PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Recording, Mixing, Performance and Production BiaB --> RB --> Daw : Workflow and Changes

All,
once generated all the backing tracks with BiaB, I'm ready to import each one in the Daw (FL Studio, or RealBand, depending on the song and on the mood :-).

Now come the fun part 2. There is a lot to do in order to refine and personalize each single track.

For example, I would like some drum solo here and there. How to obtain this in RB ?

How do you usually apport such modifications to the drum part ?

One approach I could imagine, is to let RB to generate some drum fills on another track, then 'cut' only the fills and paste it together at the right place, so that they are in sync with the track that needs a drum solo.
The new material (the fills) should obviously override the one of the targeted track.

While I find this a possible method, I think it's tedious and needs a try-and-error approach that could be painful. And it's obviously not guaranteed, that consecutive drum fills sound like a drum solo..

Another possible way would be the use of pre-made (midi or audio) drum solo/fills which are usually available in the Daw itself. But the drum kit used should sound the same of the BiaB drum track, which could not really be an easy task to accomplish.

Would you like to share some experience about your workflow ? How would you for example insert a drum solo in the BiaB drum track ? And more in general, which changes do you usually apply to the backing tracks (if any.. they are already perfect.. 8-) ?

Best regards,
Sergio

Obviously every song or project is different. Every person has different available resources and experience levels so you will receive vastly different responses. Here's how I would approach your drum tracks question.

I would begin by trying to use midi drums instead of RealDrums. Using midi drums I can keep consistent drum instruments (sounds) no matter the source of the midi drum patterns. Also, midi drum patterns and instruments are more tolorant to tempo changes so that a midi pattern with an original tempo of 65 bpm may sound okay in a song with a 130 bpm tempo.

If the original style used RealDrums there is a setting to force midi drums or you wait until you import into RealBand to mute the RealDrums then select a style with midi drums. This provides the foundation for the drum track. Usually a drum solo is fairly short so, if meshing fills together doesn't work, it wouldn't take too long to use the drum editor to create a solo. You could find some midi drum solos on the internet.

So here is one way to do it with just the BIAB drum real tracks. It takes some work and a lot of time but if you don't move the position of the tracks the timing part shouldn't be an issue.

In BIAB first pick what drum real track you want to use for the initial style. Generate the track and render the WAV file and drag to the first track of your DAW of choice. This is your base guide track. Go back into BIAB and repeat the step but each time before you regenerate add markers at various points to get the different fills to generate. Also switch out to a similar real drum track just to get some variance in the fills. The idea behind this is to end up with a dozen or so (yes it sometimes takes that many) individual WAV tracks in your DAW that have as many variances as you can generate including other styles.

It is time consuming but once your in the DAW your creativity is the only limit. Start at the bars in the song you want the solo at. Audition the tracks one at a time at first then start auditioning another or several at the same time. You will start to get a picture of how you want the solo to flow. Then its a matter of splitting the sections and pasting into the base track.

If your DAW has a snap to grid feature you should be able to slice, dice and splice with out to many timing issues. If you have a nudge feature you can nudge the clips just a bit forward or back to try and humanize the sequence a bit more. You can pull bits and pieces from anywhere in the rendered tracks in fact if the solo is nestled as a bridge don't be afraid to try a fill that was generated in a verse.

You wont get a Neil Pert or John Bonhamm drum solo but you can create some really nice 8 and 16 bar solos and its completely your creation. There is some satisfaction in that and makes the effort worth it in my opinion. I do the same with the guitar soloists. The only draw back is that if you want to use it BIAB you will have to import it into the audio track. I've never tried that so I don't know what issues would result from that. Also if you use several real track styles there may be some sonic sound differences.

One other trick that works occasionally is to build 2 main drum tracks and overlay the fills or the move them a half beat. You can get some really busy solos that sound like roto toms and double kick drums. Careful its easy to go too far and then it just gets messy.

Again this is just one way. This one works for me but some others may have a different way.

Yet another ..
At the end of many Realdrum tracks (the actual original WMA file) you'll often find samples of each drum hit.

They usually include the basic kit single hits, but you gotta look for them in the raw tracks. Then edit/save them as 'samples'.

Using these you can can create whatever drum part you want by utilizing a sample playback plugin like DR-005/DR-008 or similar.

Like other suggestions this takes a little effort but once figured out your possibilities become endless.

I've suggested more than once that PGMusic include a sample playback plugin for just such purpose.

Thanks for the interesting ideas so far, I would like to try each of them.

The method with midi - suggested by JimFogle - makes me skeptical because of the quality of the sounds (midi drum compared with Realdrum !), but I guess that with a good drum kit the results are not bad.
On the other side, the enormous advantage of a complete control over each beat and instrument is unvaluable.
I think it's only a matter of finding a good sounding midi drum kit to overcome the first step that scares me a bit.

The second approach - from Jeff S - is very interesting because the various fills - the little bricks of the solo - would be generated from BiaB/RB, which is a guarantee of good sound quality, and would be performed by a real drummer. It takes some patient indeed, expecially by cutting, pasting, slicing ant so on, but the result could be a killer drum solo.

The third one - rharv - is also very appealing, the only difficult here is that I should self create the drum solo, or find a good midi solo groove to be used in the drum kit of the sampler.
The advantage here is that such drum 'kit' contains the same drum samples of the Realdrum, hence it should merge perfectly in the drum track.
Perhaps the process to prepare such a drum kit with the right sampler would take quite the whole time; more, in the midi solo groove, each single note should match the right instrument in the kit.

Three different approaches, a whole field of opportunities :-)


Indeed would be really useful. Furthermore, would be nice to have each 'note' of the realdrum on a piano roll editing view, where each note triggers the relative percussion instrument and can be edited/moved/added like midi notes.
I know there are the RealMidi for that purpose, anyway would be nice to have a total control on the Realdrum performance of any Realtrack.

I never use the RealDrums in BIAB for a number of reasons:
(1) I can't tweak and control them.
(2) I don't like some of the kit sounds.
(3) Pushes are not very good at all.
(4) I want full control so I can put in fills and lots of other things I think drummers would do in the piece.

I use XLN's Addictive Drums which have amazing samples sounds, different kits, and MIDI patterns and fills which I can tweak easily.

When I've got the tracks I need in BIAB (mainly RealTracks nowadays) I drag them into Sonar X3. I then add a MIDI drum track with Addictive Drums and all the tracks lock together nicely. I start with a bread and butter beat and then as I listen I add the fills, end of section crashes, punctuations, etc. that a drummer would put in. Years of playing in bands helps me to know what sort of things are needed. As I work on the project I always do a lot of tweaking to the drums; they're an extremely important element of pop/rock, etc.

John

The quality of the sounds of midi drums..... you must be using the default GM wave synth drum sounds. Yeah, they sound really bad and mostly fake.

Real drums in RB or BB is a really nice, quick, acceptable, halfway decent sounding drum track, but.... as you know, it's not all that easy to edit it or to control a certain part of the kit. If the snare is too loud or not loud enough, or the cymbals.... you can try to fix that with EQ, which sometimes works but there are other times where the track is useless if you're looking for a certain something from it and it simply can't deliver.

There are some drum synths, quite a few actually, that hands down, flat out beat real drums quality with one hand tied behind their proverbial backs. Most of them require you to input the notes and fills.

My reason for using the real drums in BB/RB is simple. I'm lazy and it's quick. It also does a decent job. If I wanted to take the time, I could have a better sounding drum kit, but as a songwriter, I'm not looking for a drum track that shows off the drummer's skill..... I'm looking something that keeps the time and fits the groove well and I don't have to spend a bunch of time creating.

It's totally possible to create a Pert style solo, but, to do it, you have to know your synth and more importantly, you have to be able to think like a drummer.

The second best drum synth to me is Jamstix. Everyone has their favorites. I use this on some of my tracks since it has the ability to create a track for me based on my input parameters and then I can edit it after the fact or ask it to recreate a certain section.... very nice piece of kit, but it does take some time to get in there and make those edits. It incorporates over a dozen "famous drummer" playing styles, and dozens of kits..... plus you select a style of music from a long list and then let it create a track for you. Everything in it is editable and I mean everything..... you can tweek the tuning of the drum heads in the kit and change their diameter and depth if you want.....decay, timbre, attack.... everything...plus effects like verb, compression, room ....

I'm no expert on it. I use it at a very shallow level to get what I need. Some of the things the folks who know it and use it create with it are freaking amazing. Go check out the sample tunes made with JS here>> http://www.rayzoon.com/jamstix3.html

That's my 2 cents

The issue I confronted with other drum generators was that while Jamstix (or comparable) is nice, but if you have a desired Realdrum track already and want to match it, finding a combination of Jamstix Kit/Style that works with the existing Realdrums proved difficult for me.
All it takes is a sample playback synth to make your own 'JamStix type synth' that matches the sound of your existing Realdrum track. And uses BiaB styles..

If the Realdrum individual samples were simply available in a MIDI synth plugin ..
Then you can could, edit, delete, mix Realdrums as needed.

I know the old DR-005 does 90% of what I want, and I have used it. I even got approval from the company to use and distribute it for such use. There was a small learning curve, but I can make a kit pretty quick now (as long as the samples are available), and the possibilities are huge.

It's a whole 'nother world waiting to be explored if you have the inclination.
Want a certain Ending for the drums .. use the samples!

One of the things I'd like to see in future editions would be the ability to have a composite drum track as we now do but also to be able to control or edit the individual drum kit parts/tracks.

Jamstix and many other drum synths have that ability. You can output the entire kit or split it into multiple outputs so that each part of the kit is assigned a unique track..... very nice if you need that functionality.

I definately second that.

Anyway, I've downloaded the demo version of Jamstix. First of all, I had to install two DLLs that were missing in the O.S. (Win 7) to make it working :-/

It tooked me quite a while to figure out how to let it play a selected drum section. There are two buttons (!) that have to be pressed, one has a 'lock/unlock' icon, the other looks like the curved arrow of a browser page-reload button ! For my taste is missing a simple "play" button with the green right arrow, you know..

More, the demo version adds random noises here and there during the execution thus disturbing the audition and making quite difficult the evaluation of the product :-((

The XLN's Addictive Drums seems promising, I'll give it a try.

By the way I've also discovered EZDrummer 2, which also seems quite popular in the drum world :-)

Later.

If you have good drum sound sources like Addictive Drums, EZ drummer, or Steven Slate's SSD Drums, http://www.stevenslatedrums.com/#
you can have drums as good as RDs IMHO. Along with BiaB's MIDI drum tracks you can purchase third part MIDI drum parts from Groovemonkee,
http://www.groovemonkee.com/collections/midi-loops
and others. These grooves will work in SSD4 and Addictive Drums as I have these so I think they should work in EZ drummer.

I work almost exclusively with MIDI drums as I can copy, write, modify and/or play the parts the way I want them.

If I may throw in a random question here while the OP considers all the many options-- I too have EZ Drummer but I still use RealDrums wherever possible to save time. However in my quest for more percussion sounds I am pondering the EZX Latin add-on from ToonTrack.

However in my search I have come across Native Instruments Cuba and West Africa libraries. Tempting enough to make me want to jump ship, to say the least.

Does anyone here have experience with the NI stuff and their player? It's all new to me. Or, another percussion fill sampler I may have missed that is cheaper than say $80-100 US?