate, e.g Pan.
Not sure what the 'free' box is.
LFO is selecting to modulate the pan with an LFO. You could select an envelope instead. For the LFO, you select the rate and shape.
Some shape examples:
Sine:


Square


There are probably other options which you can Google for a visual. Square will make the pan jump back and forth from speaker to speaker (when modulating pan). Sine will do it smoothly. Rate will choose how fast.

Depth will be how far you want the modulator to turn the pan knob, for example. Do you want to pan hard left and right or just a little?

Using an envelope instead of an LFO is more like a line graph that you can draw yourself, and could be more complex than sine or square.

All this applies to synthesis in general, not just this sampler These methods are common for modulation on many synths. You may be familiar with dubstep and th synth sounds used there. Their rhythmic 'wub' is a modulated filter. Actually - a more common example: Wah pedal. If your foot goes down every beat, then that's like an LFO/envelope (depending on the movement of your foot. You can't make a square wave though ) at 1/4 note rate, set to modulate an EQ.


They are called VST plugins because...well..that's what they are http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Studio_Technology
It's just a format. If it was just called a program, people wouldn't know what they were talking about. "I have a nice drum program." Well how do you install that? Can it be opened inside the DAW or is it a standalone program? Is it controlled by MIDI?
A VST instrument (once you know what it is) lets you know that you install it to your VST folder, and can insert it as an instrument in programs that support VSTs. (Not ProTools. That uses RTAS instead). You know it will be controlled by MIDI in the piano view.
A VST plugin is the same way, except it's just a plugin (insertable on a channel for an effect, like an EQ plugin or a compressor). Not an instrument to be played.

Note: The terms are somewhat interchangable. You may find a VST instrument named as a VST plugin. Because, well, it still 'plugs in' to your DAW. The key is instruments can be played with MIDI, plugins can not. A sampler is an instrument.

[Arterial]

Alright Ethereal.

I've been playing with reason for two hours....ive started to put samples in and do stuff...but i have no idea what im doing...

i had trouble finding samples that i liked (many were real drum kits and heavy synth leads and stuff...)

btw....i dont think Reason can run VSTs...

[EtherealEntity]

It's normal to sift through lots of samples and narrow it down to your own smaller library
What is it you're doing that you don't have na idea about?

Damn, you're right about VSTs. You can use other DAWs to load the VST and rewire it into Reason, but that's complicated and you might as well just stick with using another DAW in my opinion.

I'd look into getting Cubase or Sonar if you can. I use Sonar myself. It's probably the least widely used of the major DAWs but has so many features that others don't/don't do quite as well. There's a new version of Sonar called Sonar X1 which is a complete revamp. I haven't tried it but it seems a bit more confusing. I use 8.5 Producer edition.

If you don't want to spend that much at the moment, get hold of Reaper. I hear you can download it for free and pay $40 after 30 days, but don't actually have to pay it to continue using the software. I think lots of people here use it and it has all the features you need.

[Arterial]

I forgot to mention..I have REAPER lol...

Okay im fairly close...after doing some more scouring I found on another ss.org thread that dblue Glitch is a popular VST....

I've errr ran it on REAPER as a VST and i've also loaded a MIDI file (am i doing this right? oO). Thing is with REAPER, whenever I playback MIDI files I get no sound coming out. Apparently i have to link each MIDI track to an instrument or something?
Everything is running file while i'm playing it back but theres just no sound.
i feel like im so close yet im so far =[

[EtherealEntity]

dBlue glitch is cool at appying glitch effects, yes

MIDI does not contain sound. It is a score, which tells an instrument (synthesizer) what to play. You may be familiar with Guitar Pro or Power Tab, and what MIDI 'sounds like'. That's actually the sound of the synth that your computer uses, the GS Wavetable Synth. Guitar Pro does not make any sound itself - it sends MIDI to that synth - that's when the sound/audio is made.

So no, MIDI in Reaper will not make a sound. You must output the MIDI track to a synth, like the GS Wavetable or a VST Instrument plugin - such as the Grizzly sampler, Superior Drummer, Battery, Massive, EzDrummer, and many others. All of these are instruments controlled by MIDI.

dBlue is a plugin effect, like a compressor or an EQ. It doesn't play anything, and is just inserted as an effect to process audio. That can be an audio sample that you've imported or recorded, or the audio generated by the synthesizer controlled by MIDI.
dBlue is a fairly advanced plugin, in that it almost does play something. In the plugin itself, you can create patterns of various glitch effects for it to 'play'.

You are close - you'll find all the technical aspects come together very quickly. It's just some basics and then you'll have an idea of what everything does and almost anything from then on will make some sense straight away.

[Arterial]

Okay, my next step is to output the MIDI track to a synth....i'm not sure if REAPER has any of those VSTs..I will try and put Grizzly in later tonight.

Thanks so much Ethereal, you've been a godsend for me in this department - will keep you updated.

[EtherealEntity]

Nope Reaper will not include any of those - those are all commercial VSTs that you may have heard of (except Grizzly). There is a chance reaper does include some of it's own instruments.
No problem, glad to help

[Arterial]

Okay.

I can run Grizzly and dBlue on REAPER...thing is..im still having no sound come from anything. You told me to use Grizzly to run the MIDI file but I can't get it to do that...dont now how to..