Ok man…you’re right. I seem your points and agree. I’m caught up in the details of playing drums…but honestly I don’t care enough about drums to be great at it. I’m a piano/keyboard guy. I’ll look at these new options as “tools” not cheating. Yes the goal is to make the music I want to make not show off live. It’s always been a big compromise 20 years ago to try and get a good drum track but also strings and brass…but I’ve taken steps to help with all of this stuff…next is drums.
I think the tools are the same in both packages. After using Moon Kits I got Sun Drums too. They both sound great, but of course for different purposes.
Nope, that’s the whole thing. I have been listening to a lot of nocturnes lately & those tend to be fairly short. Oddly this wasn’t intended to be a piece of music. I’d bought a bunch of VSTi’s on sale and was just checking out one of the new synths and the generative tools in the drums - basically exploring how they worked. And then I thought ‘I wonder how a bit of melody would sound on top of this’ For what it’s worth none of it was played, it was all hand edited.
By the way…I’m a moron now because of spell check! lol
I’m still trying to learn and understand the flow of Jamstix vs Sun Drums. I’m not convinced yet if Jamstix will give me the flexibility I need. I assume it should be it seems it does it own thing by itself not taking much interaction from me…but again, I have only been using the free demo version of Jamstix. The other thing I’m not sure about is Jamstix is synced with the DAW which is cool but I don’t think at anytime does the drum sequence (midi data) an be brought into a track within Cubase. There isn’t much in terms of YouTube tutorials for Jamstix.
I’m starting to think Sun Drums might be better for my work flow but I’ll have to dig into some tutorials on Sun Drums to know for sure.
How do you get the subtleties using Sun/Moon drums? I mean like snare, hat, ride, etc. ghost hits and similar details
I think what we’re trying to do here is to compose, and then get a realistic and satisfying recording of it. A classical composer shouldn’t have to be able to play all the instruments he or she is writing for. But should know enough to make best use of the instruments - articulations, ranges, and idiomatic performance (what is typical and easy to play). Good classical composers learn this over time.
So the point is, you may not be able to play drums, but you know what a drum kit can do, and you are willing to create the midi that reflects what you as the composer want the drums to sound like. And of course you can give actual performers leeway to play however it makes sense to them.
I actually ran into this situation with some of my songs. I published an album about ten years ago. Guitars and electric bass were recordings of me playing, but the rest of the band was me doing midi (drums, electric piano, piano, vibraphone, etc.). I had done a lot of work to perfect the midi for the drums to my satisfaction, and later, I had a band that was playing some of the pieces. The drummer in that band actually listened to, and transcribed the drum parts I had created.
If you don’t like the own composition JS made on a determined part or even individual bar, you can manually edit or compose and lock the beats (or bars) you don’t want to be modified. You can have the midi information on a track, if you want, too. It can be a good idea you register yourself in the forum. I agree there are few YouTube tutorials, but in the forum you can clear most of your questions.
Thank Knopf!
Do you feel you have absolute control when using JamStix or it more of a trial and error to get what you want? I want to make sure I spend enough of time with both Jamstix and SunDrums to understand fully how each works and to see what will be best for my method of creating drums with my music typle.
Early21…NICE piece man! That’s happening! So in this recording is this the midi or the acoustic drums? Very nice. So different from what I’m doing but I really do love it.
Electric bass is the next issue I’m going to address. Keyboard electric bass never sound right to me. I think it’s the lack of legato. Although I can play some bass samples with a lot of mild pitch-bend most are not convincing. When I listen to any bass player it’s so smooth in comparison. Since the 90s I’ve notice it’s not the “sound” of the instruments I’m trying to emulate, it’s the articulations and subtitles that is lacking. Todays tech is helping a lot with that. I just have to buy into the though of using it.
Thanks Raino. I have watched this video twice before. I think it’s a contender for sure. I’ll give it another look…but this time working with the software as I watch it…rather than watching it from my Roku and trying to apply what I’ve learned after I’ve already watched it.
I’m so used to playing the drums on the fly in real-time I’m needing to feel good about using tools like Sun Drums or JamStix (each have their different approach) to make drums easier but also feeling and sounding better. Like I said before, it’s not the “sound” of the drums that’s the issue. I have an Alesis DM5 rackmount drum module. The “sounds” are great…it’s the real time articulations and subtleties that are very difficult to preform.
Hello @C.F.Christopher , actually the highlight of JS is that you can get a groove or even a whole song composed, based on style and drummer way to play. For example, each one will give you different ways to build a groove, different ornaments, fills and so on. And you can modify different controls on the drummer brain or on the style. So if you want a groove with a lot of ghost snares, you don’t want to program each one of these hits and you know a drummer who plays with ghost snares, you can use that.
With the fills, for example, in the bar where the fill takes place, you can lock all hits you like and compose a fill with JS and let recompose until you like it and then you lock it.
BUT: if there is a part in your song where it is difficult to reach the exact result you are looking for, for example, because it is a very special part, you can write that part or bar yourself, locking the hits, so that JS doesn’t compose over them. Or maybe you need a kick and snare with a locked pattern you don’t want JS to recompose it, but you allow JS to compose the hihat for it.
So, in few words: the main idea is that you let JS compose, to take advantage of the brain, but if you need it, you can have full control too.
The software has a learning curve, though, and it isn’t precisely easy.
Ok thanks. I’ll dig in a bit more. I would really like to see a decent tutorial video but haven’t found too much so far on that. The manual is helpful but so far doesn’t help me fully understand how to do all that I’ll need to do. If ether of these “tools” work for me I’ll stick with it. Once I have something that works, I’ll learn it well and never look back.
Thank you again
Chris
So when you set up a section for drums in Jamstix how are you setting up the Bars and Reps? I wasn’t using the reps. I set the bars to the amount of bars I needed in that section. Should I base it with a 4 bar segment and then adding the amount of reps I need to accommodate the section instead?
Also I’m not clear as to how you add a fill. Should I be adding a section in the song called fill and placing it there or does the fill work within an existing section of the song I set up (like verse, bridge, etc.)?
But you won’t loose the capability to play & record them like you have been doing. You’ll just have some new tools in your toolbox that you can use when you want and ignore when you don’t.
That depends on how a specific part is structured. If your 16 bars verse can be seen as four bars repeated, the better you set it up as length four, repeated four times.
For your question about fills check section 14.3 on the manual. You can have repetition fills (RF) or transitions fills (TF). The former will generate a fill in each repetition within a part and the last will generate a fill when the part is ended. In the fill tab you can set up more details for the fill.
But, as I said above, I recommend you register yourself in the JS forum. You can get for sure more specific JS help than here and from more experimented people than me, for more advanced features.
I always say “Bass is a bitch”! Most of the time I find it difficult to get the right sound to blend in with the piece of music I’m working on. Compression often is the solution to the lack of sustain from one note to the other. Pitch bend usually only sounds convincing on fretless bass samples because you don’t have frets there. On a fretted bass it quickly sounds artificial because bass players can’t bend strings to the amount that normal guitar players can do.
Over the years I’ve tried a lot of libraries but I currently mainly use Toontrack’s EZBass and some Ample Sound libraries.
Most of the time I find it difficult to get the right sound to blend in with the piece of music I’m working on. Compression often is the solution to the lack of sustain from one note to the other. Pitch bend usually only sounds convincing on fretless bass samples because you don’t have frets there. On a fretted bass it quickly sounds artificial because bass players can’t bend strings to the amount that normal guitar players can do.