Lessons

Lesson Info

Bonus: EZDrummer - How a Drummer Plays

This is basically what a drummer's limbs were used for basically, I mean this changes up obviously this is not a hard and fast rule but typically left arm on the snare right arm on the high hat for the ride right foot on the kick and you know you can't see my feet but whatever and left foot will be clicking the hi hat pedals or playing double bass now notice if someone's playing double bass they can't at the same time be closing a high hat with their foot this it doesn't work they don't have three legs if they're playing ah hi hat beat over here with the snare they can't be playing a crash over here it doesn't they don't have enough limbs to do that it's just not possible and also there's only two drums at any point in time that could be played if someone can find a way to doom or I'm all ears I'm open to the experience but ah as faras I know it's not possible and so one of the things I see in really bad drum programming will be you got a snare floor, tom a high hat and two crashes all...

going at once and then ah guitar player trying to get his drummer to play this and turns into a bad situation because yeah, some sort of a brawl this is how a drummer plays before this video really plays on I'm going to just into it by saying watch how he plays and watch what he stops playing when he does other things when he goes to phil's pay attention to what he's not actually playing on the drum set this is matt from periphery basically playing some stuff and talking about one of the many packs that you can get from two in track which I've got on here that I can show you guys but main thing is there's a lot of good views uh his feet and of his hands and just try to pay attention to what he is doing but justus much of the time what he's not doing wear working right now is that halpert made me it is a big conglomeration of a bunch of different beats fills in years that I just weighed down with that producer saw waiters or anyone to really wants to experiment with different kinds of beats they they take different different these pills I played today and big macs for parts changed sounds changed drones but use them as a template for foundations right falls on top of it you were really cool pack because each song that we did general saw each other it's very different from other we try to focus on doing different tempos beats per minute for each song we try to be different variations different types of films using top simple open closed all of this combination so that really any different type of song writing situation songwriter like I said, producer really pick and choose and mix and match all these different beats flowed out speed down you'd like to use some of my ideas and check out what I like to be behind the drums in terms of playing jesus this is a great opportunity for you any solider tio okay, so hey for product placement but what did you notice what would be the first thing that you notice tyler about how he plays when he went into phil's specifically yeah, it seems like when he's doing a lot of tom work it varies from what he's doing with symbols you know? So when he's going mohr into the toms you know he's only hitting the symbols every once in a while going back and forth rather than you know, something that you might hear in another one back one man band type thing where there's toms and their symbols and then a million different things going on at once. Yes. So if he was playing a high hat pattern on the beat and I went into a fill the hi hat pattern didn't just keep going right? Absolutely lots of variations yeah or for instance, something that I see all the time is, um lots of people who are not very good at programming drums and if this is any of you in internet land, listen up I can't see you but listen up uh a lot of people I'm noticed like to use their crashes instead of a high hat when programming drums because it sounds bigger they don't know how to e q a hat right and all that and let's face it on some of the other drum virtual drum software has had sound pretty bad they sound pretty damn good on this but people have substituted the high hat with a crash a lot I get this a lot of demos where it will be a crash going from start to finish of a song and well, I think it's pretty cool to go into the crash chorus or depending on the part it's not cool at all to have it going from start to finish and especially when there's a phil going on if you're playing a crash beat, how are you going to keep that crash going when this is going it's just not possible so you notice the right thing anything you noticed at all other than what he had to add? Not really I mean everything was it wasn't muddy or cluttered at all. It was like everything was there's a lot going on about the same time you can tell that it was done by a girl drummer yeah and that's important to note also because that wasn't just your simple forfour blues based nothing drumming like that was some pretty intense stuff done by a pretty sick drummer like that that's not entry level drumming but even so he had to follow the laws of physics I guess or I don't know maybe that's not the right word if someone's a blast me on the message board that's okay but has toe fault follow follow the rules of on lee having four limbs uh so this is something that is so so, so important when programming drums like I can't say enough if your programming drums the sound riel you have to take into consideration what a drummer would actually play and uh I will tell you guys a story about myself it's story time um yeah I'm playing not play I've been programming drums for awhile I think since the last century I think since around ninety eight or ninety nine when I started programming drums and uh I didn't try to do the one man band thing I did the two man band thing because I couldn't find a drummer that was good enough to play what I wanted to play they just couldn't come back in those days, playing to a clique was unheard of. Now it is it's pretty normal but in the late nineties and early two thousand's the click actually scared people and that I have got really high musical standards and some people have called me a musical nazi and they might be right but I cannot handle bad musicians, it makes me insane. So I was having a really tough time finding a good drummer went through a lot of them, made some enemies and decided I was going to start programming drums, at least for the writing process like no more in the jam room crap with bad drummers or you can't hear what they're doing, and they forget everything, and your ears are blown out done with that, I'm gonna program my stuff, and I started a program that and basically with the early, early dauth stuff long before we got signed, everything was done with a drum machine, and the idea was we would then give it to a drummer, so we're right, everything here's, the album, let's record it. So first scenario was the first time I met this amazing german named kevin tally, and I gave him all the all the songs with my parts, and I was like, I want to hire you to play on my album, and he was like, okay, here's the price so he shows up and mind you, this is two thousand two or two thousand three hey shows up to my house and can't play anything and like what the hell's wrong with you, dude, you had, like three weeks to learn this stuff weren't you and dying fetus like I saw the slayer audition videos you can play your awesome what what's going on like we're paying you a lot of money that we saved up? What? What? And ah, hey c started berating me he's like how you expect a drummer to play this stuff that I look like an octopus you think I have eight arms and he started yelling at me and made me feel like a complete idiot, but yeah, it's because my parts were just not realistic and I expected him to play them note for note I was taking the whole attitude of this is the song and this is the song the song is the song as the song is a song so you're an employee you're going to come in and you're going to play this song here it is drummer you're awesome play it so you're the idiot boss bass yeah, I was the idiot boss, but that we can use anything those tracks were completely unusable we got through a little bit of three songs and it was so terrible we just stopped um and uh he told me that I needed to understand a little bit more about the drums before before I did this again I didn't listen to him then I hired this fusion drummer figure all right? Metal metal drummers maybe they're all idiots I'm going to get this session pro guy, you know, the kind of guy who could who basically his entire life is goingto play sessions so always a new situation they know how to read music everything's challenging one day they might be an orchestra pit on broadway the next day might be a bar mitzvah the next day might be a studio gig playing in some fusion thing next day might be a gypsy jazz trio like no, no consistency at all besides, the fact only is consistent for those guys is that what they're doing is always changing, so if you're all right, maybe one of those guys, so for that guy, I actually printed out sheet music because I know how to do that so and it was right there's no problems at all there were no problems at all with the sheet music um same thing happened, so this guy likes a challenge, so he actually didn't quite parade me. But he said to me things like, well, I'm going to try to learn this because it's kind of fun to do stuff that's impossible, but you gotta know that a drummer wouldn't magic play this this is obviously written by a guitar player and ah he didn't have the I'd say the ball's teo tell me that I should change the drum parts he should have, but he was getting his paycheck but and then say anything but basically he did telling me that these are not real drum parts like a drummer wouldn't be playing double bass and opening and closing the high head at the same time while playing a snare beat while hitting both crashes at the same time it just doesn't happen like it's not possible since you told us about embarrassing yourself in front of kevin um I wanted to ask a question that a couple of people have I have brought up in the chat rooms, which is about symbols and I know this is, you know ah big topic in virtual drums so dusty trousers asks any tips on how to get a realist performance of a drummer riding on a crash symbol I use superior that has multiple hits emulator that blends successive hits and it helps a lot, but I wonder if there's a particular method of varying velocity is to get a more natural sounds so I think this touches on a lot of things within the topic of symbols within virtual drums can you talk about that a bit? Yeah let me begin by saying that symbols are the hardest part to get right in virtual drums because of the nature of how a symbol works it's not just like a drum where you have the two heads that pushed the air. The symbol is actually rotating and changing shape and vibrating all at the same time. So you have a piece of metal that I wish I had one here to change, but, like, like a piece of paper, if you had, if you had a what's, that type of photography called where you get very high speed footage and play it very slowly, like safe. Okay, if you did a time lapse of china symbol or a crash symbol, you see that the thing is mutating and warping all over the place. And so there's so many thousands, tens of thousands of permutations of the shape of the symbol hit that the basically they would have to sit there for two months, teo sample symbols to actually get them to that level. So that said, um, that's the toughest part. Now I don't know that guy's starting from scratch or not. And that's that would be good to know. Um, if he's starting from scratch what I would highly recommend doing to getting his symbols more riel is to work on velocity, velocity, velocity, because what you'll find is that they're certain velocities. That sound like total crap with some of these symbols so it would be good to identify them and then never go near those velocities and eso getting going back to what you said about you know the right velocity depending on the samples you're working yeah exactly and it's not just yeah it's not just the losses for crash it's velocities for that particular crash because uh let me go back to easy drummer real quick when you change drums for symbols uneasy to me see there's a little drop down menu I have two options right here for this crash your right now it's on a twenty and still jin medium prototype goto eighteen here's the twenty it sounds different as the same for all of these you got the nineteen here's the eighteen with either completely different symbols and so each one of these has a different sweet spot so you're going to have to find the sweet spot for each one of these and then also keep in mind that when a drummer is hitting the symbols the symbols are turning we're going up and down there there's all kinds of stuff going on so the velocities need to be reflecting that so I would vary them a lot does that answer the question it all okay, I haven't another symbols question way should do that more often like yeah maybe like you should've gone before we ask a question about very official so we have just a few more minutes, so we just ask more questions. This is from we have three minutes. This is from blake l who says I've seen many of the other users on the tune truck programs mentioned that the symbols in many of the presets and packs come off sounding thin are underwhelming, even after surgical q what's your go to a symbol preset pack in the native program, or do you find yourself going external resource is such as other samples I don't ever use other samples for symbols. They are all the ones I know of outside of the two tracts suffer awful. So what I do is say you like the symbols from one of the expansion tax. For instance, like, say, say you like the drums for metal machine would I would, but you don't like the symbols. For whatever reason, you open up a second instance of it and say you like the symbols from rock solid, open up the second instance of easy drummer and just have all your symbols playing from that and symbols and rooms, and then have the drums and rooms playing from your original instance that there's ways within superior drummer toe all keep it within the same instance, but that's what I would do I would mix and match the sets until you have something you like. Well, is there one particular symbol set that you like and easy drummer or does it really just depends entirely on what you're what you're working with honestly, it depends entirely what I'm working on, but one of my favorite ones would be rock solid or the brand new rock exclamation point it's got a low you see right here this this is loading, so we got to give it a second but it's not uncommon at all for me to use one instance for symbols in another instance for drums, that would be the way to go, setting those sound really good and with this dropdown menu can see you have lots of options. I mean that right there, that doesn't sound too different than when we're checking a symbol in the studio with a real drummer I mean, that sounds like a good sounding crash as does that, so this in particular, which is one of their newest products, has some fantastic symbols rock solid also not bad at all. Like gotta let it load I would recommend getting metal machine rock solid and rock exclamation point and mick from making a frankenstein kit, theo says you can hear those aren't thin sounding symbols at all some that's that's what I would do