Think out of the box

Juliana Richer and the Doyle brothers

GTG DrumSampler II

I was wondering if there is a simple VSTi for your own drum samples. Yes, there is.

GTG DrumSampler II VSTi

Note to myself: Experiment with it if you have some time!

Blast from the past

Süleyman showed me some patterns which I can easily practice on my own back in January. It's funny to see that I improved so much since then so these patterns are not difficult for me anymore. Watch & learn! :)

Four drum patterns to practice

Improvisation

I was playing today in the office as well. I thought I'll record it.. So here you are. Raw, unplugged original from Neo Drummer. ;)

Improvisation 01 by neo-drummer

Addictive Drums + Roland TD-9.

So I installed my Addictive Drums on my Mac since my external soundcard got broken. Macs are good for music out of the box with no delay. Since I already put away my kit, I thought I'll try it out with the Roland TD-9 on our stage in the office. :) I couldn't wait until the end of lunch so I went instead. Time flied quickly! =) I played mainly with the Ludwig Vistalite kit. It has a great voice & dynamics which goes really well with the e-drum's pads. After reading the tutorial about the compressors I listened more & played more with the dynamics, that's why I found this kit today as the best. It's really interesting how rich sound you can make with a single Tom!

Ludwig Vistalite in Addictive Drums

Compressors explained

I found this great, easy to understand tutorial for compressors. After reading this I understand the concept & its actual use to compress the crash cymbal by the kick drum. That's the effect I tried to explain in my previous post. I still lack the experience to properly configure the buses & the compressors in Addictive Drums so I rely on the presets; maybe once if I have some time to play around with it.

Mandelbrot Drummer

I found an interesting software called Mandelbrot Drummer which generates drum patterns based on the Mandelbrot Set. The concept is very interesting and it's probably good for the claimed purposes: to get some ideas for your unique patterns. I found the tool a bit hard to use, e.g. you have to configure a lot of parameters for the individual kit-pieces. I didn't really find the generated patterns very unique either. E.g. usually one kit piece is either increasing or decreasing in intensity then stops.  Then the combination of the kit-pieces result something unexpected, but still they follow the same pattern. It's still fun to play with it for some time.

Mandelbrot Drummer