Infinite Mousehole

[Guest Masonic Boom]

Oh, help me with my drums.

 

This isn't really a real song, it's me trying to work on my drum programming and get it to sound better, more naturalistic, more fluid, etc. I've been reading drum programming tutorials all over the web, but most of them seem to be basic to the point of intelligence-insulting.

 

So critique my drums, please. Give me some pointers on how to make them sound better. I've been mucking about sidechaining the kick so that it's more PUNCHY and programming filters on the snares and percussion to give them more tonality. Did it work? Does it just sound silly?

 

http://soundcloud.com/evrenkader/infinite-mousehole

 

(Yes it gets ridiculous at the end. It's supposed to. I was playing a game to see how fast I could play before I gave up and had to program it. There was a point where I gave up and just programmed pretty patterns in the sequencer. After two days of drum programming I wanted the damn song to disappear down an infinite mousehole so I sent it off down one.)

 

Thank you in advance for your patience with my terrible drum skillz.

[Guest Adam]

don't do so wide kick. it's really annoying (the kick). :angry: I don't know much about drum programing but the kick is obvously wrong here.

[sneaksta303]

Sigh..... OK, the programming itself isn't bad, but the actual drum samples are severely lacking. Are those the Reason factory drums? If so, forget about 'em. Download some free drum samples online and make some kits. When choosing a drum sample, look for samples that sound really good as they are, so any kind of processing is minimal. Before you muck around with those more advanced techniques, make sure your base-samples are of the highest quality. But yeah, those sound like the drums that come with reason, and BOY OH BOY they are weak. Also, the drums are mixed to quiet in comparison to everything else.

[Guest Masonic Boom]

To be honest, I wasn't paying attention to the samples/sounds at all. I just grabbed present number 1 because I was more concerned about the sequencing than spending ages picking nice drum sounds.

 

Irony being, I did the sidechaining on the kick to get it to sound wider and deeper coz that's the kind of sound I like. To each their own. (Also funny that those drums are way louder than I usually put them in the mix, but mainly coz I know I'm shit at drums.)

 

OK, if the samples are gonna bother people, fair enough. Right now, I'm more interested in the sequencing, in trying to get the rolls to come out. I should probably take more actual drumming lessons, I guess. (Though I don't want to limit my programming to what a human being could play. That's boring.)

 

Thanks for the comments, though. Appreciated.

[sneaksta303]

To be honest, I wasn't paying attention to the samples/sounds at all. I just grabbed present number 1 because I was more concerned about the sequencing than spending ages picking nice drum sounds.

 

OK, if the samples are gonna bother people, fair enough. Right now, I'm more interested in the sequencing, in trying to get the rolls to come out. I should probably take more actual drumming lessons, I guess. (Though I don't want to limit my programming to what a human being could play. That's boring.)

 

 

good drum sounds go a long way for the punch factor. Spending ages picking drum sounds isn't fun for me either, but it sure as hell does more good than any fancy routing. As an exercise, you should replace all the drum sounds with good ones. Seriously, I'm not knocking Reason, I used it for years, but the factory drum samples are unusable.

[Guest Masonic Boom]

You obviously know a heck of a lot more than I do, so - do you remember offhand any good sample packs you'd recommend?

 

(Bear in mind, I spent the bulk of my recording life doing drums on a 505 so I'm still astonished that you can change and swap out the drum sounds. I really got used to "you gets what you gets" and using compression, EQ, distortion, effects etc. to get the sound I wanted.)

[sneaksta303]

Lots of great ones free here: http://www.goldbaby.co.nz/freestuff.html

 

I'll find some more later.

 

(Bear in mind, I spent the bulk of my recording life doing drums on a 505 so I'm still astonished that you can change and swap out the drum sounds. I really got used to "you gets what you gets" and using compression, EQ, distortion, effects etc. to get the sound I wanted.)

 

Yeah, I can understand that, but know this, for the most part, shit goes in, shit comes out. I understand the need to sequence, and the mundaneness of building kits (I hate doing it myself), but I can't think of any bigger one thing that would improve the sound of that track. It's a necessary evil.

[Guest Masonic Boom]

Ah! Cheers. I have swapped out the drums and crikey, yeah, I hear the difference in sound quality already.

 

(OK, still could do with some different samples, in terms of getting the... "mushiness" - for lack of a better word - of the original sounds. But the quality is a lot better and it does make quite a difference.)

 

I mean, for a proper song, I will go through and pick out individual samples for each drum sound. But hearing the difference in quality between the Reason soundbank ones and just some free samples is really quite an ear-opener. I gotta go collect some news one. In fact - HA - I'll see if I can find some shitty old 505 samples to make me feel really at home again tee hee.

[sneaksta303]

And mangle those free samples up too in an audio editor like audacity or cool edit. You can get a lot of mileage out of those with some ingenuity. Unless you're going for absolute realism in your drum kits, I'd stick to free packs on the net.

[Guest Masonic Boom]

Heh, this thread has taught me that I should trust my instincts. Listening to it again with the new drum samples, I hate it. (Hey, I usually hate songs the morning after, but it's specifically the drum sounds that I hate.) Too crisp, too clean. The samples I was using had a heap of reverb all over them and now these are completely dry. Back to the drawing board, I guess. Though I suppose I'll try sending these new samples to a reverberator and see if I can make them nice and dirty again before I scrap them.

 

(The thing I have noticed about Reason drum samples now is that they are chopped up drum loops, rather than individually sampled sounds. Which is perhaps part of what makes them sound kinda shitty.)

[BCM]

not listened to your drums yet as I'm at work posting ony iPhone, but having read your post and extrapolating from other posts of yours, you seem much more interested in the technical aspects of making electronic music, rather than the actual music itself. you talk about side-chaining and programming filters on your snares etc - I have been making electronicmusic for 17 years and have never once used side-chaining. i'm not sure I even know how to. I say this to illustrate that the post production techniques you use are of no importance whatsoever compared to how you produce the source material. you need to listen to some drum patterns and try to recreate them - I recommend listening to the drum patterns used on the analord series - usually very simple patterns, but extremely effective and interplay perfectly with the other sounds. you mentioned something about taking drumming lessons or something? er, well yeah if you want to learn how to play the drums....if you want to learn how to program drum machines though, there is no fucking point at all. it sounds like you're thinking way too much about technique and post production trickery, whereas you should be concentrating on your sound sources and pattern arranging. put the drum processing tutorial in future music magazine down for a second and listen to some analord or drexciya and try to recreate some of their patterns....

[Guest Masonic Boom]

I guess if I seem overly interested in the technical stuff, it's because I've spent 25 years doing music, and I'm reasonably comfortable with my ability to write a melody or come up with a counterpoint or weave 4-part interlocking shape-note harmonies. I know jack shit about drums, I know they're my weak point, and I want to do whatever I can to improve them.

 

Thing is, I'm asking about stuff like the sequencing and the actual music itself, and no one seems to be able to give any advice or commentary or suggestions on that. People talk about the technical aspects because it's easy and more clear to write about processors than talking about paradiddles or semiquavers. I often find it frustrating, but I suppose the actual music is one of those things it's incredibly difficult to write about effectively without getting incredibly technical incredibly quickly. (Also, it's so much a question of *taste* whether you like it or not. I don't care if my work is to people's "taste," but people can give helpful advice about "use better quality samples" whether they like what I produce or not.)

 

The things that I learned through ages of session work as a bassist - play your bass root note against the kick, add frills against snare rolls - are never the things that people write about on messageboards. You have to kind of hear them and play them to get it. I want to ask things like "when should I use a single kick, when should I use a double kick?" Writing drum patterns feels very backwards for me, I'm used to having a live drummer there for me to work off. So I'm in the process of going "hrrmmm, I play the root Am there, then modulate up to a C Major, where on earth do I put the snare roll? Just before or just after the beat?" That's why I took drum lessons, to answer those kinds of questions. I'm used to doing the music first, and coming up with drum patterns to fit, I want to be able to work the other way around, and just create beats, which is something I find very difficult.

 

Yeah, I've done the thing of doing "covers" and taking apart, say "Energy Flash" or something to see how the beat is constructed from scratch. But that doesn't teach me the things I need to know about putting good patterns under the music that I have made.

 

The drums I like are usually so simple (Kraftwerk type stuff - hey, I've got years of mileage out of ripping off Kraftwerk beats) - the really complex stuff is so fast it's quite hard to hear what's going on. When I was 15, my dad bought me books of bass tab for, like, Yessongs and stuff, when I wanted to learn really technically difficult bass solos and things. I wouldn't even know how to read a drum tab for, say Ziggomatic17, even if such a thing existed.

[Guest Masonic Boom]

Ha. Realising I'm coming across as very defensive in this thread, because I'm being reactive to comments, rather than asking direct questions.

 

My biggest bugbear is about accents and snare rolls/rushes. How to handle them, where to place them - usually just drop them in the last bit of a bar as a run-up to the next measure, but if you're using them as an accent, do you put the bulk of the roll before the particular bit you want to accent, as a build up, or do you use your musical focus point as a springboard to start the roll on, and propel it to the next bit?

[BCM]

edit:

[Guest Blanket Fort Collapse]

lol

[Guest Masonic Boom]

Edit: LOL at BCM deleting his bitchy posts after he listened to the track and decided I wasn't actually muso-Satan... tee hee! I would delete this post in the spirit of "peace" (bitch!) but I did kind of clear up some ambiguous things I said in previous posts so I'll leave those bits of it and hope it doesn't look too extreme without the posts it was answering. Ah well.

 

--

 

When I say I "suck" at drums, what I mean is, I tend to program one or two bars of quite minimal beats, and then alternate them for the length of the song, occasionally adding fills by hand in an overdub. Usually I write a song melody first, flesh out the harmonic arrangement* and then add drums just for time-keeping and accent.

 

Listening to WATMM-type music, I realise that not only can music be driven from the beat up (instead of melody down) but also, certain rhythmic elements (This is why I keep asking about fills and snare rushes.) can be used as a feature of that music, instead of just an accompaniment. Which is what I tried to do with this song, writing the beats first, as an experiment in pushing myself out of my comfort zone, and doing things in a different way than usual.

 

(*And yeah, my music-making process does tend to revolve around harmonic construction. The fact that you say things like "no one writes like that!" simply reveals that you haven't worked with enough people to know anyone else's methodology. You learn that in session work. Some songwriters come in with music graphed out in schematic flow-charts, some songwriters sit around with the amps on, waiting for "the VOIBE" to strike. I will think, while writing "hrmm, this has gone a bit dirge-like. Wait, I can move up or down the scale from the minor key to the associated major key, that will brighten it up" <--- a process refered to in music with the single word "modulation" instead of writing out that entire sentance. Some people find it quicker, more expedient and simpler to work this way rather than just dicking around stabbing random notes in the hopes that something will eventually "sound right, maaaaaan". It's also a quick way of describing what's going on in a piece of music especially when someone hasn't bothered to listen to it.)

 

It's not that I "don't want advice" - I've already heeded the advice of several people in this thread - but I don't find it helpful to get criticism from someone who hasn't even heard the piece of music I'm asking for advice on.

[BCM]

fucking chill out girl I'll listen later...

[Guest Blanket Fort Collapse]

just my 2 cents, I really don't like the drums at all on this track, don't really like the entire song though either, feels pretty aimless, definitely cant find a groove or cohesive direction to attach myself to.

 

the drum sounds or the production isn't horrible at all, yeh they sound like stock program drums, particularly like reason stock hits but I don't think its as much of the problem as the lack of direction in the way all the programming is talking to each other

[oscillik]

leave Masonic Boom alone :(

[Guest Masonic Boom]

just my 2 cents, I really don't like the drums at all on this track, don't really like the entire song though either, feels pretty aimless, definitely cant find a groove or cohesive direction to attach myself to.

 

the drum sounds or the production isn't horrible at all, yeh they sound like stock program drums, particularly like reason stock hits but I don't think its as much of the problem as the lack of direction in the way all the programming is talking to each other

 

Yeah, this is a completely fair asessment, and probably one of my biggest concerns with working this way.

 

That I didn't start the track with any clear idea of what I was doing or where I was going (which I usually do when I start with the melody and work down) and the song is probably aimless as a result, because I was kind of counting on the drumbeats to tell me where to go, and they didn't. It's more an exercise than a song. And the more I listen to those swapped out drum sounds, the less I like them. They sound characterless. As shitty as the other samples were, they at least had a character, even if it was a messy shitty sounding one.

 

Thanks for listening, and being honest (and being honest in a way that managed to still be nice!)

[BCM]

you're seriously in the wrong business if you're hoping everyone's gonna be nice masonic... I will listen later though and provide constructive comments free from swearing or nastiness.... I might even have something lovely to say...

[Guest Lube Saibot]

your use of jargon and musical terminology clearly illustrates the fact that you're one of these people who claim to know an awful lot, but who in actuality know nothing at all

 

This thread needs a touch of whark or maus to call out some of mboom's bullshit. Juss' sayin'.

[vamos scorcho]

masonic boom:

 

people are going to be very nasty, sadistic, and cruel to you about your creations. there is ONE way to deal with it, and ONE way only, and that is to say, "thank you for your criticism," and move on.

 

personally, i hear signs in this music. it has a depth to it that 95% of music out there misses out on in some ways. i appreciate "composition" and "music theory" very much so i know where you're coming from. i think you need to work on making the actual sounds/synths sound "cooler" though. you need to work on production.

 

don't read about anything really (IMO)...at most do a search on google if you have a question...just let it come to you over time.

 

experiment with different programs, but don't rush. LEARN TO MAKE THE MOST OUT OF THE SHITTY SOFTWARE/SOUNDS FIRST. it sounds like you are already very, very well on your way.

 

use eq, compression, limiting, reverb, effects of all kinds. just experiment, and have fun....

 

 

 

or do it your own way. i would say you should 99% just trust your instincts and don't share anything here unless it is completely done and you want people to hear it. criticisms from people on message boards will (generally) get you NOWHERE and nobody is going to have that strong reaction that you might be looking for until the song is good enough for you.

 

 

keep at it

[Guest Masonic Boom]

Yeah, I know. Back in the day when I still made a living from music, Momus used to tell me "don't read your press, just weigh it."

 

But hey, 24 replies, 221 views and 34 listens - imagine what would have happened if I posted a track I actually *liked* and was proud of, instead of some weird thing I did as an experiment that I wasn't sure about and wanted some feedback on!

 

I do appreciate any genuine criticism (nice or not) and one usually learns from one's mistakes. And some things on this thread were really useful! But, you know, politeness costs nothing.

[Guest Blanket Fort Collapse]

criticisms from people on message boards will (generally) get you NOWHERE and nobody is going to have that strong reaction that you might be looking for until the song is good enough for you.

 

that statement is kind of ricky retardo and kind of completely true, I completely agree that the best way to make music is too push to completely satisfied with it yourself.. but until you can do really satisfy yourself you need to take outside criticism and use it as motivation to realize what you need to push harder at.

 

I don't think I would be nearly as good at getting the sounds I want if it wasn't for reading that people were unimpressed/saying they didn't like the drums/its too busy/meh whatever. when you haven't quite hit the mark yet and hit quite a few tracks out the ballpark where you know its being received well you can be so close to your tracks and tunnel vision unable to really see what needs improving

 

I would make really really good melodies and be merely be satisfied enough with the drum production that I liked what I was doing a lot but not enough to really consider the final product a success until I step back and could see the flaws better. Motivation to improve upon what people help you realize are the short comings is very important.

 

Once you really have the confidence and know how to get what you want and can step back as an honest listener, outside criticism isn't as important as achieving your personal creative goals.