Drum workflow for electronic music

[NoSoup4you]

I've dealt plenty with real drums and real drum emulation, e.g. Superior Drummer, but how do video game composers and electronic producers do their drums typically? I don't know what to do for stuff that's not supposed to sound real. I've messed with Spark VDM a bit, but the pattern based workflow bothered me. If you don't start the project from the beginning it won't align correctly, it's a pain to do small variations in specific measures, etc etc. Ideally I want a VSTI where I can just map audio samples to specific MIDI notes (36 for bass, 40 for snare etc) and program them on the piano roll. But then I don't know where to start with samples. Are they usually just processed hits from classic drum machines?

[AngelCityOutlaw]

In terms of workflow, it kinda depends on the DAW. In FL studio, you can load samples and trigger them individually with the step sequencer. There are some drum vsts out there like Session Drummer that allow you to load your own samples. In a lot of daws like Cubase or Reaper, people tend to just drag the samples into the timeline. A lot of EDM producers also use pre-made loops, either from purchased sample packs or ones they've made themselves. You can also look into "drum replacement" software that could replace beats you've made with superior drummer with electronic samples of your choice.

As far as the drum samples themselves, it entirely depends on what genre you're going for.

Big Beat music like the Crystal Method, Fatboy Slim or Overseer tend to use old vinyl, hip-hop drum loops and samples or even live drums where as trance and dubstep use purely synth generated drums though they are often layered with acoustic drums. Most people I know would just buy a sample pack containing these drums as one-shot samples.

 

[shadowpsyc]

There are a lot of different ways to go about it. There are drum machines(not really familiar with the VST equivalent of these but FL's FPC/DirectWave or Renoise's integrated sampler can both do what you're talking about), there are drum machines that use stacked synthesizers instead of samples(and some that do both), you can just drop the wav files right on the timeline/playlist or whatever your DAW calls it, you can load samples or synthesizers individually and use the piano roll which makes it easy to repitch things all over the place if that's your thing, there's beat slicers where you can take a loop and chop up each hit for use in a piano roll...

 

Samples themselves are also open ended. Acoustic drums, samples of old drum machines, samples of complicated modular synthesizers, all of these things layered and otherwise mangled together into something entirely new, they could be recordings of someone hitting a gas can or a washing machine. Tons of possibilities, just have to dive in and find out what works for you

[timaeus222]

I layer my drums in FL Studio using the Layer tool, and I write my patterns using the step sequencer. It's by far the easiest method that I've used to write drums for dubstep, electro house, and drum & bass music. I tend to use some distortion/waveshaping to strengthen the fundamentals should I need some real snap to the drums (like for EDM snares), and I use some parallel compression to make them punchier.

I like layering stuff from BHK Rough Connections (Drum & Bass), Bladerunners Dread (Drum & Bass), When Alien Drum Robots Attack (general Roland TR-808/909 samples for electro and dubstep music), MPC60 Vol. 1-3 (dubstep, hip hop, etc), and Black Octopus Leviathan (dance/trance). Together that's over 5000 drum samples.

This is one track I've written using mainly the WADRA and MPC60 drums: http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR03225

[NoSoup4you]

^Sounds good. I only tried FL for a day, but does the step sequencer convert to MIDI clips/blocks at some point? So you can take one measure and add a fill or something without making a whole new pattern. I'm coming from basically a traditional composing workflow (in Guitar Pro though...) so I'd rather manually copy-paste things and be able to edit them individually than draw patterns.

I guess just putting audio samples on the timeline is a possibility, haven't done that since I used Acidpro 5... I sorta got in the mindset that it was wrong, after using Superior Drummer. I guess with a track folder it wouldn't be too bad.

[timaeus222]

19 minutes ago, NoSoup4you said:

^Sounds good. I only tried FL for a day, but does the step sequencer convert to MIDI clips/blocks at some point? So you can take one measure and add a fill or something without making a whole new pattern. I'm coming from basically a traditional composing workflow (in Guitar Pro though...) so I'd rather manually copy-paste things and be able to edit them individually than draw patterns.

I guess just putting audio samples on the timeline is a possibility, haven't done that since I used Acidpro 5... I sorta got in the mindset that it was wrong, after using Superior Drummer. I guess with a track folder it wouldn't be too bad.

The step sequencer still makes pattern clips like you can make in the piano roll, but if you mean "can it be converted into piano-roll notes?", then yes (right click the channel, click "Send to piano roll"). You don't have to do it that way, but you can.

If you mean "can I reuse chunks of notes from the step sequencer patterns in a convenient way", then yes. When you place step sequencer patterns in the Playlist/Multitrack/Arranger window, if you left-click the upper-left corner of the pattern, clicking "Make Unique" lets you duplicate the pattern without losing the original, and you can edit the new clone to add variation that way. I do that all the time, and it really helps my workflow.

Copying and pasting is also pretty quick; if you want to paste the same pattern clip or entire chunks of piano-roll notes multiple times, try pressing Ctrl+B and holding that. Alternatively, you can highlight multiple pattern clips in the Playlist using Ctrl+Left-click-drag, and then Shift+Left-click-drag to clone a bunch of patterns at once.

You could place audio samples on the timeline, but I personally only do that if I want to align transients (like when using vocals, cymbals/reverse cymbals, cinematic risers, etc). It's otherwise quite hard to align something like a reverse cymbal.