I am considering adding Superior Drummer 2.0 in my studio drumming gears. But I am also in the process of completing a real drum kit for recording studio use. So which of the two is actually better in terms of music production? In this post, I will take closer look in examining all factors involving both of these great drumming solutions.
Credits: Toontrack/Art Bromage
Cost Benefit Ratio Analysis
Superior Drummer 2.0 is not a free drumming solution. It cost around $400 as a download in their site. I also checked with Amazon and Superior Drummer 2.0 cost only around $179 which is not a download version.
For those that are not using real drums in their home recording studio project, you might want to experiment further to improve the quality of your drum sound. The sound that comes out from most drum sequenced software is not realistic and not natural sounding.
Assuming you do not need to buy another much more powerful drum sequencing software solutions or buying a real/acoustic drum kit, the quickest way you can improve the sound of your drums is using samples.
These samples are actual recording of the beat which can be taken from any percussion instrument. If you have that bass drum in your home or a solo snare kit then you can use it. By doing that “actual recording” you add some realism to your existing drum groove.
Another way you can sample drums is to duplicate an existing drum sound in your loop and add a bit of delay and different EQ settings on the duplicated tracks. This can broaden the drum sound.
Let’s have an actual example so that you can understand this technique.
Drum Sequence without the samples (original)
Supposing you use a relatively inexpensive drum sequencing software such as Hotstepper to generate the drum arrangement. Like any other drum sequencing software, it needs to be programmed. Then assuming you have the following drum sequence below:
And this is how it sounds like:
Supposing you want a more fat bass sound in the kick as well as a punchier snare sound, this is possible using samples.
Adding Samples to your Drum Track
Supposing you will use a beat box/cajon/drum box percussion instrument to re-generate the fat bass sound in the kick that you need; follow the steps below:
1.) Insert the drum loops (the original one) to the any multi-tracking software for example Reaper DAW.
2.) These drum loops would serve as your click track (timing or reference).
3.) Put a microphone on the percussion instrument. For example, you put the microphone on the drum box as follows: Read the rest of this entry »
From a reader of this blog: “Hi! I would also like to know how you convert an hpa file to wav file. Look all over Google, but I couldn’t find a single thing about it.”
- The conversion process can be lengthy depending on the complexity of your drum loops. In this tutorial, you will learn how to convert your HPA file (Hotstepper drum sequencer) into a 32-bit float/96KHz WAV which can be used by your multi-track recording projects. Since the purpose of Hotstepper is to compose and arrange drum sequence loops, it still needs to be converted into a high resolution WAV file for it to be added to your project. If you are entirely new to this one, you can read this introductory tutorial on Hotstepper. You can also download the fully working version of Hotstepper. This software is free.
FIRST STEP: Create your drum loops and export each drum parts
1.) Launch Hotstepper, create and compose your favorite drum loops. If you are having difficulty in creating drum loops, you can download the common drum patterns for Hotstepper and open it. Supposing you will download pattern 8 on that page, extract first the hpa file from the zip archive. Then in Hotstepper, go to File – Open and click “No” for “Do you want to save before continuing?” then browse to the location of pattern8.hpa. This is how patter 8 drum loops would look like:
If you see an error when opening the hpa pattern files on any of those downloads; it is most likely that you do not have the correct drum parts saved in your Hotstepper library. In this case, you need to add real drum sound parts to your Hotstepper and specify correct filename as used by the downloaded pattern example (e.g. rock kick.wav, tama snare.wav, etc).You can get these real drum sounds in any professional drum recording studio or in your own acoustic drums. Once you have finalized the sounds and added it to the Hotstepper library, you can reuse it many times in your projects without needing to go to the recording studio anymore. You can also assemble unlimited amount of drum loops/sequences using the same real drum sound samples you added in the library.
2.) To get started in converting this hpa pattern file to WAV; you need to export EACH drum parts (snare, kick, cymbals, etc) as a separate wav file. One big mistake after completing/creating the drum loop is to directly go to “File” – “Write Pattern Wav” and export the entire drum tracks into a single wav file. This is not correct because you will still be applying effects to each of the drum tracks during mixing. Since this is only a single file (already containing all the drum parts); you cannot implement your desired effects for each drum parts and you cannot isolate them in the mix for further processing (panning, etc). Looking at the previous screenshot; you are only using three drum tracks and that is “rock kick.wav”, “tama snare.wav” and “open hi hat.wav”. This means that at the end, there will only be 3 separate wav files for your drums. Let’s start by exporting “rock kick.wav”. To export the kick drum part, you need to remove the red triangles of all active drum parts (snare and hi hats) except the kick drum. You can do this in Hotstepper by right clicking over the entire red triangles on snare and hi hat parts so that only rock kick.wav red triangles should remain. This is how it looks like after doing this adjustment: Read the rest of this entry »
