I Might As Well Face It, I'm Addicted to Drums

Hi There,

Today I began my foray into adding the drum tracks for my piece, "Midnight on The Water". Now, I was planning on using a very minimalist approach and going analog with a small kit, but today in a search for how to loop audio in Reaper, my DAW of choice, I came across a program called, "Addictive Drums". This is simply a drum machine VST instrument like "Groove Agent" or what I see most often these days is "EZ drummer". So I gave this one a shot and to me it turned out pretty great.

My biggest difficulties came from not being a drummer. I really have no clue what to do when it comes to arranging drum music. Thankfully there is about a million beats and fills that you can drag and drop into your track as a MIDI file. That being said, I find out of the box never really quite works for me. The biggest example I found was getting a beat to match the second part of my piece. I ended up pulling a Jazz beat from the menu. Given that this part of the piece was pretty ambient I ended up removing much what was being played to suit the song. The little ride cymbal mostly.

For all you drummers out there. Please try not to hunt me down for such an immoral crime. But please remember, while would love to have a sweet set of AKG drum mics and an 8 mic preamp interface... I don't. So in the meantime, I was incredibly pleased how Addictive drums doesn't sound like a drum machine, granted that I am a pretty amateur user. Who knows, maybe someday I will be the next great YouTube keyboard drummer!

As Always, feel free to stop by my MySpace page to check out the newest version of the peice.

Jamie