How to get real sounding drums from drum machine presets: an Alesis sr-18 preview UPDATE

Back in April, I wrote a blog about getting decent drum sounds out of a drum machine,which I have reprinted below.However,I made some discoveries that really should be mentioned.First, After having worked with both the Alesis sr-16 and the Alesis sr-18, there is no question that the Alesis sr-18 sounds better. It rivals drum samples and even cymbals sound real.The sr-16 cymbals were quite weak.

Here are a few tips that I ran across to make the drum machine sound realistic in your recordings or live.

First, the sr-18 has three different sounds in a preset, drums, percussion and bass. I highly recommend muting the bass out completely , it sounds lousy.Secondly, mute the percussion as well in most presets. The reason for this is that it usually contains hand claps, little bells, shakers and other noises that just aren't usually associated with a drum kit.


Now , for the most important tip and to be filed in the 'now you tell me department'. Select a pattern and then go into the drum machine setup and there you can change the drum kit associated with presets. There are quite a few drum kits and it is amazing what a difference that a drum kit will make.It can take a useless sounding preset and make it really sound realistic and useful. For example,I particularly like drum kit 70 and I tried it on a lot of different presets .The drum sound overall stays the same but it plays different patterns. Great for recording an album.Most bands don't use a different drum kit for each track on an album,but rather one kit with different patterns.

By the way, Drum kits on the sr-16 can also be chosen but they are more limited in sound than the sr-18.

original article
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For home recording enthusiasts ,getting realistic drum sounds has always been a pain in the butt. Access to a drummer and recording a drum kit is a daunting process for most musicians bedroom studio's. Also, if your not a drummer, how can you program custom drum sounds on a drum machine?!

For me as A non drummer who doesn't program drum machines with much success I rely on the presets. I got an Alesis SR-18 with a lot of presets,but even more importantly , a lot of different sounding drum kits that can be used on any of the presets.

For recordings late at night , the simplicity of a drum machine was just right and the drum sounds of the SR-18 are every bit as good as session drummer 2 and similar programs. Using the kits to change the sound of the presets is crucial for recording. Also, the drum machine has a swing setting that can humanize the drum playing a bit.Use the fills sparingly 

 and don't try to get the Neil Pert Phil Collins and Keith Moon mountain sized drum fills as they wills tick out too much as unnatural.but some fills is helpful to break up the monotonous.

 Also.Also, a fun tip is to take a preset and create a user preset of the original preset and then you can take out a one of the drums to create variations on the preset pattern.Though, for most non drummers like me, just changing the drum kit makes a huge difference to the presets.

Adding some reverb F/X and sometimes some delay to the presets can yield interesting results. as well.The SR-18 has some built in reverbs,but an external unit can be very helpful.

Also, if your playing while recording , get a set of pedals to start/stop the drum machine and a pedal for fills. its a blast to hit a fill pedal and it will play a fill from the beginning or where ever you are in a musical time (4/4,etc..). the presets on the SR-18 are broken up into A/B variations and and a/B fills.

 interestingly the presets are setup in a 16 bar sequence. I much prefer the SR-16 in this respect, that was setup for 4/4 time which works great for rocks.The fills are more immediate. the solution then is to midi an SR-16 to trigger the SR-18 sounds which sound much better.

Also, for a few bucks , many drummers would create some cool custom user patterns for you. I had a drummer friend who did this for me for free and in no time I had many usable user preset patterns that were vastly superior to my feeble attempts.But if your going to ask a drummer to do this, make sure you are familiar with the sr-18 as far as getting  into programming mode and so on or else a simple task will discourage the drummer from messing with it.
anyway, I have used the SR-18 live and on albums with much success. Don't listen to these saps who say well drum machines aren't 'real' drums. the SR-18 samples are 'real drum'' samples. Its the next best thing to having a real drummer  available at all times. Listen to Joe Satriani's surfing with the aliens album where most of the drums are most definitely drum machines.

The SR-18 has some really great drum sounds!!
Denis Taaffe
denis@dtguitar.com
http://www,dtguitar.com

A cheap light show for Musicians with Guitarist Denis Taaffe / a review for the 3 led rotating lamp bulb

I ran across a cheap solution to enhance your music studio's atmosphere or practice space or even for small gigs for less than $8 

How to get real sounding drums from drum machine presets: an Alesis sr-18 preview

For home recording enthusiasts ,getting realistic drum sounds has always been a pain in the butt. Access to a drummer and recording a drum kit is a daunting process for most musicians bedroom studio's. Also, if your not a drummer, how can you program custom drum sounds on a drum machine?!

For me as A non drummer who doesn't program drum machines with much success I rely on the presets. I got an Alesis SR-18 with a lot of presets,but even more importantly , a lot of different sounding drum kits that can be used on any of the presets.

For recordings late at night , the simplicity of a drum machine was just right and the drum sounds of the SR-18 are every bit as good as session drummer 2 and similar programs. Using the kits to change the sound of the presets is crucial for recording. Also, the drum machine has a swing setting that can humanize the drum playing a bit.Use the fills sparingly

 and don't try to get the Neil Pert Phil Collins and Keith Moon mountain sized drum fills as they wills tick out too much as unnatural.but some fills is helpful to break up the monotonous.

 Also.Also, a fun tip is to take a preset and create a user preset of the original preset and then you can take out a one of the drums to create variations on the preset pattern.Though, for most non drummers like me, just changing the drum kit makes a huge difference to the presets.

Adding some reverb F/X and sometimes some delay to the presets can yield interesting results. as well.The SR-18 has some built in reverbs,but an external unit can be very helpful.

Also, if your playing while recording , get a set of pedals to start/stop the drum machine and a pedal for fills. its a blast to hit a fill pedal and it will play a fill from the beginning or where ever you are in a musical time (4/4,etc..). the presets on the SR-18 are broken up into A/B variations and and a/B fills.

 interestingly the presets are setup in a 16 bar sequence. I much prefer the SR-16 in this respect, that was setup for 4/4 time which works great for rocks.The fills are more immediate. the solution then is to midi an SR-16 to trigger the SR-18 sounds which sound much better.

Also, for a few bucks , many drummers would create some cool custom user patterns for you. I had a drummer friend who did this for me for free and in no time I had many usable user preset patterns that were vastly superior to my feeble attempts.But if your going to ask a drummer to do this, make sure you are familiar with the sr-18 as far as getting  into programming mode and so on or else a simple task will discourage the drummer from messing with it.
anyway, I have used the SR-18 live and on albums with much success. Don't listen to these saps who say well drum machines aren't 'real' drums. the SR-18 samples are 'real drum'' samples. Its the next best thing to having a real drummer  available at all times. Listen to Joe Satriani's surfing with the aliens album where most of the drums are most definitely drum machines.

The SR-18 has some really great drum sounds!!
Denis Taaffe
denis@dtguitar.com
http://www,dtguitar.com

Create A Finished Album Without calling on satan

I saw a you tube video recently from a religious fanatic who swore that albums were made by magically created by Satan and brought to Satan's alter to be cursed and put spells on the listener?!! Ignorant I thought. It actually is a bit simpler than that and you don't need Satan or dark magic at all. lol. I thought I would take a little time and talk about something I am in the process of doing right now which is putting together an album.in this case, my 191th album called Modern rock guitar vol. 191 ''. I use simple software tool to put together a finished Album including song order, length, and spaces between tracks,album drafts. What I have to work with: 

1)a folder with tons of tracks I have recorded in the last week or so and some tracks that didn't make it on the last album.

2)each track is a mastered 44.1K 16 bit wav CD ready WAV. file which has a silly name such as : 191turkfinal, 191dopfinal1,191dopfinal2

3)a windows explorer folder of .wav files where i also create a folder called not used and one called masters whereI put the nonmastered original recording and the not used is where I put tracks I decided to not use for the album because of some reason. if I really like a track but it doesn't fit the album , I will instead put it in the next album folder (album 192 for instance) to be included in the next album. this helps me keep track of all these files that build up.

4)I use a simple program called Roxio CD creator Classic: I have a folder called album191 which contains a bunch of mastered unreleased tracks that were recorded for this album. Hopefully error free. From these, I choose which tracks will appear on the album, how long the album will be, the order of the tracks and length between tracks and then I burn a CD-r 'master'.

 NOTE: click on the graphic above to see it full size

Notice the names of each track are cryptic silly names.The reason for this, is that I base the names of the tracks on the artwork of theme of the Album usually after the track has been recorded,simple enough because these are instrumental tracks.So, eventually a track called 191mort2final will end up being called 'Escapade' ,etc...  I also try to keep an album to about 1 hour or people complain that its too long or too short.I have seen albums that are 30 minutes long only. In any case, this is just my preference.1 hour or so seems just right.

To me, ,even in the days of .99 single tracks, the order of the tracks is very important as it creates a theme for the album and the flow of an album. From slow to fast or vice versa and intensity or perhaps one track is a perfect intro for the next track ,etc..this is where your creativity or musical sense comes in and to me is as important as creating the music. for examples, see Pink Floyd the wall for example. or the Who "Tommy' albums. (except for that freaky fiddle about song...?!?!)

Transitions /gaps in songs - the industry standard is 2 seconds between tracks and it works for me most of the time. Sometimes if you want to have a track come right after the first for dramatic affect you might say no transition, but I have only done that one time on Modern rock guitar vol. 33 years ago.It had an orchestral intro and then the track would come in. But, most of the time 2 seconds per tracks works great,allows those crappy cheapo CD players mechanically to keep up without cutting off intro's or endings.

Use the preview section to listen to the tracks or even the first couple of seconds of the track, does the intro of one track sound like the one before or after it? if so, it may not be in the 'right' place for the CD.This is subjective of course. Also, listen for correct fade in's,etc...

I guess I should also mention CD volume of the tracks. I master my own tracks so they all have pretty close the same volume. But this is something to listen for as well.there are fancier red book CD creator programs that will bring all tracks to similar volume,but sometimes those have bad audio results.But it may be a needed,if your tracks go from way to loud to not loud enough.This should be handled in the mastering or at least for me this works out fine and I have rarely had to bring the volume down of one track to match others. Use your ears. Don't be a pinhead and try to get the loudest CD that distorts and has digital distortion to beat out the major label discs destined for radio. you squeeze the dynamic range and add noise and ear fatigue. I mean if your tracks are mastered they don't have to be the loudest of the loud, case in point: compare any  Rush album to a Michel Hedges album (Arial Boundaries is a good example) ,you will be amazed at how much louder the Rush album is compared to the Michael Hedges Arial Boundaries album, yet the Michael Hedges album will have every bit of sound quality if not more dynamic range.

I guess I should make an exception for those who use premastered tracks to send to a professional mastering house.But, some prefer the cheap home computer mastering which is cheap but can work ok..Of course a professional mastering house would be better but so would recording in a  million dollar studio instead of your bedroom /.

Another tip is burn a draft  CD of the album and go listen to it.I do this while going to sleep.It has been so very helpful, as I often find crappy choice of song order, faults in songs I didn't realize were there or tracks that were never faded out and abruptly end when they should not. If listening on the computer it is easy to get distracted and songs tend to just flow by with little thought.It is hard to concentrate on music critically for long period s of time,so I advice creating a CD to listen to and live with for at least a day or two if not longer. you may find you want to make changes.

.I have at least 3 or for 4 Cd-r coasters of earlier attempts before finding the right order for an album.I sometimes make a track change and even some further editing before its done. So make sure you stock up on those 100 CD-r rolls of blanks and a CD burner of course.

If satisfied, I  then send the cd-r to a manufacturer along (with arwork which I will cover in another blog)  to be made.Pat your self on the back that you didn't need Satan's help or dark magic to create an album/CD.

Denis Taaffe
denis@dtguitar.com
http://www.dtguitar.com

Electrovoice EV-four Speakers

As an audiophile, I often heard about how great Electrovoice speakers from the 1960's and 1970's, when Electrovoice was making home audio speakers, were.

Well recently, I ran across some Electrovoice EV-FOUR (EV-4) 3way speakers (original with midrange horn). Each speaker was in a real maple cabinet (none of this cheap simulated wood finish crap).The grilles were tweed like. More than that, each speaker weighed a ton (well about 50 pounds or more) and they were big and thick floor speakers.

This made me curious, so I went to google to see what I could learn about them. I rab across a thread on audio speaker forum and I usually trust the threads. However, I was saddened that these so called expert audiophikes dismissed it. Adding such comments, "perhaps it would sound better in a different cabinet", "must replace the caps", "well, ev speakers just are not interesting to listen to?!", "they are worth about $20...I never pay $20 for a pair of speakers" and my favorite "they just dont have any bass" and so on.

 I soon discovered that these bozo's making these comments were ignorant morons who not only didnt own a pair of ev-4's, but hadn't even heard them. They also commented that the price should be $20?! to maybe $100. . Strangly, these morons even posted a recent ebay sale of a pair of EV-4's for $450 plus shipping.Even after posting this, they kept saying that was ten times ore than there worth and how they should be $20 (this from the schmuck who wont spend more than $20 on a pair of speakers) others saying $40?!

I plugged in the 8 ohm ev-4's to a humble 100 watt solid state sony receiver and popped in a CD. My jaw dropped to the ground!! Suddenly the room was filled with a full range sound with a deep, tight bass, airy midrange and smooth hi sounds,all well balanced. These were one of the best speakers I have ever heard.The guy who posted they didnt have any bass obviously has never heard ev-4's. As it turn out , these speakers range goes from 30khz to 20hz. I mean 30khz is subwoofer territory!! Most speakers roll off at 60khz at best. Also, this isnt flabby bass, but tight ,punchy bass!! Kick drums, bass and double bass just were amazing.

Next the midrange which is switchable to low mid high on the back with a switch is incedible to listen to. I had an eric Johnson cD on and you would swear his marshall cabinet was in the room with you. Just a full sound. The trebble was not as bright as my bookshelf Polk speakers granted, However, it has a three way switch on back and the trebble is so smooth and fits the speakers correctly. Pink Floyd's the wall cymbals were lifelike.

 I would pay $800-$2000 or more for these and they just provide a full sound that was better than my canton's, klipsch and Polk speakers. The are very much on par with my 4 way jbl l-120's which cost way more than these with possibly a tighter bass.If you run into a pair of these grab them!! You wont believe the sound.I will never again believe these so called audio experts who were talking out of their butts without ever owning or even listening to these incredible speakers (my response is "take your pants off as I cant hear what your saying").

Dont take my word for it though, find a pair and see for yourself. I was going to sell mine on ebay after reading the posts at audiokarma before plugging them in, now they are staying with me as one of my favorite speakers and one of the best I have ever heard.