Music Maker

[shabs]

So there have been some steps taken to alleviate this whole "Shuborno doesn't make music" problem.

A. DRUMSI have been looking at some drum programming software from a company called Toontrack for quite some time now. I bit the bullet and bought EZdrummer... set me back $160, but after looking at their products for 5 years and having not spent

Comments

[vinas]

Well, thank god you can't buy a program to play Mario with you or I'd be totally fucked! Actually I just picked up EZDrummer, Sonar 8, and a Korg MIDI pad off of Sasha's buddy out here. It totally lacks the fluidity and satisfaction of playing the drums (at least to me) but I am interested in paying more attention to the mechanics of constructing beats. Yet to find a virtual kit that sounds great - I think I'll be focusing on electronic kits rather than simulated kits.

[vinas]

I just switched over to Acoustica's Mixcraft which seems to be a lot closer to what I was looking for but damn! I see what you mean about the latency problem. Not a lot I'm going to be able to do about that on this cheap laptop I guess. Maybe it's time to take my Powerbook in to the mac store to see if they can get it running again and set it up as my studio piece. I'm nervous about my upcoming living situation - if I end up in an apartment for next year then having a MIDI keyboard and some good headphones hooked up to a decent PC will become a total necessity.

[shabs]

Is the MIDI pad velocity-sensitive?

The thing with ezDrummer is that you can program it to hit the drum lighter or harder. And hits at the same volume will sound slightly different as well. However, the "performance" is now in the hands of the programmer. That's why Meshuggah's Catch Thirty-Three, done with the same software, sounds natural - Meshuggah's drummer just programmed it to sound the way he'd play it. As I found out the hard way, if you program a repeating beat at 100% volume, ezDrummer will make it sound as shitty as a real drummer would. I had to dial back to less than half as my "default" volume before I started hearing more natural sounds. Speakers seemed to make a difference too. My gaming headphones were pretty useless compared to my studio monitors. I was hearing a lot more nuance and dynamics with the monitors.