Improving Your Drum Track, Part 1: Getting Started With Independence Free

In a home studio, it is easy to make electronica, techno, and dance tracks. There is an expected level of machine-like precision to the music. Perfectly accurate precision and artificial drum beats are readily acceptable. (Let me go on record with a disclaimer: making those forms in a home studio are easy. Making good or great tracks is another story. I am not trying to downplay the level of artistry involved. I saw Aphex Twin spin live in the mid 90's, so I can appreciate the level of complexity of the art form.)

Where it becomes much more of a challenge in the home studio is when you're trying to sound like a traditional band (guitars, bass, drums, vocals). There is some level of trickery that is required to achieve your desired sound for all of these instruments. Right now I want to focus on the difficulty of drummers. Much like Spinal Tap, I have always had a hard time keeping a drummer on call. And then you have the acoustic issues of sound isolation, excess mic bleed, having enough mics and inputs to record the whole kit, complaints from the neighbors, etc. As usual, I will be focusing on use of this within REAPER.

My Dream Drums, For Now
Years ago, I had a Yamaha RY-30 Drum Machine. Bought it used for $330 in about 1993. Like an idiot, I sold it around 1998. Now they're hard to find, but it had very sweet sounding drum kits. Their natural kits were extremely beautiful, using 16 bit samples at a time where the average home user was rocking out to 8 bit. Listening to old recordings I did with that drum machine make me once again regret having parted with it. I have been working to try to achieve the "is that a real drummer?" sound and feel using only free tools.

This is the first part of an ongoing series of posts that will be focused on the best tools I have found to "fake a drummer" and how to tweak your drum tracks to get the "real" drum feel.

Yellow Tools Independence Free
One of the best all-in-one packages I have found so far is Yellow Tools' Independence Free 2.0. As the name implies, this is the free version of their very robust sampler tool. There's a couple features disabled in this version, and the bundled sample library is "only" 2 GB of data. The "Basic" version ships with 12 GB of samples, and the "Pro" version ships with a whopping 70 GB sample library!

My initial goal is to have one or two good "natural" kits. Included in the free 2 GB library are 6 acoustic drum kits, so there are plenty of options. The kits have multiple velocity samples for each sound, so there's more detail than your average single-sample kit.

So What's Missing?
The Free version lacks a couple of major items. The most notable is the lack of ability to import your own samples. The other is the lack of ability to import 3rd party VSTs. Of course, if you're hosting this in your own DAW (like REAPER), that's not really a problem. You can add your VSTs to the chain after Independence Free, and have as many add-ons as you want. Lacking the ability to import your own samples is more of a concern if you want to branch out into custom kits. Later in this series I will tackle this issue with another tool.

How Do I Start?
You can start by going to Yellow Tools' website at http://yellowtools.com. Under their "Products" section, you can find Independence FREE. You'll have to register on their site to download it, but registration is free. All of this is detailed on the page. (Alternately, you can pick up a copy of the UK magazine "Computer Music", which comes with a DVD that includes the "Independence Free CM Edition". Same thing, with an extra logo on the UI. You will still have to register on the site & download the instrument files separately, however.)

When you install it, the installation location is for the standalone app only. It will prompt you separately for the location for the VST. Either install in with your other VSTs, or add a path in REAPER's VST configuration screen to find it. Either way, the next time you boot REAPER, you should see a new entry in FX "VSTi: Independence Free (Yellow Tools) (24 out)"

Starting Simple
To start a simple track in REAPER, open a new project. Insert Independence Free as a VST, and then open it. Your first view is probably going to be overwhelming. This is a very complex and sophisticated interface. Since we're starting simple, look for the layer controls. There will be a highlighted item that says "01 click here to load instrument". When you click on it, you will get a popup menu. Select "Load Layer". When the standard file requestor opens, navigate to the "Independence Free - Instruments" folder, and then into "01 Acoustic & Electronic Drum Kits". The .ytil files are the ones you care about. Select "Acoustic Drum Kit 1.ytil", and click "Open". Now your Drum Kit is ready for you on MIDI channel 1.

If you want to hear the sounds in this "layer", click on the "Mapping" button at the top of the VST's display. You will get a piano key layout, with colored bars representing the samples. If there are breaks in the line, that represents different samples used for different velocity ranges. As you can see in this kit, there are 11 velocities for B1 and C1, which are your kick drums. You can play the samples on the keyboard by clicking on them, but it is not going to be easy to trigger at varying velocities that way. It's easier using REAPER to control it.

Close the FX chain window and insert a "New MIDI Item" in the track where you set up Independence Free. Hit some notes, and you'll hear your new drum kit. How simple is that?

Ummm....What Happened To My Octave?
The first thing you might notice when you compare Independence Free to REAPER's piano roll is that the octave notations don't match. What Independence Free calls C1, REAPER calls C2. This is a common problem across music apps, because of differences in opinion on what octave is considered to contain middle C. You have 2 options: make a mental note of this difference, or reconfigure REAPER to honor the offset.

To reset REAPER to use the same notation as Independence Free, go to Options->Preferences->Media->MIDI. The option "MIDI octave name display offset: 0 octaves". Change the value to -1. Now REAPER will call the notes the same as Independence Free. This change only affects the labeling in REAPER's piano roll. The same/correct MIDI note numbers will be used regardless of this setting.

What Now?
Start experimenting with the kits available and see how good the samples are. Be sure to vary the velocities, so you can get the full impact of the multi-sampled drums. So far I've been quite happy with the kits in Independence Free. Keep in mind that this is a sampler tool, NOT a drum machine. Look at all the other instruments that come bundled with it. They are of equally high quality and very useful in their own right.

Up Next...
In Part 2, we will go into more features and uses of Independence Free as a drum machine, including adding effects, using multiple ins and outs to minimize CPU usage, and some other random tweaks.

Read the full post here!

Where is My Cowbell? (a.k.a. General MIDI Drum Assignments)

When you are first beginning to use Drum VSTs, it sometimes comes as a shock when try to actually find the notes that trigger the sounds. This is primarily because drums are attached to individual notes (unlike a synth that you can play up and down the range). It is also because not all Kits are created equal. Most freeware drum VSTs only offer support for a standard 8 drum kit, sometimes more, sometimes less. This makes the game of "find my drum triggers!" even harder, if you're just hunting and pecking.

General MIDI standards
Fortunately for us, this has been a problem from the early days of MIDI music. The General MIDI standard was developed in 1991, and expanded in 1999. In a nutshell, the General MIDI standard included several pieces, most notably the assignments of specific instrument assignments to specific bank slots. So, for example, instrument 10 is always a Glockenspiel on an instrument that adheres to the General MIDI standard.

Drum Standards
For the mostly software-based home studio, most of the General MIDI standard doesn't impact too much, since we are more likely to have pieces that are custom-written specialized for out gear. The portion that I think is more important is the General MIDI Drum Standards. According to the standard, Drums should always be on MIDI Channel 10 (and 11 if you have 2 kits in use at the same time). Even more useful is that specific drum sounds are identified by specific note numbers. Notes 35 to 81 are identified as very specific sounds.

Why Should We Care?
Simply put, it allows you to swap out full drum kits without having to tweak your music. If we didn't follow a common standard, that means to change from one drum VST to another might require you to re-write all the drum parts to connect the entered notes in your DAW to the actual notes the new VST wants. By using General MIDI Drum Assignments, everything is much more portable. And easier to find the sounds you're looking for. (In the piano roll in most DAWs, you should have the option to see "named notes" or "note numbers", so you can see exactly where these sounds should trigger from.)

General MIDI Drum Note Assignments
35 Bass Drum 2
36 Bass Drum 1
37 Side Stick
38 Snare Drum 1
39 Hand Clap
40 Snare Drum 2
41 Low Tom 2
42 Closed Hi-hat
43 Low Tom 1
44 Pedal Hi-hat
45 Mid Tom 2
46 Open Hi-hat
47 Mid Tom 1
48 High Tom 2
49 Crash Cymbal 1
50 High Tom 1
51 Ride Cymbal 1
52 Chinese Cymbal
53 Ride Bell
54 Tambourine
55 Splash Cymbal
56 Cowbell
57 Crash Cymbal 2
58 Vibra Slap
59 Ride Cymbal 2
60 High Bongo
61 Low Bongo
62 Mute High Conga
63 Open High Conga
64 Low Conga
65 High Timbale
66 Low Timbale
67 High Agogo
68 Low Agogo
69 Cabasa
70 Maracas
71 Short Whistle
72 Long Whistle
73 Short Guiro
74 Long Guiro
75 Claves
76 High Wood Block
77 Low Wood Block
78 Mute Cuica
79 Open Cuica
80 Mute Triangle
81 Open Triangle

Closing Thoughts
These are only applicable to instruments that adhere to the GM Standard. Not everyone honors the standard, and there are variations created by plug-in makers who are apparently blissfully unaware that they are making something completely incompatible with any existing drum standard. There are also a number of other accepted formats (mostly pricey "pro" kits) that don't necessarily adhere to the GM Standard. Keep an eye for GM Standards-compliant packages while building your discount studio. It will make transitions a lot easier, and you will always know where your cowbell is. (It's note 56, in case you missed it.)

Read the full post here!

REAPER Tutorial: Multi-Out Drum Tutorial

One of the hardest parts of a home studio to "get right" is the drums (unless you happen to really be a drummer). In a world of free and/or cheap tools it is hard to find a good virtual drum kit that gives you the options needed to get a solid drum sound and have the ability to mix the drums off into separate channels.

With most free drum VST instruments, if you want to be able to treat each drum separately (i.e. if you wanted to do something like add some extra reverb to ONLY the bass drum), you would be forced to use multiple instances of a standard drum VST, and program each drum sound as a separate instrument. This causes 2 problems: it increases your processing overhead by running 8 or more versions of the same VST (eating your CPU power like candy), and it is really hard to lock in your drum pattern when you're dealing with so many separate MIDI tracks feeding the sound of your drums. Notice I said "most free drum VST instruments"?

GTG Drum Sampler I
GTG makes some absolutely wonderful drum sampler VSTs (and some pretty good synths, too). Most of them feature a stereo out, but the GTG_DrumSampler I features a total of 9 outputs; 1 main output and 8 individual outputs for each piece of the drum kit. The UI has a nice picture of a Drum Kit, and the drums vibrate when they are played, which is a frill, but it's a nice touch.
Configure Your Outputs
First we want to configure the track itself for the drums. Since we know GTG Drum Sampler I has a total of 9 outputs (8 for individual drums), we will need to reconfigure our track for 8 channels. On the track where you want the drums, click on the "io" button on the left of the track panel. This will open the routing window for that track. There is a field in the top left labeled "Track Channels". This usually defaults to 2. Change that to 8.


Configure the Drums
Now that we've expanded the channels that this track will control, let's go to the UI of the DrumSampler I. In the top right of the window, there is a button labeled "9 Outputs". Click this to get the routing matrix for the drum kit. You will get REAPER's attempt to do what you want, which is a stair-step appearance, and completely useless as it is. It is useless because as is you will ONLY hear the bass drum. Here is where the labels take some getting used to. If you just want to hear all the drums together, you need to fill in the boxes for outputs 2 through 9 across the top row (Channel 1). This will play all the sounds through the left channel.

For our purposes, we want all the drums isolated. So instead, let's make the routings in this order: 2->Channel 1; 3->Channel 2; 4->Channel 3;etc. Your routing diagram should look like the one shown here:

This configuration means that the first drum (bass drum) will be output on channel 1, the second instrument (snare drum) will be output on channel 2, and so forth. To see a complete list of the outputs, click on the INFO text in the to middle of the Drum Sampler interface, and it will change to a drum assignment listing. With the way it interfaces with REAPER, these numbers are 1 below the way the output is numbered in REAPER. (BD = 1 actually comes out on output 2, according to REAPER's routing).

Make the Targets
Now we need to make the target tracks for all the drums to go to. We will need 8, and you should probably name them according to the drum to avoid confusion later on. In order, they are: Bass Drum, Snare Drum, HiHat, Tom High, Tom Mid, Tom Low, Cymbal Crash, Cymbal Ride. These new tracks will be IN ADDITION to the track that you have the drum kit installed on.

Lock The Feeds
Now that we have the channels isolated, and somewhere to send them to, we need to enable the sends. Go back to your original Drum pattern track, and click the "io" button again. The first thing we want to do is disconnect this track from the master. We do this because we only care about the drums coming through the individual channels, not from this pattern directly. Disconnect this by removing the check mark from the "Master/Parent Send" option in the top left of the window.

Now click on the drop-down "Add New Send", and select the track you named "Bass Drum". This will create a new block in the window about the send to the track named "Bass Drum". Below the sliders are a couple of drop-downs labeled "1/2 => 1/2". These are channel numbers, and it defaults to paired sends. "1/2=> 1/2" means "send channels 1 and 2 from this track to tracks 1 and 2 on the track I'm sending it to". In our case, we know that the Bass Drum is on Channel 1, since that's what we set up on the Output Routing in the VST. So change the FIRST "1/2" to "1". We will leave the target as "1/2", because that will put the drum as a stereo track in the target track. That's all we need to configure this send.

Now go back to the drop-down "Add New Send", and select the next track, "Snare Drum". Go to the new section it created, and change the send to "2=>1/2" so we send channel 2 to the Snare Drum track. Repeat this process for each of the drums.

Try It Out
That's it! Now insert a new "Empty MIDI Item" on your original drum track, and build a drum pattern. As it plays, you will notice that the mixer controls will show that the levels are coming from the individual drums as they are hit. Build a pattern with all the drums, and play it in a loop. Now you can start playing with adjusting the levels on each drum individually, as well as adding "fx" to individual drums (like the reverb on the bass drum example).

This is a fairly simple example, but by using simple track sends, you can also simulate mic bleed between drums (by adding a send between the drum tracks, with very low volume), among other ideas.

Other Notes
I should also mention that this wonderful drum kit comes with a pretty decent single kit of drum sounds. As far as a standard drum kit, they drum samples that come pre-loaded are pretty solid and will work great for quick drums without the need to sift through samples to build a kit. If you don't like the sounds, you can still load your own through the interface.

Also, the one drawback to using this drum VST is that you are limited to an 8 piece traditional setup. So if you want a double-bass kit, heavy cymbals, extra toms, etc., then you'll need to either use multiple instances of this VST with alternate drums, or upgrade to more serious software. But for simple drum tracks, it's still a great place to start.

Read the full post here!