What do you people like for your Robot Drums?

At some point in my life it became necessary to replace my drum machines- I never had anything hip or cool- with software-based solutions for rockdrums, so I bought Toontrack shizzle, and I was in their camp for a good long while- as was everybody else, it seemed, even if only because EZDrummer was so cheap and available. I started using Native Instruments stuff last year for drums- and I love NI - but it started to seem sorta thin and bright to me, though I liked the overall more open, less compressed timbre of it. So I started layering it with Analogue Drums' stuff, which is bone-dry. I've demo-ed Slate, but that's fuckin' compression city modern rock whatnot. Now, it sounds good as hell, except I hate the compression! I just hate the attack, especially on the snare. I know what I like on snares, and that is not it. I'm especially picky there. Funny thing is I like the sounds of the drums themselves! Slate has killer brass, but the kick/snare/toms, while perfect for lots of peoples' taste, are not to mine.

Some of the new Toontrack stuff has me intrigued, the SD2 NYC expansions and the Randy Staub kits (again, mondo compression in a way that I don't mondo compress, but I do like his work). I like how they sound soloed, the space they occupy.

My metal collaborator loves BFD and Joe Barresi's Evil Drums. Now, Joe Barresi is fucking awesome, and I asked him to borrow his BFD install discs to try this.

Even when I'm happy with shit (which currently is a mix of a bunch of things) I'm never happy, because I like just recording my crew, but that's not always practical.

Discuss.

An addendum: I figger at this point I'm the only person who poasts here here who does electrodrums, so this is about emulation of realdrums. If anyone cares, I use Logic Ultrabeat and EX24 and NI Kontakt to load samples. I do use Toontrack's Electronic EZX expansion from time to time. I generally use my own 808 and 909 samples that I made. I will sample hardware and make my own sounds when I can get my hands on things. There are a few software libraries I like, mostly for fucked-up sounds.

Real drums or no drums for me. Even though i am pretty solidly unhappy with how my drums are and have been recording, i prefer me playing bad sounding drums badly, to me playing guitar along to good sounding robot drums.

It is odd, i think that to a normal music person, my drumming would have to sound very bad and inconsistent. But i love to hear it moving around and falling apart like that. Just one of the ways my brain is broken i guess.

You have the advantage of having actual drums that you can actually play (with some skill, whether you want to admit it or not), and sometimes record.

I am pretty sick of Toontrack drums. If I make anything with them I will probably replace the snare with 'inferior' samples, instead of that 'luxurious' snare that every recording from 2009 had.

i have no idea how to program drums. I kinda wish I did, but I don't even know how I'd go about doing it, and it'd probably mean working with a grid.. and I'm not even sure I know how to turn THAT on..

And everyone uses the same one or two snares, too, never mind there's a bunch of good snares to choose from there. Now, some of their more recent offerings seem to be unprocessed, so they don't have the compressor splat on the hard hits, which is nice. And these days I don't use 127 velocity outside of fills anyway. You should see my shit in Logic- all over the friggin' map velocity-wise. It establishes a groove, and, with the bigger sample libraries, adds a lot of randomization. That's why I like the Analogue Drums stuff- dry snare drum. Bone-dry everything; I mean these are really raw tracks, having heard a lot of raw tracks. Raw tracks from a good studio, yeah, but I know what those are like too- takes some work if you want them to sound like, y'know, that.



Now, I have no idea how to program anything in Reaper. In software, though, unlike a hardware drum machine, you can work without the grid. And at least in the stuff I spent the most time with, you're not locked to it. It's there as a visual reference, but I don't have to keep stuff dead-nuts on, and frequently don't if I'm not going for an overtly synthetic drum sound.

Now, there's some clever bastards out there who record bands to a click but establish beforehand where the band slows down and speeds up and build tempo fluctuations of a few BPM into the click if they're playing at the same tempo (counting half- and double-time feels) throughout- and having worked with a live band that plays to a click for a number of years now I understand this very well.

But yeah, back to the drum programming bit, you are not married to the grid if you don't want to be. It's a nice reference, but stuff does not have to fall on it or its subdivisions unless you want it to. There's quite a bit that goes into it to get it really real sounding, and most of that is really thinking like a drummer. (And having good sounds- the modern software stuff helps in that regard tremendously.) That being said, it's not actually that hard to do. See above thinking like a drummer... [cue rimshot]. I mean, if you want to go nuts with it in a mix, it's involved, but laying down some beats to jam over is pretty easy and just a matter of learning the tools.

THIS. I have on occasion had to do it, but I did it old school on a drum machine and then resampled it all. I think I have posted samples of this stuff but it does go back about 10 years. Since then my recordings have been all with real drummers.

Ah, hardware from ten years ago: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13184331/Over.mp3

Aside from the actual sounds, the... Er, playing? Here doesn't sound too horrid. Boss DR770. All done on an Apple G3 using the DR770 as a sound module though. Guitars IIRC are JMP and Dual Rec and should be obvious which is which. But yeah, I would have killed a man- or at least shanked a bitch- for what we have now back then because it actually sounds like drums and I gave a shit about programming actually a lot more then when it was way harder. I still do it, but I have good drummers now, which I never did then.

It is interesting to me, that you kind of have your own signature drum sound via programming. The things you program sound a bit like the type of things you program. I think it might be the hi-hat and snare flam locations or something.

What can I say, my favorite band is The Sisters Of Mercy, and they have one indie single from 30 years ago that has live drums on it? I blame that. You've heard those records, they have a sound and all.

I know what I want as a drummer or from a drummer, I just can't do it very well, or record it most of the time anyhow. I do have a style and influences, I just don't get behind a real kit that often. I was flattered to be allowed to drum for a song when we rehorsed last night- I had an idea for a part to go with a sequencer riff. Part of it is the snare and hats- I do have specific things I do there- and I think a big part outside of what's being "played" is how beats or parts of a beat are accented on certain parts of the "kit", how I'm counting the ONE two Three four and the space in between with any, well, in-between kicks and snares. I get what you're getting at; there is a recognizable thing there- same with the guitar tone- and I think as I can see from, say, all of us on here who play a bunch of different stuff, you do something for long enough, you develop a recognizable thing that you do on it. Even if it's a drum machine. The above is a writing demo; I took what the singer had for a chord progression/basic guitar part down to my basementstudio and recordized all but the vocals, which are lost to history. It's not my song, but you can recognize, I think, who it is playing on it if you've heard their work.