I finally finished reading the book “Drum Programming: A Complete Guide to Program and Think Like a Drummer” by Ray F. Badness. The book is only 54 pages long so of course it did not take that long to read it. I was entering the patterns into my drum machine (Propellerhead Reason’s ReDrum) and learning how to use that. Today I completed the process by arranging my song parts in the sequencer. This was fairly difficult because I was unsure how to get so many drum patterns into the sequencer. What I wound up doing was creating a ReDrum device for each song part. This keeps the patterns organized and allows me to load up all the samples needed for a set of patterns. Then I had some difficulty arranging my tracks in the sequencer so I’ve added some detailed notes to my custom help collection on that topic.
Last evening I learned how to do drum programming in Cubase, another DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) that came with my PreSonus FireBox recording interface. I thought it was important to reinforce my knowledge in a slightly different environment where the concepts are applied a little differently. Cubase has a Drum Editor which makes it difficult to enter notes because you don’t have a bar measured in 16 notes. You have to keep track of your note positions visually. But it does allow you to see all your channels in one grid so there is less button pushing to switch channels and it resembles my drum tabulature.
You can listen to the complete song I arranged below. Please note that I was following the instructions in the book so I didn’t bother too much with making it sound perfect and did not change much to improve it. My focus was just to learn the techniques.
[audio:http://www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com/media/DrumProgrammingSong.mp3]
