Advice on best method (clean,acoustic samples of drums..)

Help me out:
my goals are
1 get some velocity changes happening to make my beats sound more real.
2 have all of my sound be more REAL sounding. Big, Clean natural sounding samples.
Whats best and easiest way to do this? Use midi and record note on's in the MPC1000 and trigger an outboard sound module?
Or, sample via the digital ins and record takes into the MPC100 and then work on Velocity swtitching? (btwI use the JJ OS that was free..3.16 I think).

Any advice helpful.
GtrGeorge


ok I admit it..I play alot of rock and pop stuff.

take full level off, turn TC off, chop drum loops and play'em back in different order, keep the "air" in the drum samples... reverb, compressor, find a nice tape plugin to "glue" them together, LPF. decay... just some suggestions

GtrGeorge! wrote:Any advice helpful.

Bounce over to MPC-Samples and grab yourself a multi sampled drum kit or two. The 'Dirty Drummer Kit' and '60s Funk Kit' spring to mind as being exactly what you want.

Deconstruct them and they should answer every question you need to know about piecing together realistic drum programs.


http://www.mpc-samples.com/section.php/ ... -releases/

GtrGeorge! wrote:2 have all of my sound be more REAL sounding. Big, Clean natural sounding samples.
...
ok I admit it..I play alot of rock and pop stuff.

Might want to go with some clean studio recorded drum samples, maybe something with velocity layered sets.

If you want a sound module, rather than using samples, maybe a Roland V-Drum brain.

Thank you for the quick replies

Yes I will download those kits and see what I can learn from that..
and yeah...I am looking into a Alesis D4 drum Module. I saw one cheap ($65) and it could really help...I dont have enough memory (maxed out to 128MB RAM) for all that I use live so to off load the drums..might really be a wise way to go (to just use the MPC100) for its sequencer..but get the sounds from the D4). For 65 it might be the best way to go for CLEAN and realish sounds..
Its an acoustic/rock pop band so it might just work.
STILL..any advice appreciatted...
is the D4 a joke?
GtrGeorge

to forknspoon,,,,
It's for a live band so its hard to do the whole "process everything thru a VST DAW"..unless I do awhole lotta pre-preduction work ...and Im already got my hands full with other stuff) ..I have found so far that the more I process a sound (like a Radio King snare) the worse it sounds..just gets smaller, and has less punch. I am a deft user of compression (waves,VCA, 1176 etc but still..I have come to belive that for my gigs less processing tends to work better. Maybe its because Its an acoustic gig (ac guitar and bass and clean guitar against drum samples and bass parts prerecorded etc)
but cool ideas for STUDIO work.
GtrGeorge

Coz,
I checked out your idea a lil more: The funky kit is closest but at $25 just to start to learn velocity switching I prefer to see if I can figure this feature out without spending the money (times are tight!). But your suggestion is my fall back plan. And I thank you for it..if I had more money Id download 20!!!!
GtrGeorge

if you are just needing a backing track, maybe look into some rock midi loops, and edit (or not) those within the mpc, or even within your DAW before you drop them into the mpc, then find a nice acoustic drum kit sample and adjust the velocities and stuff if you need to, and you can just load up each song project by project and have the midi notes corresponding to the pads.

if you look around online you will be able to find quite a few free drum kits. type in free demo kits in google, or free acoustic drum samples.

Well, the loops idea won't work for me because it sounds very repetitive after a short period of time. In a live pop /rock gig that lasts 4 hours it just sounds canned to me.
I hooked up a Proteus 2000 for drums (slaved to the MPC1000) and it sound pretty usable for an old machine!! But sadly the note numbers of that box doesn't allow me to change the note numbers of anything..and the sequences I worked out don't correspond to its drum kits.
To use the Proteus 2000 would require me to redo thousands of hours of work.
It sucks that it sound pretty good.
In the end, Even if it did correspond better to the Akai MPC1000 note-numbers..it would only help me with one of my goals. (Fresh,velocity sensitive drums)..I would still have a severe memory shortage in the MPC1000...so bad that I cant do an entire gig with it.
Any suggestions??
I am starting to to think I have to leave MPC world and get a PC for live use...although I love the vibe of rhythyms I create on the MPC. Hence I asked elsewhere on this forum if there is a DAW that works well with the MPC100 as its input device.
Any thoughts/suggestions welcome.
GtrGeorge

forgive me if you do, but i dont know if your understanding fully what im trying to get across. ill try to explain it better here.
with midi loops, as opposed to audio loops, you can make slight changes, ect and they will correspond to whatever note the samples are assigned to. so if you find a good midi groove, you wont have to create one from scratch, this can save you lots of time.

for example you can load a verse, chorus, bridge, ect ect according to each song, and have it in one sequence. by just dragging and dropping them (thats the beauty of using midi) into your mpc. now they will play whats on the pads when you push play, and when your song is done, its on to the next sequence.
i think youll be able to load a bunch of these in a program because they are so small (kb in size usually) and i think you could probably even go up to the mpc's maximum sequence limit when working this way.

so a little pre preperation could set you up for a lot of songs. and if you wanted to switch kits ever, just assign the notes to different banks, so essentially you could have 4 kits on banks a,b,c,d and have midi notes corresponding to each of these to switch your drums so your songs dont get to stagnant.

it would take some work, but imo, this might be the easiest thing to do, becuase if you have to play 4 hours of music, you wont have to create all of those sequences yourself if you find the right gm midi files right off the bat.
and if you dont find the perfect ones, you may find that you can edit a few things here and there instead of creating new ones from scratch.

hope that helps.

GtrGeorge! wrote:I hooked up a Proteus 2000 for drums (slaved to the MPC1000) and it sound pretty usable for an old machine!! But sadly the note numbers of that box doesn't allow me to change the note numbers of anything..and the sequences I worked out don't correspond to its drum kits.

I think that you might be able to, with some stuffing around with layers and linked programs...

http://www.emusician.com/news/0766/proteus-power/143890

GtrGeorge! wrote:I would still have a severe memory shortage in the MPC1000...so bad that I cant do an entire gig with it.
Any suggestions??

What is taking up most of the space in the MPC, what sort of samples?

Can you offload that to something else?

How much more than the 128MB of the MPC do you need in total?