So I have been using EZ Drummer2 for a couple years now. obviously its great and without it id be non-functioning
That being said, I just got a Novation Sl MK2 49 keyboard. The thought occurs to me that I might try manually playing some drums to give a different feel to some songs
How many of you are manually playing drums for your songs?
Are you guys using different variations? I can see for example keeping the EZ Drummer hi hats and cymbals but manually entering the kick and snare…or vice versa
any ideas?
Anyone playing EZ Drummer manually with pads etc?
if it works im not averse to ordering a more dedicated set of drum pads or whatever
I find it takes longer to sift through the loops to find the right one than it does to just play it most of the time. But it really depends on how picky I am about the song. If it’s just a quick jingle thingy, then I’ll pick one and run with it. If it’s for a song that I want to sound a certain way exactly, I’ll play it out.
I don’t find that the loops sound any less human, it’s just that they tend to be 90% of what I want at best. If I can find one quickly that’s 90% what I want, sometimes I’ll just use it and make changes to it.
I’m finding speed to be more and more important the more I do this stuff.
the thing im worried about there is that ive never been a drummer. I dont technically know everything that drummers do etc
one thought I do have is that one could drum out the basic pattern with pads and THEN use THAT to search thru all the libraries like with “tap to find”
there are variations of opening the high hat that I have never figured out on ez drummers internal “tap to find” function
if I could get that going with external pads then id be a little ahead of the game
yeah, finding the exact loops etc. 99% of mine have STARTED with whatever pattern I sort of randomly decide on at the moment and then I just work from there. Im hoping that I can also learn to do it by making the music FIRST and then finding, or making, interesting beats. Dunno though, ive always played off of drums for inspiration
One thing that helped me with this was to start working on a couple cover tunes and I tried to recreate the drums manually (with a keyboard, or pads like you’re talking about). I tried to duplicate what they played and learned quite a bit about some of the nuances of drumming in the process. It helps to have a couple of examples like that to get you started.
I have always used an mpc to ‘play’ my beats,
Although in later years i have taken a similar route to Boz where as i get my loop from superior drummer or whatever and tweak it to how i want.
I used to predominantly use samples and the mpc sequencer but it was time consuming and hard to keep the ‘flow’
I do however think its great having the freedom to use the pads like a drum kit and you can get very creative very quickly with a good drum vst and a bit of quantize.
For me the most important thing was getting vertually NO latency with the pads and the drum vst.
If you have latency you may as well quit before you begin with manual drum sampling as it is just a nightmare.
Having said that, some of my best drum loops were made using shitty samples and off beat rhythms lol.
One of the advantages of using pads is you can physically play in the velocitys giving it a ‘real’ feel rather than having to tweak each hits velocity in a pulled sample loop.
Its great to have the musical expression of pads, even if just editing existing loops.
But deffo ensure your midi latency is as near to zero as it can be
I’ve been recording with an electric drum kit (Yamaha D4 module) for awhile and I find one of the most frustrating things about the kit is that it doesn’t allow much, if any dynamics. I went into the module settings a few years ago and tried to adjust it so that I could get ghost notes to sound but I seem to remember that it would mistakenly trigger other pads (ie, I would hit the snare and the hi tom would sound at the same time).
Another thing I hate about pads/ electric drums is that sometimes the sounds won’t trigger. It’s not unusual for one or more snare hits to not trigger during the course of a 3 minute song. Could be my pads or my module are going bad or the drum module settings aren’t optimized.
What drumset is it?
I have never had any problems with my mpc with regards velocity or responce.
It does sound like your midi mapping needs looking at if its triggering the weong sounds!
But yeah some pads/drums are better than others and if your gear isnt working correctly then its just a nightmare.
Hope u get it sorted. What v drums are they?
Pads are yamaha? Are they set up to be velocity sensitive? Are they capable of sending volicity info?
Its deffo settings between your pads and unit.
Also make sure your firmware is up to date👍
Midi can be a nightmare to set uo but once set up you very rarely have to touch the settings ever again.
Without me being there and ‘fiddling’ i dont know how to advise best. If you gave us a rundown of your settings and what not i could try.
Good luck
