Midi Loops - Any luck with these?

[NickT]

Everyone knows I do pretty well with audio drum loops. I bought a bunch of Groove Monkey midi drum loops and haven't used one yet.

Does anyone have a good way of working with these? How do you guys do it? I have EZ Drummer and can get those sounding good, but I just don't have an easy way of working with the loops.

I know Aiden and P-Dome can program, but I don't have the patience for that.

Just curious,

Nick

[Bobby Watson]

Haven't ever done much with loops for drums, Nick. So, couldn't give any advise.
Programming isn't all that tough, once you get used to it. Maybe, it's because that's the way I started. And, I'm too lazy to mic my drums, and, do them live. 
Good luck and  have fun anyway.
BW@

[Gerk]

I've done quite a lot of midi drum programming, there are easy ways of doing things (and looping them).  I've never tried with Sonar (I do it primarily in Digital Performer) ... there is a thing in DP called a "groove brush" .. I imaging Sonar has something similar.  You can basically "brush" a pattern with slight variances (timing, velocities) that works really well.  You can do it with a single note (say just the hi hat) or a whole pattern or drums.

You should do some research to see if Sonar has something that works like this.  It makes things very easy to get a good sounding drum track and it's very quick to use once you know how.  2-3 minutes you can have a whole drum track in place that sounds great ...

Mark

[CosmicDolphin]

What exactly did you want to do with them Nick ?

I used to use them all the time back in the old days before the PC's were fast enough for audio loops.

Generally I'd edit them and send them to an external drum machine..had an Alesis SR16 and Yamaha TG300, also a Roland Groovebox.....but you can use a plugin drum machine nowadays.  I'd normally find a basic pattern I liked ...paste it for however many bars I wanted, then draw some fills and stuff in the piano roll editor, maybe change some of the bars like drop the snare for the chorus after the middle 8 etc...I used to change the velocities in different parts too.  You can turn them into groove clips now just like you can the audio ones and roll them out across the song for speed.

Sonar has a useful Drum Map Manager that lets you send certain notes to different instruments...say you like the kick from Session Drummer 2 ( which comes free with Sonar ) and the Snare sound from  EZ drummer , you can configure it so you can do it from the same loop, rather that having to split them across seperate tracks like I used to have to do.

Pretty straight forward really...hope that helps some !

CD

[Pleasuredome]

What I do is use ezdrummer and click on the open grooves box, then having auditioned a groove by double clicking it and selecting it, I pull it down to a midi track on the audio editor (cubase , sonar etc).

I think the problem they will always have is the size of the library and making the selection and graphics user interface simple becuase there are simply so many sources.

[TallPaul]

I find it easier to find a Real Drum style I like in BIAB, then I can force 'fills' as needed. I don't have the patience for drum pgm'ing myself!
Paul

[CosmicDolphin]

I can't be arsed with any of them , I'd rather use a sample loop then get one of the drummers here to replace