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Killsion posted:learn to cheat at drum programming As a relative newbie to guitar and an absolute newbie to recording, to my ears this all sounds pretty good. I'm curious how you learned to cheat at drum programming. I have MT Power Drum, which has a bunch of loops built in and I figure if I ever get into songwriting I can just use those since they sound pretty decent and are free, but I'm curious what you're using for this. What DAW are you using, out of curiousity? There's a local band I like, and their first attempt at recording an EP came out really terrible (the more recent effort is much better). I guess nothing is as good as like, a real for real studio with all the sound engineers and expensive microphones and expensive amps and room treatment and all that stuff. But for anyone else, it seems like you can get 85+% of the way there on the instruments at least by programming drums and going direct in on the guitars. Again, maybe its just my ears are relatively untrained, and I'm listening on cheap PC speakers right now, but I hear this and I think it sounds like the recording and production is really pretty good.
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Jan 4, 2018 15:47
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I took my strat into the shop to have its frets leveled and it won't be finished for a couple more days. In the meantime I've been back to playing my LTD EC. After playing my stratocaster for a couple weeks I'm finding the EC extremely difficult to play. I can't barre an F chord to save my life, and everything is just a struggle. I attribute it to two main things: it has 10 gauge string while my strat has 9, and I think I got used to the 9s. Also its action is pretty high, at least compared to the strat. A few days ago I posted about how easy the strat is to play. I'm honestly not sure if that's the case of if my EC is just especially difficult to play. But it's been kind of discouraging. And I really miss my strat.
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Jan 4, 2018 16:43
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Strats really are just easy to play. Turns out Leo was a pretty smart dude.
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Jan 4, 2018 17:20
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Hellblazer187 posted:As a relative newbie to guitar and an absolute newbie to recording, to my ears this all sounds pretty good. I'm curious how you learned to cheat at drum programming. I have MT Power Drum, which has a bunch of loops built in and I figure if I ever get into songwriting I can just use those since they sound pretty decent and are free, but I'm curious what you're using for this. What DAW are you using, out of curiousity? Sure, it's actually really simple. While I was investigating this I noticed a lot of people were making recommendations to make their drum tracks in guitar pro tabs, and then exporting them as midis into their DAW. Having Guitar Pro and a numerous amount of tabs, many of which include drum tracks, I started digging through a ton of songs for different types of drum beats and patterns, copying, and pasting them into a new tab which functions now as a giant database of drum patterns I can now choose from, which I then exported into a midi file and opened it in my daw. I'm using Reaper, and also using mt power drumkit, so just create a new track with mt power drumkit, and then open up a media file in that track and choose the exported midi file you made, and there ya go. From there I'd create a separate mt power track to be the actual drums in a song, and then just dig through the previous midi file to find all the drums I want to use for that song, copy them, and paste them into the new midi item. Sometimes they don't work perfectly, so obviously you may need to go into the piano roll and make some customizations, but it's incredibly easy like this. Also if doing this the drums start looping and acting really odd, right click go to item properties, and uncheck the loop source button. Also after you do your drums, it's a good idea to humanize them, so in Reaper I like to set it so the time variation is 5% and the velocity variation is around 25%. Sometimes you'll get really bad velocity on hits that need to be strong, so you'll need to manually increase the velocity there, but this is all really quick and easy stuff to get them to sound pretty passable as you've heard. Killsion fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Jan 4, 2018 |
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Jan 4, 2018 17:30
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Hellblazer187 posted:As a relative newbie to guitar and an absolute newbie to recording, to my ears this all sounds pretty good. I'm curious how you learned to cheat at drum programming. I have MT Power Drum, which has a bunch of loops built in and I figure if I ever get into songwriting I can just use those since they sound pretty decent and are free, but I'm curious what you're using for this. What DAW are you using, out of curiousity? I learned to program drums by watching a bunch of videos of drummers and learning about beats, fills, accents, etc then making everything myself. There's a lot of copy pasting because stuff repeats a lot and it's really tedious, but learning how to do it yourself is way better than just pulling from a library of beats.
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Jan 4, 2018 17:36
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Hellblazer187 posted:I guess nothing is as good as like, a real for real studio with all the sound engineers and expensive microphones and expensive amps and room treatment and all that stuff. But for anyone else, it seems like you can get 85+% of the way there on the instruments at least by programming drums and going direct in on the guitars. most of what makes a production sound professional is mastering
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Jan 4, 2018 18:29
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Learning to program drums in and of itself isn't too hard, using the humanize functions makes it sound a bit better/more 'real'. The hardest thing is learning to program drums well, as Spanish said its worth watching some YouTube drum tuts so you are approaching from a drummer perspective. I found Misha Mansoor's videos on superior drummer quite handy, though he is pretty djent focused theres some decent general programming info in there. My personal tip is don't go higher than about 115 velocity at the loudest/'hardest' part, full velocity drums are exhausting to listen to, give you nowhere to go and generally will sound a bit rear end, especially snares. Fills are probably what I find hardest to get right, breaking out of the same 2 or 3 is a similar thing to those default few licks or riffs you always find yourself playing on a guitar.
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Jan 4, 2018 18:37
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A fun place to steal fills from is to watch a bunch of jazz drumming videos and take stuff from there. Then I realized they're just applying rudiments across the kit so I've been watching a ton of rudiment videos and holy hell theres a lot to learn.
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Jan 4, 2018 18:55
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My issue was I just know absolutely nothing about drums, so even if I were to watch some drumming videos, I'd have no actual idea of what I was seeing. My ears are simply not trained towards hearing drums, they are like a secondary instrument in the back of mind which I largely glaze over, and never really listen for. I'd need to use really, really, basic stuff, and honestly just don't quite have the time or drive to do so. This method is obviously not as good as the real thing, which is also not as good as learning to actually program yourself, but for my purposes this is working pretty well.
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Jan 4, 2018 20:11
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Killsion posted:My issue was I just know absolutely nothing about drums, so even if I were to watch some drumming videos, I'd have no actual idea of what I was seeing. My ears are simply not trained towards hearing drums, they are like a secondary instrument in the back of mind which I largely glaze over, and never really listen for. I'd need to use really, really, basic stuff, and honestly just don't quite have the time or drive to do so. This method is obviously not as good as the real thing, which is also not as good as learning to actually program yourself, but for my purposes this is working pretty well. Every drum beat is based on how the snare and kick interact with each other. The cymbals are there for accents and time keeping. I mainly know about metal drumming because that's all I give a poo poo about but let's look at the basics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1j1_aeK6WA Ignore the complicated parts and listen to the beat he's doing while he's talking. Just the cymbal keeping time and the bass and snare alternating. That's the backbone. The other parts are just flair to make it feel like someone's playing a drumset, not that a metronome is keeping time. But at it's heart that's the basic "rock beat" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbH23XgfeSg I picked a slow video to show it clear. Then you speed that up and it becomes metallica: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gytsi0z4Uo But this video showcases what the basic metal beats are and how they're played. Also it shows the notation for it so you can just pause the video and make the midi file in reaper off of this. I time stamped it to show off the thrash beat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTk78Rc8HpE&t=563s The other videos on drumeo's channel are loving awesome and I highly suggest watching all of them. But once you get what's going on you can see something fast and make sense that it's just a rock beat played faster https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNX64t_abkk
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Jan 4, 2018 20:30
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I just tried a new tuning on my seven string, b standard but dropping the g to f# so it behaves like a baritone with a high string instead of a guitar with a low string and it is SO MUCH EASIER TO PLAY, I wish I'd tried this yeas ago!
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Jan 4, 2018 20:38
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My Digitech Luxe just came in! It's nuts that Reverb was selling these for 50 bucks instead of 150 because holy cow do they sound awesome! My tone gets super fat immediately, and unlike a regular chorus, there's no oscillation, which is tbh the part about those kind of modular effects I really don't like. Wicked.
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Jan 4, 2018 21:15
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Killsion posted:I'd need to use really, really, basic stuff, and honestly just don't quite have the time or drive to do so. This method is obviously not as good as the real thing, which is also not as good as learning to actually program yourself, but for my purposes this is working pretty well. another option is prerecorded loop libraries like beta monkey
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Jan 4, 2018 22:00
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Southern Heel posted:Guys, just to confirm I can keep my amp in the garden shed (it gets down to freezing but that's about it - probably a few degrees warmer in the shed itself - it's insulated/carpetted/powered/etc.) ? I've had all my poo poo in a barn for the last few years with no heat, no insulation, and no problems. I wouldn't worry about it as long as it stays dry in there.
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Jan 4, 2018 23:53
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Spatulater bro! posted:I took my strat into the shop to have its frets leveled and it won't be finished for a couple more days. In the meantime I've been back to playing my LTD EC. After playing my stratocaster for a couple weeks I'm finding the EC extremely difficult to play. I can't barre an F chord to save my life, and everything is just a struggle. I attribute it to two main things: it has 10 gauge string while my strat has 9, and I think I got used to the 9s. Also its action is pretty high, at least compared to the strat. A few days ago I posted about how easy the strat is to play. I'm honestly not sure if that's the case of if my EC is just especially difficult to play. But it's been kind of discouraging. And I really miss my strat. Having you tried adjusting the action yourself? It's pretty easy on a TOM since you move the whole bridge at once instead of having to diddle with each individual string.
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Jan 5, 2018 00:14
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The Muppets On PCP posted:another option is prerecorded loop libraries like beta monkey Well like I mentioned, I found a decent alternative similar to this, where I take a bunch of drum tabs off guitar pro, and export them as a single midi file which the daw can read. In time I'll likely split these files up to better organize them, so create a separate midi file of various forms of blast beats, fills, slower atmospheric things (see how well versed I am?), etc, but for the time being this is working pretty well, and functions the exact same as you described wherein I'm creating a library to copy paste from.
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Jan 5, 2018 00:16
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Anime Reference posted:Having you tried adjusting the action yourself? It's pretty easy on a TOM since you move the whole bridge at once instead of having to diddle with each individual string. Yeah, it's as low as I can get it without fret buzz.
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Jan 5, 2018 00:24
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Killsion posted:Sure, it's actually really simple. While I was investigating this I noticed a lot of people were making recommendations to make their drum tracks in guitar pro tabs, and then exporting them as midis into their DAW. Having Guitar Pro and a numerous amount of tabs, many of which include drum tracks, I started digging through a ton of songs for different types of drum beats and patterns, copying, and pasting them into a new tab which functions now as a giant database of drum patterns I can now choose from, which I then exported into a midi file and opened it in my daw. Awesome, I think this is going to help me with making some backing tracks for practice stuff, and playing with the software will of course help me when it's time to write/record my own stuff. Anyone have decent recommendations for bass vsti and/or piano vsti as well? Edit: I found 4Font Bass and 4Font Piano which are enough for my purposes for now. Whenever I insert a new midi item on a different track, it makes a bunch of empty bars. Is that the looping thing you were talking about? Any way to delete those extra empty bars once they're there. Hellblazer187 fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Jan 5, 2018 |
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Jan 5, 2018 01:13
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Killsion posted:Sure, it's actually really simple. While I was investigating this I noticed a lot of people were making recommendations to make their drum tracks in guitar pro tabs, and then exporting them as midis into their DAW. Having Guitar Pro and a numerous amount of tabs, many of which include drum tracks, I started digging through a ton of songs for different types of drum beats and patterns, copying, and pasting them into a new tab which functions now as a giant database of drum patterns I can now choose from, which I then exported into a midi file and opened it in my daw. Oh hey drum-stealing buddy. I do the same thing (except I bought a copy of EZDrummer and the Drumkit from Hell Expansion) and it seems to work OK except that guitar pro and EZdrummer have one drum that's notated differently in the midi. Kind of an easy fix though. (Also, from googling around, I seem to remember that drum parts aren't generally speaking susceptible to copyright, so you can just steal them at will.) Clayton Bigsby posted:Hate him or love him, there's no denying his skills. I may have come across a bit harsh on Yngwie; I actually really like his first album, and he has achieved a tier of ability that I will never be able to come close to. I was looking at a tab for "I am a Viking" and... I mean, I can play some fast stuff, but 11-tuplets at 160bpm is just insanely absurd and Yngwie nails it live all the time. I just can't even try to mimic his technique though -- I learned my technique from Paul Gilbert videos (Paul's from the next town over to my hometown and my first guitar teacher got lessons from him in high school), and thus have a super hard time economy picking, which Yngwie definitely does all the time even if he says he doesn't.
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Jan 5, 2018 02:01
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Hellblazer187 posted:Whenever I insert a new midi item on a different track, it makes a bunch of empty bars. Is that the looping thing you were talking about? Any way to delete those extra empty bars once they're there. Not sure what you mean. If you create a fresh midi item it looks like this.  Now from here typically you would drag the item to be as long as you want it to be.  See those little triangles though at the start of each measure? Those are points where the track will want to loop, so if we say took a drum pattern, and put it on the piano roll, it'd play what you added, and then just start looping that same thing across the entire length of the item. Not very useful if we are trying to sequence a drum track of a song. So we right click it, and remove the loop source from item properties.  Now you see those triangles are gone, and you can safely copy and paste to the full length of the midi item to your hearts content. This drove me insane when I first was trying this and being brand new to using Reaper.
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Jan 5, 2018 02:05
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Hey fellas so I was filming myself doing something extremely cool and I was a little bit drunk and I didn't look where I was going and I sort of fell onto my acoustic guitar and cracked it. It now has a pretty big crack in the body on the top. Is this a problem? It still plays totally fine but I am a bit upset about it 
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Jan 5, 2018 03:26
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Killsion posted:Not sure what you mean. Uh, it was dumb. So l was pulling some MIDI from a Guitar Pro file. One MIDI for the drums, one for the bass, one for the vocal (which I'm voicing as a piano in reaper). So I add the instrument track for the drum, insert the media file, no problem. Let's say that was 30 bars long. Then I add the bass, same way, except it's the 4Front Bass Module instead of the MTPowerDrum, but same idea. OK, it's fine, but it adds another 30 bars of blank space at the end for no reason. Then with the piano it added 60 bars of blank space. But, I guess I can trim that just by dragging the end of the MIDI track back. So now that's all clear. It sounds better than the real sound engine or whatever from GP, and I can record my own guitar and vocal over it right in reaper, which is my project for tomorrow. I feel incredibly dumb with this stuff, but I guess it's the kind of thing you just need to get in and play with to get it.
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Jan 5, 2018 03:32
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This might be a stretch, but: Does anyone know of a good resource that explains the specs/differences between models/used value of old 80s Charvels (specifically the "Model" series)? I've been reverb window shopping to prepare for blowing my tax return, but most of the sellers don't have a lot of info about the guitars, and I can find next to nothing from googling. Don't want to get ripped off by overpaying for what might have been an entry level model.
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Jan 5, 2018 03:50
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Hellblazer187 posted:Uh, it was dumb. So l was pulling some MIDI from a Guitar Pro file. One MIDI for the drums, one for the bass, one for the vocal (which I'm voicing as a piano in reaper). So I add the instrument track for the drum, insert the media file, no problem. Let's say that was 30 bars long. Then I add the bass, same way, except it's the 4Front Bass Module instead of the MTPowerDrum, but same idea. OK, it's fine, but it adds another 30 bars of blank space at the end for no reason. Then with the piano it added 60 bars of blank space. But, I guess I can trim that just by dragging the end of the MIDI track back. So now that's all clear. It sounds better than the real sound engine or whatever from GP, and I can record my own guitar and vocal over it right in reaper, which is my project for tomorrow. Gotcha, not too sure why it was adding so much extra length, but glad ya got it figured out.
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Jan 5, 2018 03:55
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On another topic entirely, I took my very first real singing lesson today. I'm apparently not entirely tone deaf, which is good. I've got a long way to go on this stuff but I'd like to get to the point where I'm playing and singing at the same time and doing both well.
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Jan 5, 2018 04:23
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Paperhouse posted:Hey fellas you'd need to look inside the body to make sure but so long as the bracing isn't damaged and it's not making any weird sounds you're probably okay i mean, this is willie nelson's guitar 
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Jan 5, 2018 04:44
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The Muppets On PCP posted:you'd need to look inside the body to make sure but so long as the bracing isn't damaged and it's not making any weird sounds you're probably okay I love the videos where they did maintenance it and talked about how it got that way due to willie's playing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhQuJTc5yFY
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Jan 5, 2018 04:57
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If it still sounds and feels fine (ie, it didn't break the bracing, ie it's staying in tune and not making horrible rattle/buzz/creak noises and feels normal to play), it's
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Jan 5, 2018 05:26
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AlphaDog posted:Sounds like a good plan. Thanks guys! I'll figure out budget. I think a practice amp would be a good idea. Anything works as long as long as I can plug in headphones and it'll let me take it to lessons or something.
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Jan 5, 2018 06:07
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Spanish Manlove posted:I love the videos where they did maintenance it and talked about how it got that way due to willie's playing The repair videos are always interesting because they talk about not being able to do too much to it but they have to do things to keep it on life support or else he will quit playing guitar. There is something really romantic about once guitar guys. I wish i could be one but I like guitars too much and at the very least would need like 4 to be able to have guitars appropriate for different styles of music. Regarding that drunk fall crack though, ouch man. Many years back I learned not to leave guitars on the ground because I drunk stumbled onto it and didn't put my foot down very hard but stepped right on the nut and it just split the headstock right off. I don't drink anymore but I still keep them off the floor because you never know - I could see my cat tripping me or something. But anyway, is that guitar solid wood or a laminate? Solid wood the crack is more likely to spread and no matter what the construction is, like the dude said above you need to get a lit mirror in there to see if the crack is need any bracing. A lot of the time you will hear if the bracing is hosed up when you play but sometimes not. You could have damaged some worse spots though so at least that's something. Fun story on a different subject, I just finished a song and needed to record it asap because a drummer I play with wanted to practice to it. I se up a pedal tone on a looper with a rhythm that skips beat one and lands on the and of 4 and Jesus, i have issues playing with loopers sometimes anyway but this was just hard as poo poo. It doesn't help that I'm not used to the chord changes but I didn't really anticipate having an ostinato like that gently caress with me but when it is a machine looping it rather than a person playing it it got surprisingly hard to stay with it. Serious respect for looper guys. It's not really a style of music that I think is big in the thread but since I am not describing what the looper is doing very well this is what I'm talking about (the rhythm at the beginning that goes through the whole song). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4g7TKb2fas
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Jan 5, 2018 10:08
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The Muppets On PCP posted:you'd need to look inside the body to make sure but so long as the bracing isn't damaged and it's not making any weird sounds you're probably okay If trigger's any indication, Paperhouse has got a million dollar guitar in the works there
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Jan 5, 2018 13:44
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As an old guy I’d like to say I found real to real recording an adorable turn of phrase.
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Jan 5, 2018 14:06
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If you're looking for a good, free drum machine program, I use Hydrogen for all of my recording needs: http://www.hydrogen-music.org/ It was built for Linux, but the Windows version works perfectly fine. It's a hell of a lot easier to use than chopping up midi files, you loving madmen. Importing midi files is hit or miss, but the worst I've had to do was copy what should be toms off of the hand clap or something like that. I used the Millo-Drums v1 kit to record these: https://thebugouts.bandcamp.com/releases That kit fit the sound I was going for, but there are other built-in and downloadable kits to fit other needs, too. The K-27 Trash kit is really fun to play with.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:37
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It kinda is the wrong time of year to mention this but superior drummer goes on sale every Black Friday.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:39
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Gnumonic posted:I may have come across a bit harsh on Yngwie; I actually really like his first album, and he has achieved a tier of ability that I will never be able to come close to. I was looking at a tab for "I am a Viking" and... I mean, I can play some fast stuff, but 11-tuplets at 160bpm is just insanely absurd and Yngwie nails it live all the time. Paul Gilbert a hardcore alternate picking player? Never really paid attention to his technique other than nothing he's a loving amazing guitarist. Also a hell of a cool guy, been going through the "Scarified" series of videos he posted on YT and they are great. Could listen to him and Ola Englund blather on about random poo poo all day.
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Jan 5, 2018 18:57
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There’s an iOS app called Drum Genius that is really good. It focuses on jazz and world music but it has 400 something loops that were transcribed from records and it includes some rock, R&b, funk and stuff like that. It’s free and they give you three free drums to download to try it out and see if you like it. All of the loops are 8 bucks. It also has a very nice metronome built in. It’s been a great practice tool for me and has also helped with how I hear drummers in real life.
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Jan 5, 2018 18:58
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So on a whim I went to GC and played an expensive Taylor acoustic. Dammit, now I want an acoustic. Don't tell my wife.
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Jan 5, 2018 19:52
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Troy Grady has a great video series on picking techniques, its informative and pretty entertaining. https://troygrady.com/ Here is one on Yngwie's technique. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TnddE2k598
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Jan 5, 2018 20:02
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Spatulater bro! posted:So on a whim I went to GC and played an expensive Taylor acoustic. Dammit, now I want an acoustic. Don't tell my wife. Check out the Yamahas as well, I have an AC3R and it's outstanding. 899 bucks at Sweetwater. Played it and some Taylors costing 2x as much and ended up liking the Yamaha better.
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Jan 5, 2018 20:46
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rio posted:
This is really nice I think having the other player listening really helps, so you all naturally gravitate to being in-time instead of letting the gap linger. Loopers are obviously completely stubborn and it's up to you to listen and match them. The other side of this is you're the one setting up the loop in the first place, so if your timing is off when you end the loop, it'll be off forever and that makes it hard to feel it, especially if you can't always hear the looped part too well. If you're doing anything slightly tricky in the timing, there's more chance you'll tap loop just off the beat, and then you're stuck with it When I was in a band I tried using my delay pedal's looper in a song or two. The drummer wasn't paying attention to it though, you can imagine how well that went 
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Jan 5, 2018 21:13
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