41 Tracking eDrums

I was talking to a friend the other day who was lamenting the fact that he would need to (possibly) get a new electronic kit. When I asked why, he said he needed one which could output all the different channels separately so he could record it at home into his computer like an acoustic drum kit, with the bass drum on one channel, the snare drum on another channel, the toms on another channel etc. 

His kit only had left and right outputs so he was convinced (due to clever marketing by an electronic drum manufacturer) that having separate channels from a module with only left and right outputs, was totally impossible.

Every electronic kit with just left and right outputs can output every single channel separately, as long as it has a MIDI/USB port, and no, I'm not talking about recording just MIDI – I'm talking about ending up with the kick audio on one channel, the snare audio on another etc, JUST as you would get from an acoustic kit (or from a very expensive electronic kit!).

Let me explain how.

There is a current trend for electronic kits to have multitrack outputs over USB so you can plug the USB cable into your computer and the kit will appear as (say) 10 different channels – kick on one channel, snare on to another channel etc.

Yes, this is very convenient and very easy but it doesn’t mean that you can’t do that on any other electronic kit ever made, just by spending a little bit more time doing it.

I’m going to assume that you are recording onto a computer.

The most important thing is to get the performance right. If you connect your drum module to your computer via USB, or a USB to MIDI interface, and record your MIDI performance.

Being MIDI it can be tweaked (for tweaked means corrected – dodgy notes can be moved, mistakes can be deleted, a great chorus performance can be copied to all the other choruses etc) very easily.

(However, don't be tempted to just correct everything and make your performance perfect – it will sound boring and stale. You need to leave a bit of humanity in there)

You can listen back to your performance just by playing the MIDI data back down the MIDI/USB cable to the module and listen to what comes out of the module (on headphones or speakers). That will be an exact reproduction of what you played (minus the mistakes!)

Like everything when it comes to recording, the more you do this the quicker and better you become at it.

When you have your drum performance recorded on the computer as MIDI data you need to make sure that your sounds are correct, and it sounds pretty much how you want the final drum tracks to sound – dead kick, ring the snare, bright cymbals etc. However, being MIDI data and the fact that you've recorded it into the computer, you can always go back and replace the sounds later, if you want.

Then you go to the module and you turn down the volume of everything apart from the bass drum.

Then go to the computer and open a new audio track and set it to record from the drum module (either as USB audio, or from the outputs of the module through your audio interface).

Then hit play and your MIDI data will go down the USB cable to the module, and trigger your performance from the module. However, as everything is muted apart from the kick drum, just the kick drum will be will be recorded onto your audio track.

At the end, stop the computer turn down the volume of the bass drum in the module and turn up the volume of the snare drum.

Set a new track to record on the computer and hit play. Now everything is muted apart from the snare drum so this next audio track will record just the snare drum performance.

Let the computer play the whole way through and stop it and then repeat with the hi hat, the toms (either separately or altogether), and then the cymbals (again, either separately or altogether). 

At the end, you should have a load of audio tracks on your computer with the bass drum separately, the snare drum separately, that I had separately, and then whatever combination of drums and symbols you decided to record.And because they were all triggered by the same MIDI information/performance, they will all line up and be in time with each other. However, depending on the speed of your computer or audio interface, you might need to nudge the performance forwards or backwards in time so it lines up perfectly with the recorded track you played to. Just make sure you nudge all the tracks at the same time!

It’s very simple but it does mean that you can get all the tracks separately and the best part of it is that you can go back and you can change the sound of the snare drum or the bass drum for instance and we record it and it will be exactly the same as the performance you recorded before just with the new sound.

I hope that makes sense – it’s so obvious but I think a lot of people have overlooked it because they didn’t think it would be so simple but the truth is, yes you can have separate drum channels from any drum module as long as you are recording onto a computer and the module has a MIDI/USB port.

Simple!

(If you want to be a bit more advance, you can even automate this. On Logic (and most other DAW programs) you can set audio channels to record different takes in a continuous loop and then separate them out afterwards to separate channels. All you have to do is change the mixer settings at the end of each take (turn the kick down and turn the snare up etc), and after the track you are recording to has played through a few times, you'll have all the separate drums on different channels. You can even automate the mixer changes so you don't even have to touch anything while the computer and module are putting all the tracks down)

Simon Edgoose

40 New Macs

Due to lockdown/C19 I have found myself doing more video work and my 2014 Mac Mini wasn't really up to the job of video editing, especially as I want to work in 4k, so I decided to look into replacing it last November. 

24 hours later, Apple announced the new M1 Macs. Bingo! It looked great for video work and that was my biggest concern. I'd keep my current Mac Mini for audio work (as it is great) and everything would be good.

The new Mac turned up a few weeks later (the lead time suddenly went from a few days to a few weeks) and the box was not opened for quite a few more weeks while I finished some stuff and decorated my studio. 

In the last week, I got around to setting it up. 

OK, so its great for video work. Thats a given. And everything runs on it, even though I was told by a few companies that their software wouldn't.

But what makes this really, really special, is how it performs with drum VSTi's/ plugins.

On my old Mac, I would run stand alone VSTi's like Superior Drummer 3, EZdrummer 2 and Addictive Drums 2 at an audio buffer size of 128 samples/ 2.9ms output latency. This was so that the computer would have a chance to catch up and the audio would be clean – if I lowered it anymore then the audio would break up and go crunchy. If I was running lots of other audio, I might have to lower it to 256 samples / 5.8 ms latency. 

I know those are great figures for most people, as I've spoken to many PC owners who get much higher figures than that, and much bigger latencies, but (without wishing to sound like an advert) thats why I use Macs. 

But with this new M1 Mac, I can run Addictive Drums in stand alone mode at the very smallest buffer size of 16 samples. That is 0.4ms output latency. 

Just let that sink in. 

Audio travels at roughly 1 foot (30cm) per thousandth of a second (1 millisecond).

So thats like saying if my computer was the snare drum, my ear would be 12cm away from the drum and it would hear it 0.4 ms after I'd hit it.

Thats faster than if I was sitting behind an acoustic drum kit where my ear would be 2.5 feet (76cm) away from my snare.

That is FAST!

Of course, it doesn't really work like that in the real world – my electronic kit has to output the midi which takes a couple of milliseconds, the midi data has to be processed by the computer and then the program can send out the audio data to the drum module (which is being used as the audio interface as well). That all takes a little bit of time.

BUT...

This is not an expensive computer. The base model can do this. The base model is £660 from Amazon at the moment (although please buy from other places if you can). 

Yes, you need a monitor, and a keyboard, and probably an external hard drive or two to store the massive sound libraries of SD3 or whatever software you use. And to be honest, the base model has a hard drive which is too small to download any decent library onto, but you get the idea.

But to get that sort of performance in October 2020, I'd have to have spent £2400 on a 16” Mac Book Pro.

Now, theres a reason I mentioned Addictive Drums. This is because at the moment, it is the only drum VSTi that allows (in stand alone mode - not running inside a program like Logic, Ableton Cubase etc) you to lower the buffer size to 16 samples. 

Everything else has a lowest buffer setting of 64 samples (SD3, EZ2 etc), but I'm sure that will change before long when the coding gets updated to suit the new Macs.

Apparently (thanks to Anders G!) Addictive Drums in standalone mode is really tightly integrated with the Apple hardware which is why they can get the buffer size so low without problems.

So just how good is that?

A while back I was doing some programming for a band that are rather famous (even all my elderly relatives had heard of them, and some owned records by them – gives you an idea of their age!). For the drums they were using an electronic kit, disguised as an acoustic kit, and we ended up using Superior Drummer 3 running on some MacBooks through a MADI audio system (full redundancy RME Madiface and Ferrofish A32 if you really want to know) for the sounds. We were able to play the kit at 16 samples over 16 individual outputs, and it felt and sounded great.

However, that system cost £2500, plus £1500 for the MacBook at the time. Total £4000ish (it actually cost twice that as we had two of everything, but that's rock and roll budgets for you)

Anyone can now get similar performance and output channels from a Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 (£380ish) and a Mac Mini (£660). Total £1040 plus monitor, keyboard etc so lets say £1500 all in.

Ok, so its not comparing apples with apples – one was for a stadium tour, the other is more suitable for home use – but, you get the idea. 

Thats a 62% price drop over 2 years for similar performance.

Don't you LOVE technology?!

Simon Edgoose

15 What Is MIDI?

There a lot of talk about midi on various forums, but theres also lots of threads which suggest that theres still quite a bit of misunderstanding about what actually is, so I thought I'd have a quick look at it this time.

MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and it was invented (in a cross collaboration by a small group of top synth makers) in the early 1980's. It was designed to allow different musical equipment to talk to other equipment and the basic idea is actually quite simple.

The idea was that if you had two keyboards connected with a midi cable, you could press a note on one keyboard and the same note on the other keyboard would also play. What was the point in that? Well, it meant that for once keyboard players could play chords on an organ AND a piano at the same time without having to grow another set of arms. If you look at picture of keyboards wizard Jean Michel Jarre from the 1980's you'll see he had STACKS of keyboards all around him, with each keyboard just having one sound on it. After the advent of MIDI, Jarre's keyboard setup got MUCH simpler!

So how does MIDI do this? Well, when you press a key on a keyboard, a processor inside sends a small amount of special data down the MIDI cable which (in simple terms) says “This note has been played, this hard. And now its been let go”. Thats it. Thats all there is to it.

And now if you imagine a massive grand piano with 127 notes (a standard grand piano will have 88 keys, so we are talking MASSIVE!), and imagine that the very bottom note is called '1'. The top note is called '127' and every note in between has its own consecutive number. Pressing any key will also play the same note on any other connected MIDI gear.

How hard you press the note is also given a number from 0-127. 0 is obviously the lowest possible level, where as 127 is the loudest the note can be played, so each midi message has the MIDI note (from 0-127) followed by how hard (from 0-127) is had been played.

However, MIDI is a little bit cleverer than that. One MIDI cable can actually send 16 loads of midi data all at the same time. Each 'load' is sent down its own MIDI 'channel' and each channel can go to a different device, meaning that one keyboard could control or play different notes on 16 other keyboards if needed.

So now each midi message has the MIDI note (from 0-127) followed by how hard (from 0-127) it has been played, followed by a MIDI channel (1-16).

Also, all this MIDI 'data' that I'm talking about is incredibly small. As it is just 'on/off' information and which notes are played, on what MIDI channel, it is the smallest burst of digital data you can imagine, which is why it seems to be instantaneous.

But we are drummers, so enough of this talk of keyboards. Lets replace the notes with pads on our electronic kits. You hit the snare pad and the module sends some MIDI data which says “this pad has been hit this hard, please play this MIDI note”. Whatever the electronic kit is connected to with a MIDI lead (a drum machine for instance), receives the information and plays the relevant sound assigned to that MIDI note. Simple.

The MIDI note of a snare pad is usually (but not always) number 38 or D1 which is around the bottom of a standard keyboard. So if you MIDI'd your ekit to a keyboard and hit the snare, the keyboard would play a low D note. Bass drum is usually the C just below the snare drum or MIDI note number 36 and so on. Every rim, bell, bow, bell, foot splash on your kit has its own MIDI note number assigned to it, and this is how your kit tell other devices what to play.

So if you want your electronic kit to play the sounds on some other gear, you need to make sure that the midi note that your kit is sending is the same as what the connected gear is expecting. You also need to make sure that both bits of gear are sending or receiving on the same MIDI channel (and there's 16 of them, remember).

MIDI being digital means that it doesn't make an audio sound like music. You cant record out of the MIDI socket of your kit onto a phone for instance and listen back to it. Its just a string of very fast data messages saying 'play C3, play D2 'etc etc. If you want to listen to your electronic kit, you still have to plug headphones or speakers into your drum module.

As well as the notes generated by hitting pads, ekits also send out MIDI CC data. This CC stands for Control Change or Continuous Controller and, as its name suggests, is continuously changing control data from such things as hi hat pedals. When you press down on the hi hat pedal, MIDI CC4 (for it is controller number 4 which usually is mapped to the hi hat) copies every movement and bounce your foot makes and transmits this to whatever you module is connected to. Because our feet move so much on the hi hat pedal, ekits sometimes generate so much CC data that they can crash computers or just overload devices. When you add to this the fact that positional information (if your kit has it) is also sent via MIDI CC, then you can see why ekits can cause problem with computers and the like.

So, just to reiterate;

MIDI is digital information, you can't 'hear' it.

MIDI just takes one bit of information and moves it somewhere else, usually down a 5 pin MIDI cable or a USB cable.

127 is the magic number – there are 127 midi notes, the volume level of each note is also from 0-127, and each MIDI CC is also from 0-127.

Each part of your electronic kit has its own MIDI note and every time you hit part of it, it sends out MIDI data. If you want your kit to 'talk' to another device (computer, drum machine etc) you just need to make sure that the MIDI notes and MIDI channel correspond.

17 One note or two?

Acoustic instruments are marvellous things – we hit them, stroke them, caress notes out of them, and they never swear at us or refuse to make a noise (of some sort, not necessarily the noise we want though). They continuously react with their surroundings (clap your hands with your foot pressing down on the sustain pedal of an acoustic piano and you'll see what I mean), have an infinite dynamic range and every single note they ever play will be different to the last, and every other note that instrument will EVER play.

Some of these characteristics are desirable in electronic instruments, some are not.

Take the china cymbal you have on your acoustic kit (assuming you have one). It is continuously vibrating because of the air movement and floor vibration in the room. Even though it rings for a few seconds after being hit, from the audience perspective, it just goes “Bang!” or “Gaaaa” or “GSSHHHhhhhhh” depending on the model and weight of it, and to them it seems to die away almost instantly.

Take the lovely china sample you have on your electronic kit. That also goes “Bang!” or “Gaaaa” or “GSSHHHhhhhhh”, and if you are lucky enough to have a module that allows you to have nice long cymbal decays, will ring for quite a long time. But do we want that? Well, lets have a look at what happens when we play the pad.

You hit the pad, the module makes the sound which the audience hear and all is good surely? Well, if the audience hear the first half a second, they wont hear (amongst the barrage of toms, kicks and clarinet samples - ok, maybe not) the long decay as the china sound dies away. That long decay is stealing one note which could be doing something else. 

If you remember the article I wrote on polyphony, you'll remember that all drum modules have a set polyphony which means they can only play back a certain amount of notes at one time – as many as the processor can handle. If you use up all those notes, then the next note to sound will have to steal one from a sound that is already playing (called note stealing).

This isn't a problems as such, but the easier our modules lives are, the better all round.

But theres another thing. If you play your china sample five time in quick succession, all those decaying 'tails' as the china sound dies away are playing in the background, hidden under the last note you played. This is what happens (to a degree) on a real cymbal but the tails all blur into one as the vibrations bounce around the metal. 

There is something we can do about this.

You might have noticed a function inside your module (not all have it but most do) that allows you to switch each sound from 'poly' to 'mono'. Poly is polyphonic (or more than one note at a time) and Mono is monophonic (or one note at a time). Most modules are automatically set to Poly by default, but by carefully choosing Mono for select sounds or pads, you can clean up your stage sound (by not having unnecessary audio tails playing in the background), and lower the demand on your module.

If you imagine hitting your china sample five time in Poly mode, it would look something like this.

If you hit your china five times in Mono mode, it would look like this.

As you can see, in Mono mode, as soon as you hit the second and subsequent hits, the previous on is cut off. While you might hear this in isolation, when the full band is playing, you definitely wont.

You have to be careful selecting which sounds are in mono and which are in poly – choosing the wrong one can make the kit sounds 'jumpy' or 'glitchy'. For more acoustic instrument sounds, leaving the sample in Poly mode will give a more realistic sound, but with more electronic sounds, you can happily drop all manner or drum, cymbal and percussion sounds into Mono mode and it will give you a cleaner sound (as the inaudible tails are not playing) but will also free up notes for the module to use elsewhere. 

So, trust your ears, have a listen, and see if you can clean up your on stage sound, and make your module love you more.

Simon Edgoose

39 Resolutions

As it is the time of year to come up with some New Years resolutions, can I offer some electronic drum related suggestions?

1. I'm going to learn how all my gear actually works – I'm going to look at the manual and actually work through it so I can learn all the stuff that I wasn't aware of. As well as improve my chances of work, it will also mean I can offer opinions based of experience rather than “I read that...”

2. I'm going to actually work out what I want. Do I want an electronic kit which sounds realistic and like an acoustic kit? Do I want something more weird and experimental? Only I know.

3. If I decide I want an acoustic sounding electronic kit, I'm going to actually listen to it and make it be able to replace an acoustic kit in an acoustic recording to the best of my ability. After all, if I cant play my electronic kit with some acoustic guitars without it leaping out of the speakers shouting “I'm an electronic kit!” then its time to look for another electronic kit surely?

4. If anyone criticises any aspect of my drum sound, I am not going to instantly blame the gear, and I'll try and improve my drum sound, assuming the suggestion was warranted in the first place.

5. If I ask for advice online, I'm going to accept that many people who offer gear suggestions are only doing so because they are insecure about their choice of gear and want to justify their choices to themselves...

6. If I offer gear advice online, I'll make sure I'm not doing to just because I feel insecure about the gear I have and want to justify it to myself...

7. I'm going to realise that if I ask 'what kick pedal should I use?' (for instance) 95% of the suggestions are pointless because all they will do is tell me what pedal other people are using, not will actually suite me, feel good to me, or sound good to me

8. I'm going to realise when someone (or a company) is trying to sell me something, rather than genuinely offer advice, help, or pretty pictures

9. I wont believe the first thing I read on line, I will do my own research, and I will form my own opinions

10. I will buy lots of lovely electronic gear in 2021

11. I will continue to read Seriously Wired every month

Happy new Year!

Simon Edgoose

37 The Digital Drummer's Swiss Army Knife

This months article swerves uncomfortably close to a product review... ok, it is a product review. Apologies if that is a problem, but I honestly think that you (as an electronic drummer) should know about this, if you don't already

One of the great disappointments as a budding electronic drummer is finding that not everything is compatible - Roland hi hat pads wont work with Yamaha modules (and vice versa), Roland mesh pads don't work very well with Yamaha modules (the impedance difference and hotter output gives a limited dynamic range and awkward 'hump' in the velocity curve), ride cymbal pads with two cables (Roland) aren't compatible with modules which just need one cable (Yamaha)... etc etc. Obviously I've only mentioned Roland and Yamaha here, but cross compatibility is also an issue with pretty much all brands. 

Obviously there ARE ways around it – plug your 'A' brand pads into an 'A' brand module and then go via MIDI into your 'B' brand module – but you need two modules, which doubles the expense, and its just a bit of a PITA.

But also, what about if brand 'C' module has a rubbish hi hat controller? Great sounds but thats it? Are you stuck? You could do the same as above – use a brand “B' controller into a brand 'B' module, then MIDI into the brand 'C' module, but again, its all a bit of a faff

Enter the Audiofront eDRUMin. 

The eDRUMin 4 (there's two versions – 4 and 10), is a small – 9 x 7 x 3cm - 3D printed plastic box with a load of sockets at either end, made by Robert Jonkman (who is also responsible for DSP Trigger). You plug your pads into it on one end, and on the other, it talks to the outside world via USB, MIDI, a (hi hat) controller input and a power input.

(The eDRUMin 10 is bigger, in an aluminium case, has 10 inputs plus both USB and both MIDI. It behaves in exactly the same way as the '4', just with more trigger ins)

When connected to your computer you can use the software (Mac, PC and iOS) to made the eDRUMin understand what pads are plugged into it, and tweak the trigger response to get the best out of each pad. As long as you leave the unit connected to a computer for more than 5 seconds after you make your last edit, it will remember them, and you can unplug the computer and use the eDRUMin 'standalone'.

The software itself is very flexible, and I was able to get flawless triggering out of all the pads I tried with it, once I understood how the software screen is represented (the Threshold, Scan, Hold and Decay windows are one window showing the natural progression of the trigger signal, not four separate windows as I initially thought). The Decay window is probably more useful than that in 99% of drum modules as it really helps to stop the trigger from retriggering accidentally, and it needs to be set as 'tightly' as possible to allow for rolls etc. One thing I can happily say about the eDRUMin is I NEVER experienced double or false triggering, which cannot be said for many drum modules straight out of the box with non-factory pads. 

Theres a very useful and informative PDF manual accessible directly from the editor, which is a handy touch. There's also presets for a few pads (mainly Roland) but I understand theres lots more presets coming soon.

The inputs are stereo, and work with piezo/piezo pads or piezo/switch (so basically any pad). But each input can be split to act as 2 mono inputs, and the eDRUMin has a further trick up its sleeve – each mono input can use something called EdgeSense to create a separate trigger zone from the edge of a mono pad. Yes, mono pads can generate 2 zone information – head and rim – so mono pads can be technically turned into stereo pads. Firstly, let me say that not all pads are suitable – some are much better than others – but when it works, it works well. I got this working even on the iPad app triggering iMPC Pro, but I did find that certain pads like to be hit in a certain place, at a certain velocity to cleanly trigger the EdgeSense.

So in effect, a simple mono pad set can be made to be much more feature-rich than before. Roland ride cymbal pads, which usually need two cables to speak to a Roland module, can be used with a single cable into the eDRUMin and the EdgeSense will create the third zone. Impressive stuff.

The obvious use for eDRUMin is not having to use a conventional drum module when using a plugin like Superior Drummer 3 , Addictive Drums 2, ezDrummer 2 etc. You can just plug your pads into the eDRUMin and then go via USB into your computer. The computer powers the eDRUMin over USB, so its one nice simple system. Its also capable of being powered by an iPad due to its low current draw, which is very useful

When using it live, you get a harness with a Velcro strap so you can strap the eDRUMin to your hi hat or other stand pipe to keep it neatly close by. When your pad settings are tweaked (and the eDRUMin can store 4 different settings for each pad in 4 different 'banks'), you shouldn't need to touch the eDRUMin – everything will be done at the computer level. 

Its not 100% perfect, but for the price and feature set, I don't think ANYONE would complain. My only issues were I found the MIDI socket to be incredibly tight, I struggled to find a power adaptor that worked (apparently the Boss PSA120S is perfect) and the 3D printed box looks a little basic close up (but no complaints – its incredibly strong, nicely shaped, and it is unlikely your audience will get within 30cm of it anyway!). But all things considered, its a great product. It's so small that you could fit one in a pocket of your stick bag for emergencies. As far as the power supply is concerned, I just used a USB cable and an Apple iPhone plug to power it when it wasn't connected to a computer or iPad, and that works perfectly.

So why I got onto the eDRUMin in the first place was that I have always had a soft spot for the Alesis DM10 module (not the kit, just the module, the kit suffered from sub standard pads for serious use). I've always thought the sounds were great, and as the modules can be picked up for not very much money, I've always had one kicking about – it's paid it's dues many times over. However, the original hi hat was awful, and the trigger settings are basic and not very flexible. The downsides are that the DM10 module has a latency of 14ms which makes it pretty slow (make that very slow).

So, I was curious as to if the eDRUMin could improve the DM10 module. 

And the the answer is a resounding yes! Because I wasn't limited to Alesis pads, I used a selection of hi hat controllers into the eDRUMin and I got REALLY good results. Not only did it suddenly start behaving like a more serious dum module but interestingly, the module latency over MIDI dropped from 14ms to 7ms – a much more respectable timing. Yes, for some odd reason, the Alesis trigger pages add 7ms to the latency, when compared to triggering over MIDI! 

So extending this idea, now you CAN use your Roland hi hat controller on a Yamaha module, your Yamaha 3-zone pads on your Roland module, and any other combination you desire, simply by using an eDRUMin. And it works REALLY WELL!

The eDRUMin cost me $149 (£115 shipped to the UK) and I bought it myself because I was curious as to if it were as good as it looked on paper, it was not a freebie. I'm very pleased I did as it is a real Swiss Army Knife for the electronic drum world. So for the cost of a rubber pad, the eDRUMin lets us add any pads to almost any module (they need to have a MIDI In) or talk to any computer running a plugin.

So, if you need something small to trigger your plugins, something to go 'between brands' successfully, need a back up trigger interface to stick in your stick bag, or just fancy trying trying something different, then this may well be right up your street.

Simon Edgoose

36 Perfection

Recently I had to reprogram a John Bonham 'style' drum track. I wanted to make it so that hearing it instantly conjured up thoughts of John Bonham but without being any one of his particular grooves ie not trying to rip him off totally.

I decided I wanted a groove similar to Fool In The Rain but the drum sound of When The Levee Breaks (nothing like mixing things up!), so it would be a classic Bonham half time shuffle, but with even echo. 

Overall, this was pretty simple to do, but one thing just kept sounding wrong to me. The delays which give the bass drum the distinctive sound on When The Levee Breaks just didn’t sound right. The track used a Binson Echorec which unlike other similar echo machines of the time, used a magnetic piece of wire wrapped around a rotating drum, rather than a tape loop (see last months article). This gave it great stability (it even came with a lifetime guarantee), very even delays, and it sounded great! 

As I was doing it in a DAW (logic in this particular case), I had (lazily) just put a virtual tape delay on sixteenth notes. Technically it was 'right' but the whole thing just sounded too nice and correct. It was just too perfect.

So I went back to listen to the original tracks. Bonham had definitely recorded without a click and the Binson was definitely analogue (not digital perfection), so that the delay tempo didn’t quite perfectly match his playing tempo. It was the discrepancy between the drums tempo and the echo tempo which gave it the distinctive sound and fell. As the delay faded away, you can hear it get more and more out of time

So I went back and started playing with the speed of the delay, and simply turning off the delay quantise, and making it go out of time fractionally by a few tens of milliseconds, made it sound much more authentic.

This got me thinking about all the times when we have all this gear and technology at our disposal and we do things because they are 'correct', but not necessarily 'right'.

In the (analogue) drums world, we love one piece Radio King snares because they have a character and a nice 'musical' ring to them. But the reason they sound that way is that the wood shell is still fighting to get back to its original shape ie a flat board, so Radio King shells are all out of round... but thats one of the reasons why we love them. (I'm not suggesting you do it, but if you were to cut a Radio King shell from top to bottom, and leave it a few days, the gap would open up to a rather impressive amount)

Jean Michel Jarre once famously said that imperfections are what make music interesting and he's absolutely right. 

We've got used to mixing with our eyes, rather than our ears (“does the snare line up with the kick?”). We automatically put everything 'on the grid'. But thats not necessarily a good or music thing.

So how about when we next mix our drums we use our ears rather than look at the monitor? How about we set delays by ear rather than just click on the '16th note' button.

As a final example, I needed to make an electronic kit sound as 'acoustic' as possible (shouldn't it be like that all the time?). The final kit was made up from a 10” maple, jazz (high) tuned tom, a 12” birch 'rock' tuned tom, and a 16” hybrid shell floor tom tuned slack, with a tuned down open bass drum and a metal snare. Individually the drums didn't match at all – it sounds really 'mix and match' – but when played as a kit, it sounded great. You couldn't get more imperfect as a kit, but maybe, just like negatives cancel each other out, audio imperfections do too!

Simon Edgoose

35 Loops

We are all so used to using loops now in music that we don't really think about where they actually come from. By that, I don't mean who records them and stuff like that (generally musicians like you and me), more like why we have got used to using short repeating sections of music to make other music from.

You only have to open up Logic, or Ableton, or GarageBand and you are faced with thousands, upon thousands of different audio loops covering different genres, different tempos and different feels.

But how did this come about?

Forgetting all the classical musicians who messed about with tape recorders in the 1940s, this way of working using taped sections of music on repeat probably first appeared in the Jamaican dub scene of the 1960s. Dub features, pretty heavily, slap-back echos, which were done back then on tape echo machines. These had a loop of magnetic tape inside, and the speed at which they travelled could be adjusted by changing the motor speed. The signal (a sounds, hit, etc) would be recorded onto the loop, and allowed to travel around its wheels and capstans until it reached the playback head, whereupon it would be heard again, at a fixed time after the original. This gave the classic slap-back (or fast single repeat) effect.

https://youtu.be/JZ-yp2cCGbQ?t=274

Usually, at that point, the tape would pass over an erase head, which wiped the magnetic information so it was clean for the next sound to be recorded onto it. However, if this erase head was turned off, the tape would go around again and anything which subsequently was played into the tape loop would be recorded on top of it, and both signals would be heard next time the tape went over the playback head. Cue instant Dub.

This 'sound on sound' method gave us a totally new way to build music, as well as also being the name of the long running popular recording magazine in the UK.

But going back to the method, by changing the loop length and the tape speed, different loops could be created and played back, leading to many thousands of classic dub tracks, and all this was happening some 60 years ago.

Of course, many others at the time, including the Beatles and Frank Zappa, were using tape to come up with weird and wonderful tracks (check out The Beatles - Revolver, 'Tomorrow Never Knows'), but this was more reversed tapes, or loops of Paul laughing, rather than drum grooves. 

Pre digital, everything was recorded to magnetic tape. The audio that was being recorded was converted into an electronic signal and the electronic signal caused to magnets to move the position of magnetic particles on the tape. When the tape was passed over a playback head, the music that was originally recorded would be heard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXNoUHdFyrQ

The only problem with this was that the tape was very fragile, would stretch easily, and could be destroyed in a fraction of a second if one of the wheels or 'capstans' in the tape machine got anything remotely sticky on it (no sneezing near the tape machine!). It also degraded so quickly, simply by playing on the very machines it was designed to be played on, that it is said that every seven plays lost half the audio quality. You can hear this degradation on early tape delays, where each repetition would lose its high end and become more muffled.

The positive side of tape, was that it was cheap, easy-to-use, and could easily be cut with a razor blade and different sections could be stuck back together in a different order – early editing.

When the disco hit popular music in the 1970s, the demand on drummers became totally different from the rock scene that preceded it. Before, drummers could play as they liked, the crazier the fill the better, keeping tempo wasn't so important. To be honest, things were pretty relaxed.

Now drummers had to play with a certain intensity (no relaxed, laid back disco grooves here!) and drum fills were something that happened once or twice in a whole song, not every 8 bars, as before.

Drummers that could play the same groove round and round for five minutes at a time were very much in demand (12” extended mixes were very popular). While playing for this long might sound like a relatively easy thing to do, it is actually incredibly hard to play for five minutes, non-stop, with the same intensity, integrity, and intention, without changing the groove, doing a fill, or hitting a cymbal. Try it.

Larger tape machines were available, so the drum groove would be recorded first. Then everything else would be layered on top to make the final track, and we still record this way today usually.

As the amount of drummers who could do this successfully was small, studios had to look for other ways to achieve it. 

Engineers would find 2 or 4 bar sections of drums (with or without bass, percussion etc) and chop (or 'splice', hence the name Splice.com of the loop website) them out, and connect the ends with special adhesive tape so they made a loop of tape. When played these 'loops' would have an endless drum groove, with no deviation – perfect for building your disco classic on.

This became the new 'norm' and wasn't just in disco. Check out The Sweet – Air On 'A' Tape Loop, which has what sounds like two tape loops – a guitar phrase that starts the piece, and another which is the one bar bass and drum tape loop running through the rest of the track.

https://youtu.be/a0c94S_hPHE

Of course, all this was just a moment in time.

Despite drum machines having been around since the 13th century (check out references to Al-Jazari's programmable automaton drum players from 1206 in Turkey), it was the Linn LM1 drum machine from 1980 with its digitally sampled sounds which put an end to the tape loop for music production.

But that is another story...

Simon Edgoose

34 Zoom Update

It's always nice when companies listen to criticism.

You may remember a few months back when we went into our first lockdown that I did a roundup of what was available to us drummers who wanted to either teach online or be taught online.

At the time, I said that Zoom was the 'new boy on the block' but didn't have the best audio quality, due to some serious audio compression (both data and level) which we weren't able to turn down or off.

Well, it appears that Zoom were listening (or, of course , it could be completely coincidental) and we now have the option to seriously improve Zoom as an audio carrier. The change actually happened a good few weeks ago, but as I had been seriously unimpressed with Zoom at the time of testing, I hadn't reexamined it – my bad. They did it, I missed it, but it is good, and I've used it very successfully for some live streaming events over the past few weeks. Of course, you may well already know about this, but I'm guessing there are many others who don't know.

So now, when we use Zoom, before we make a call, or instigate a lesson, we need to click on the cog wheel/gear symbol in the top right hand corner of the Zoom screen.

Then we need to click on the Audio tab and then click on Advanced at the bottom right of the screen.

Then we need to click the box next to “Show in-meeting option to “Enable Original Sound” from Microphone”.

This allows up to turn off the compression so we get a more accurate reinterpretation of the audio signal coming into Zoom. If the instigator of the call ticks the 'Enable Original Sound” box hen all other people on the call also get the chance to tick the box, which improves the sound from and to them too.

Of course, you'll still need to disable the “Suppress Persistent Background Noise” and “Suppress Intermittent Background Noise” options, and turn the “Echo Cancellation” to Auto, but overall it now works really well, so well done to Zoom, for helping us online teachers.

If you are lucky enough to use an EAD-10 to do your teaching with, then Zoom now becomes a good option to use, but also there is another bonus.

If you switch on “Enable Original Sound” on your desktop version of Zoom, then you also get the option to use it on the iOS version of Zoom, which means you can now just plug in your EAD-10 into your iPad and teach from that with full access to better sound. I haven't used it yet, and I haven't tested it to see if it works on Android (as I don't have any Android gear I'm afraid), but its definitely a step in the right direction.

33 Storage

If there's one thing I like about having access to thousands and thousands of really, really good drum sounds is the fact that if I feel like track needs the sound of a 1974 Ludwig Black Beauty with wooden hoops, I've probably got some samples of a drum like that somewhere.

But it's not just the drums.

I have a friend who is a samplist - he makes samples for a living the various different companies in various different magazines. He has a very simple philosophy when it comes to putting sounds together. I'm always amazed by how little he uses EQ when to me it's an absolutely essential part of sound making.

However, Oli (let's call him this, for the simple fact that it is his name) will rarely touch EQ, and if he does it is only very, very minimal.

The reason is that he has so many, for example, tambourine sounds, that if one doesn't fit with the track, or drum loop he is working on, he'll go through seemingly limitless amounts of tambourine sounds until he finds one which is just right and needs absolutely no tweaking. 

In essence, if you know your sound library, then you'll know where to find the exact sound that you're after.

The downside of this is that all these thousands of very similar sounds take up vast amounts of disk space.

Four example, if you were to download the full install of Toontracks amazing Superior Drummer 3 (SD3), you would need in excess of 230 GB of empty disk space. That's a lot of space in anyone's book, and that is just one program, without even getting into any expansion packs.

So if your average laptop comes with a terabyte of storage, you could easily use 25% of it (roughly) on just one Superior Drummer 3 install.

But does it have to be like this?

It's never made sense to me to fill up my main hard drive with samples and it's fairly common practice to have an external drive with all your sample library on, connected via USB3 or Thunderbolt.

But then your precious library is only one thin cable away from stopping at the worst possible moment. No thanks.

So what else can you do?

If you look on the side of many laptops, and desktops that matter, you'll see an SD card slot. Now if you stick a normal SD card into it, some of that will poke out which is just asking for trouble, so I wouldn't recommend you go down that route. 

However, there are MicroSD cards available which have massive amounts of storage and are half the size of a conventional SD card - I'm currently looking at a 512 GB (half a terabyte!) microSD card on Amazon. 

You can also buy small adapters which allow you to insert a microSD card inside and flush of the SD card slot on your computer so it won't get knocked, and it needs a concerted effort to remove.

So this is what I would recommend if you're looking for somewhere to store all your sounds. Back them up somewhere else of course, but a microSD card is perfect for large amounts of storage.

But, you may say, a microSD card is never going to be fast enough.

If you get a good quality microSD card they can transfer pretty large amounts of data in a very small amount of time (they were originally designed for professional photographers who also get through vast amount of storage in a short time like us). Seeing as most heavy duty sample libraries play sounds back from RAM, or play the start of the sounds from RAM and then stream the rest from storage, they are easily capable of keeping up.

I probably wouldn't use a microSD card for playing back loads of very long multitracks all at the same time, but for us drummers with our thousands of short samples, it's perfect.

But what if your laptop doesn't have an SD card slot (as many of the newer Macs dont)? Well, you can still utilise the MicroSD card, but you can also buy very small USB adapters which will do the same job, but just stick out a little (be careful!) and they can be had for pennies (literally). If your laptop has USB3 then it will run only slightly slower (20% approximately) than a SATA SSD drive installed inside your machine. Not bad for a small piece of disposable plastic (not that ANY plastic is disposable, but you get what I mean)!

Simon Edgoose