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Easy way to do drum beats...


uk_lefty

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I'm looking for some advice... I've been doing some solo recording. The bass and guitars is coming out well, vocal needs work. I just don't have drums. Any advice on cheap or free places to "get" drum bears to record over? I record using Audacity purely from familiarity but should try Reaper soon. I'd like something where I can get an easy pattern and decide where to put in fills so I can make it work for doing my own versions of popular songs. Don't really want to spend actual money as I've invested in an expensive but of effects kit recently. 

Grateful for any advice! Thanks 

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If you Google something like "Drum software", you'll find plenty of cheap or even free options. Once you put a pattern on the screen, you can see how it works - where in the bar various things happen (kick on 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4 at its simplest, etc, etc) and take it from there. Won't take long to learn how basic patterns work. 

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18 minutes ago, uk_lefty said:

I'm looking for some advice... I've been doing some solo recording. The bass and guitars is coming out well, vocal needs work. I just don't have drums. Any advice on cheap or free places to "get" drum bears to record over? I record using Audacity purely from familiarity but should try Reaper soon. I'd like something where I can get an easy pattern and decide where to put in fills so I can make it work for doing my own versions of popular songs. Don't really want to spend actual money as I've invested in an expensive but of effects kit recently. 

Grateful for any advice! Thanks 

MT Power Kit. Super easy and fast to set up.

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If you had a Mac I'd suggest Garageband, which has a very good drummer app...

I use Audacity for audio editing on a local talking newspaper for the blind. I haven't tried using it for music production though, and would be interested to hear how you get on.

Edited by leftybassman392
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When recording covers of popular songs, I use Karaoke Version, if you choose the "Custom Backing Track" option, every instrument can be downloaded individually and easily inserted into your DAW as a track.

https://www.karaoke-version.co.uk/custombackingtrack/

Edit: Btw, each custom song costs £1.99 and you can download each full song or individual instrument parts as many times as you like, for example, I often download the full song without the bass track, or I sometimes leave the guitar parts out as well if I'm capable of playing them myself.

Edited by thebrig
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One way is to get some pre-recorded beats from a 'library' of some kind which you then loop in the DAW.

The other way is to program your own..... most DAWS have a kind of "piano roll" where you can place each drum onto the beats you want it. I prefer this way as a) I feel the end product is 'my work' and b) sometimes you can't find the beat you need.

Example of a piano roll, with a (simple) drum pattern I made for a middle 8 which I probably could not have found in a library.

1924545355_drumroll.png.0d67f990ff453e014295797c331b2cc9.png

 

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If you’ve already recorded the bass and guitars, are they to a click? Adding to a prerecorded track is doable in something like Logic Pro, where you can beat map a track, I think it might be more problematic in audacity - though to be honest I’ve only ever used Audacity’s Paulstretch feature, I’ve never used it for recording, it’s just something that occurred to me.

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15 minutes ago, ambient said:

If you’ve already recorded the bass and guitars, are they to a click? Adding to a prerecorded track is doable in something like Logic Pro, where you can beat map a track, I think it might be more problematic in audacity - though to be honest I’ve only ever used Audacity’s Paulstretch feature, I’ve never used it for recording, it’s just something that occurred to me.

Yes have been playing to a click supplied by my Blackstar BEAM amp. Have downloaded MT Power kit and Reaper once more because Audacity can't take the MT Power kit. Audacity is very basic, probably why I've not moved away from it until now! 

Thanks everyone 

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6 minutes ago, uk_lefty said:

Yes have been playing to a click supplied by my Blackstar BEAM amp. Have downloaded MT Power kit and Reaper once more because Audacity can't take the MT Power kit. Audacity is very basic, probably why I've not moved away from it until now! 

Thanks everyone 

Feel free to message me if you need any help with Reaper. I’m not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, I do use it a lot though, all my PhD stuff is done using it.

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2 hours ago, uk_lefty said:

...Grateful for any advice! Thanks 

Much good advice above. Feel free to PM me if you want a drum part. A tempo, and a vocal 'beat-box' idea of what's required and I could probably spit a couple out for you quite rapidly (or a demo track, of course...). B|

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Top advice thanks everyone. Believe it or not being in two bands it's very hard to motivate anybody else to do any kind of recording even though they moan about not being able to get together to rehearse. Will stick to producing my own stuff and then sending tracks to others so they can re do "their" bits should they want to

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If you want to stay with Audacity for a while there's a way (not exactly easy but not difficult either) to generate a BPM click track and a very basic grid into which you can import free drum loops off the web and keep them in time.

Once you've built up a satisfactory sequence of drum parts for your song you can mute the click but leave the grid in place while you commence to play your guitars and bass 'into' this project.

Alternatively you could export the drum sequence (sans click) as an audio file then re-import it into a new project, play along to the drum audio then save the whole thing. Slightly rambling bloke show you how to do it below (but omits to mention usefulness of starting with two bars of sticks count-in), also how to apply effects to drums, etc

 

Edited by skankdelvar
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Hydrogen drums is free, relatively easy to get going with. Plenty of youtube videos to help and you can download different drumkits. Pretty good for a beginner.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/hydrogen/

 

Looperman is loops and samples with a wide range of drums and many other sounds. It's also free and great for those simple beats.

https://www.looperman.com/

 

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On 24/01/2021 at 15:22, leftybassman392 said:

I use Audacity for audio editing on a local talking newspaper for the blind. I haven't tried using it for music production though, and would be interested to hear how you get on.

I started off using it to just chop up a long rehearsal recorded on a Zoom handheld in to songs and get rid of chat between songs and false starts, save as mp3 and host on Dropbox. Then I started to use it to record off the USB output from a Blackstar ID Core BEAM (very handy for home recording), then for vocals got a USB mixer and started to play around with adding track upon track. Here's something that took me about 20mins using that kit:

Listen to Take on Me by clive mustang on #SoundCloud

https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/6Y2bd

There's no drum or vocal on it. I was purely trying to prove a point that to do an 80s cover without keyboards is possible, so it's just intro, verse 1 and 1st chorus with a mess up over how long or short that chorus should be! 

Am sure Audacity could do more but just for taking the input and recording track over track it's doing the job. 

 

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