Drums for dummies

A long, long time ago I had Cakewalk and enjoyed messing around with audio. I've gotten interested in it again and have been tinkering around with Reaper, VSTs, etc. Thanks to Kenny's videos I'm getting up to speed. I have a guitar, a keyboard controller and I mainly like to make noise :) I'm more interested in the 'how it works' vs 'how it sounds'. What I'm struggling with is drums. When I had Cakewalk I had a huge library of patterns (.wrk files IIRC) and I could easily drag-drop those into a window and quickly build up a simple pattern. What's the modern equivalent to that? I've toyed around with BFD but it seems overly complex (or I'm dense) :) Jim

Watch one of the many demos for Toontrack EZDrummer: It is just that easy, drop in patterns or make your own (and yes you can drop the supplied patterns into Reaper and modify them to whatever you want.) Super easy.

Ctrl-Alt-X opens Reaper's Media Explorer. There, make sure 'Tempo match on' is set in the drop-down window, and also the checkbox 'start on bar' and 'auto play' are ticked. (To the right is a volume bar which you can set later) I suggest you also enable the loop button next to the stop and play controls. Now you can just hover the mouse cursor over an drum loop (wav, aiff etc) and it will play in sync to the project. When you find the right loop, just drag it to the track panel and it will align there or even make itself a new track if you drop it outside existing tracks. Pretty nifty. Personally I prefer VSTi's like drum synths and samplers, but the process is still similar to above; now just using MIDI files (.mid). All you have to do is make sure the track containing the drum VSTi is selected and you can audition MIDI files in the Media Explorer, all in tempo with the project. You can find a lot of free MIDI drum loops around the net, but there's also reasonable at for example .

Jim, While BFD is a nice program, it's too complicated for me...my needs. I just don't need all those extra features. Try BFD ECO it's a scaled down program which still offers all kinds of customization like mics, mic placement, FX, tons of drum loops etc. I also have a steven slate Drums pared down version as well. Both were fairly cheap on sale...not sure what they cost now. Also, try the free (but sometimes hard to DL) Sennheiser Drumic'a. It has some cool features like trying what's supposed to be a showcase for their mics but serves its purpose in home recording. Try bangin' away on your midi keyboard to "play" the drums too.

So many of the Drum Rompler sellers have versions that are free or almost it is worth getting a few and just seeing if one of them suits your work method. Frankly most of the loops that I have tried were never good enough in terms of the playing fitting what I wanted for a ong. You may find they work for you though, but the MID that comes with most of the romplers is easier to edit!