The natural rhythm and timing of a great drummer is a great thing to have in the musical parts – basslines, chords, melodies, etc – of your own songs, right?
Here’s a technique that will let you take these grooves and quickly apply them to the sounds in your song.
The steps:
- Import a drum loop (audio file)
- Mark the transients correctly, holding shift while you move them.
- Right-click the loop and select Convert Drums to MIDI
- Copy the resulting MIDI clip onto other MIDI tracks and assign those tracks an instrument each – one for bass, one for chords, etc. In this example the chords track is using the Quick Chord Planing technique covered in this short video here
- Open each MIDI clip and deactivate some of the notes, for example all the kicks and snares but leaving the hats pattern active. To deactivate notes, select them and hit the zero key on your keyboard.
- Move the notes up and down using the arrow keys on your keyboard. In this example they are all kept “in key” by moving them to black notes only.
To learn more…
We offer a focus course on Music Theory for Electronic Music at our Sydney school.
Here’s an in-depth tutorial on tuning your drums to your song by Liveschool trainer Yama Indra.
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