Learning more about Drum Patterns.

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Learning more about Drum Patterns.

Postby jimmusician » Fri Mar 26, 2010 5:08 am

Lately I'm interested in learning more about drum patterns. Alot of stuff I've done so far has all been polka beats/blasts/some hip-hop variants. But I don't know a hell of a lot of styles as far as how to write more creative "real-world" patterns that are out there.

Anyone got any advice or know any sites I can go to learn?

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Postby dfaultuzer » Fri Mar 26, 2010 12:03 pm

this may sound like a completely retarded answer but here goes anyway

record a drumloops that u like, think is original or weird or whatever, stick the loop in ur daw and try to reproduce it

at best u'll manage to do it correctly and probably will understand better how the said drum pattern works, at worse u'll fail at reproducing it, but may come with something different that is actually cool too

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Postby MarkyPoo » Fri Mar 26, 2010 5:42 pm

^ that is a really excellent idea for memorizing what drum patterns look like in a daw also. I don't know if anyone else thinks that way but I remember certain sounds by the way the pattern that produces the sound looks in my daw.

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Postby divtech » Fri Mar 26, 2010 8:26 pm

^ hah mark i know exactly what you mean

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Postby DISEMBOWELLED » Sat Mar 27, 2010 6:45 pm

i played the drums in real life before getting into production so ive never really had a problem 'thinking' about the patterns in that way.

but the flipside is my brain can get restricted into only programming patterns that would "make sense" to a real drummer, not really always what you want for breakcore

hopefully that makes sense

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Postby jimmusician » Sat Mar 27, 2010 6:59 pm

i hear you. did you learn from like any notation books or did you learn from scratch? I'm not restrictive to breakcore either. Jazz, metal, whatever, its all good to me. Just like i don't know a whole hell of a lot about patterning aside from 8ths and 16ths that would "make sense" as you said before.

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Postby Skornsteen » Wed Mar 31, 2010 11:26 am

I'm a drummer myself, and what I've found as a good help to drum programming in a more natural flowing way is to keep in mind how a drummer whould play a pattern on his drumkit, as in the pattern in your head.
For instance, when a drummer whould play an amen break
he whould be tapping his left foot on his hihat for keeping time, while his right hand goes on the ride in a more swing feel.
Also real drummers hit on different velocity's with each hit, on his kick, on his cymbal on his snares, what ever. Try to add some random velocity to your patterns, what's also very important is to correctly pan your drums.
When you pan you must first think where you are while listening to the drummers, if you are in front of him the hihats will be panned more to the right and the ride cymbal more to the left, if you are in fact behind the kit, this is turned around.
Drummers also hit at different spots on there drums, so that whould mean a slight change in pitch of the drum.
Also try watching video's of drummers from different genre's where you can actually see what they are doing so you can memorize these things and use them and combine them in to interesting patterns.
Some interesting drummers to check out:
Marco Minneman, Thomas lang, Jojo mayer (plays lots of drum and bass stuff, also jazz) Flo Mounier (more of a metal/jazz fusion drummer)
Cozy Powel, George Kollias on his Spastic Ink work.. well the list goes on, enough interesting stuff to find about these fella's.
Hope this is of any use.

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Postby producer_snafu » Wed Mar 31, 2010 8:21 pm

all you need to do is learn to count, bam yer the next venetian snares!
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Postby jimmusician » Thu Apr 01, 2010 3:32 pm

Here's something I put together with a little time. I think the BPM (565?) is really doing most of the work for me, but I guess it shows what I can do.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=0RNJXKB0

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