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Drum apps / beat box apps workflow question
Am curious as to how people use these drum / percussion / beat box apps in their music ?
I've only toyed with a few and I find that I can get some interesting results, but what do I do with those patterns next, in terms of creating a track ?
Working pretty much exclusively in Gadget currently, I find I'm changing the patterns in London, Tokyo and Darwin pretty much scene by scene, depending on the other instrumentation. Perhaps importing some 'beats' I've created in say Diode, or Egoist into the Gadget samplers may be another avenue to look at ?
Comments
For me pretty much all apps are just ingredients for eventual mashup in a DAW on PC. It is all about source material creation and lately I find it best to have three or four apps all recording at once in cubasis with ideas worked on in parallel together. Just long jams with things like egoist, seekbeats, thor, magellan, with sequencing coming from thesys or the egoist bass out midi. As for gadget i have bounced out seperate tracks and mixed them in a daw but never found importing into gadget very practical.
for me using a DAW on PC is to making music what Photoshop is for photography. Nowadays, vital.
I use them to create loops that are then mangled through effects and then triggered live for jamming with Launchpad.
Samplr and sector are amazing at recycling loops, and they sync nicely !
Yes my last loop was mixed in Samplr with C3PO saying "how rude" lol
Sector is just amazing even though I'm just getting to know what it does, but having many happy accidents with it!
I just get creative with it, explore the unique features and workflows these apps offer and when something sounds good it goes into Audioshare. It's good to have a folder full of beats from different apps. That way there's always something cool and unique to jam to, just import it into a DAW, ThumbJam or Loopy. But Gadget? Never felt the urge. Recently I pulled out a Tokyo Bilbao beat from Gadget and imported it into Animoog's 4 track to jam over. Feels weird to use it just for that but Gadget is the best drum machine of them all, on top of being all that other stuff.
I mix rhythm segments in Auria - I'll chuck anything in there as long as the tempos match, then shuffle them around until I come up with an interesting thing
This is very similar to my gumbo recipe.
And with Auria Pro we will have timestretching so tempo shmempo! Cant wait!
Personally, I found the workflow of making beats separately from Gadget to really slows me down creatively, when I'm working on a track. As I said, I find I'm changing the drum parts a lot as the track builds and I would find it (perhaps) restricting to go back to the other apps to modify the beats - unless I was slicing it up in Abu Dhabi.
When @firejan says
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I can see that its the way it integrates with Gadget that makes it great (of course, it's debatable as to whether its the 'best')
I make my own drum loops by recording various drum apps into Cubasis. I'll make several variations and bounce it into TwistedWave where I can cut out some loops and open in (nearly) any app. I don't have Gadget (must be the only one) but I would/could then use my loops in gadget.
When I get further into my track I tend to get a better idea what drum loops I need, so yes, I then go back to the drum apps I used to start, load up my sounds and patterns and create more loops. This time with a better idea of how they should go.
I hear exactly what you are saying. For this reason I have until now, almost exclusively used Gadgets drum machines.
But Patterning and DrumJam and SeekBeats are lovely, lovely apps (Elastic Drums and Impaktor too). And I've yet to even play with Diode. So I've been trying to think of a way to get them involved.
Making whole loops in them then importing is possible but problematic for me. I've done some extra percussion in DrumJam and that worked ok - but generally I want my drums separated into different tracks for mixing and I want to be able to tweak things throughout the track. I don't like committing to audio until right at the end.
Using Patterning and DrumJam for midi into Gadget I'm finding works well. You can take advantage of their playability. I've also sampled a lot of DrumJam instruments so I can make Bilbao versions of each.
Another workflow idea I want to perfect is:
point Patterning at SeekBeats and mess around with different sounds in SeekBeats until you get what you want
mess around in patterning until you have various patterns that work together - and the cool thing is that these can be patterns that last many, many bars until repeating.
meticulously sample each of the 8 sounds out of SeekBeats and put into Bilbao (BeatTwirl has made this a lot quicker)
point the exact same patterns at your new Bilbao kit and record as midi into Gadget
you can now edit and tweak individual hits in Gadget. Add hits, take parts out etc etc. And then split the kick and snare (or all sounds) onto different tracks for final export for mastering if you want
the one thing I lose this way is the velocity of the hit effecting the timbre of the sound in SeekBeats (one of the lovely things about SeekBeats) but if I can live with that, then it seems like quite a good workflow. (And I could apply to ED, Diode etc etc).
I should've added in my opinion but the post was already getting too long. I think I could argue that it is the most complete one - synth drums, sampled drums, automation, all the different time sigs and beat divisions, triplets and a way to go off grid EDIT: and a pretty nice selection of effects - is there any other drum machine that does all that?
I tend to agree (for my purposes,) the Gadget beat modules are fantastically useful / automatable etc. There's a lot you can do with them, particularly with reference to my original point. However, I don't have much experience with all the other drum type apps out there.
There are some annoying limitations with the Gadget drum apps IMO.
I think the effects on drums are a bit limited in Gadget. You can only apply one effect. If you want delay, then you have to say goodbye to a filter, or any distortion Etc etc.
The effects in Patterning, for example, are much better and more flexible in my opinion.
In terms of drum synths, you can make a much wider set of sounds in SeekBeats or Elastic Drums.
Live playability I find to be best in DrumJam, personally.
Initial programming (to get a good beat going) I find easiest in Patterning.
However, overall I'd say Gadget's drum modules win because they are integrated with Gadget - and as has been said, because of the great grid and the automation.
Im trying to merge the best of my favourite drum apps in a kind of hybrid workflow at the moment - all ending up in Gadget.
Would be interested to hear your views on this in another month or two.
Thanks. I'll try and share some results.
I think patterning is really great on the random hits settings for some parts. And the way handles velocity is lovely.
Wow.
That's a good point but all the drum apps have some limitations. I'm sure Patterning is no exception.
Absolutely. Patterning has plenty of limitations. For a start you can't nudge individual hits off the grid like you can in Gadget.
If I want different effects for say , London. I just run duplicates of London playing the same pattern and change the effects on the new one.
Saying that, I rarely use the preset kits, I tend to change the snare or the kick etc. to suit.
We have a load of 'drum apps' available but still we look for more in every possible way
Some day I wish we'd see a 'drum app' where every sound/channel has a dedicated set of FX (EQ, Compressor, Delay, Reverb in any order we choose), for what good are the plethora of 'TR-x0x clones' when all we get is a single stereo-output? It's a pain to mute/export/mute/export to be able to process the individual sounds just as one example. The situation is improving over time though and new apps are popping up all the time...
I'm thinking about getting one of these two. How do they compare to iMS-20, which I already own, as a drum synth?
Never use iMS-20 as a drum synth really. Whenever I open it I get confused and then close it.
It sits gathering dust
.
Seekbeats is very easy to get great sounds out of.
Yes, iMS-20 can be confusing. But I don't mind, I'm not looking for shortcuts
I'm kidding
My experience with it is very limited and I'm just trying to decide whether it's a good idea to invest my time in learning to use it like a pro. Btw. there's a nice tutorial about drum synthesis with MS-20: http://www.wavealchemy.co.uk/blog/synthesize-your-own-drum-sounds
Another alternative is Zmors Modular which is wonderful but I just don't have enough knowledge about sound synthesis theory. Hmm, maybe it's time to fill that gap