need some help starting

n0Ob Joined: Jul 14, 2008 Posts: 2

Alright i'm new at all this stuff, but i'm really up for making it work.
I've some vst's and a couple of vsti's and using ableton live 7.

But really i'm a bit unsure where to go from this. I mainly want to get drum's sorted first why i'm posting here.
I've drumatic 3 and can't seem to understand how to use it Mad

[must be a bit of an idiot hah.]
Just wondering what's the best ways to make your own drum beats and what effects to use on them, and any good tutorials i could learn from.

Any help is appriciated thanks :].

Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2008 1:15 pm

i've never produced anything on ableton, so i cant say much about that. the easiest thing to do is to use fruity [i dont remember drumatic's interface so idk if it's hard to use or not.]

so get a copy of flstudio producer's edition if you can, then throw away every sample it comes with. you don't want them. download a shit ton of single hit drums (you can also take a loop you like and chop hits out with a wave editor, goldwave is a good one, so is soundforge. you can use the shareware version forever with full functionality. they claim otherwise but it's true)

the interface is pretty basic at first but theres a lot more available than you'll need right away, drum programming is mostly pushing squares, so load up your hits and like go nuts. for more in depth stuff mess with the piano roll (if you cant find it hit f5 and check the help section) and if you need way more beats per bar, just double the bpms to give you more spaces in between.

for sound quality use vst's like EQ's (the higher number of bands the better) and compressors, though i hardly ever use compressors.

for cool effects use delays, distortion, reverb, whatever else

two of my favorite plugins are cyanide and northpole, but i usually use them for synths, not drums. cyanide will fuk your drums up very nicely though, so i'll use it for that sometimes.
just google a ton of shit and you'll find what you need.

if you want to make your own drum hits, theres a standalone program called stomper that's designedfor that. i prefer using it to make long ass squealer noises.

a good page with a lot of tutorials is spinwarp.com

Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2008 9:42 pm

If you're wanting to do everything in Ableton and you are wanting to make breakcore rather than a genre with more simplistic drum patterns, you don't really want to be using drumatic, you want to use breaks samples. To be honest, I wouldn't use Ableton for doing your drums at all but there are people who do it who might be able to help you out with that if you are set on doing so. If you are actually wanting to program all your drums from scratch, I seem to recall the impulse tool is pretty useful but I've never really got my head round it.

As cuttingagent said, if you are new to all this then get yourself a copy of Fruity Loops. If you are using Ableton because you like the idea of performing live then you can use Fruity to write your breaks and then just transport them over to use in Ableton.