Freesound Forums

Hey guys,

I'm a guitarrist and I'd like to start adding drums to my songs. I know how to use a DAW, but only with guitar parts.
I was told this was a good place to learn how to insert drums in our songs.
Could you guys help me? I've hear about drumm mapping and stuff, but I don't know shit!

Thanks

Hello!

Two things you can do from a DAW to drive drums:
- load a drum machine plugin in a supported format (generally VST for Windows or AU for Mac)
- use a standalone drum machine, and drive it from the DAW via midi

Take a look at this: http://www.hydrogen-music.org/
It's Hydrogen, a standalone drum machine, available for Linux, Mac and Windows.
In the screenshots page take a look at the first one: behind the mixer window you see the main one; at its center you see the content of a 4-beat pattern. Each black dot means playing the instrument on that row at the moment indicated by the column. You can define as many patterns as you want and arrange them at will to compose your song (the flow of patterns for that song is shown above the pattern editor).

In the Documentation section you can find tutorials and videos to help you get a better idea.

Many plugins are simpler than this, but the concepts are more or less the same.
A good resource for plugins is the KVR Audio Product Database

Tell us more about your computer, OS and DAW and we can help narrowing your path on the way to drums

I don't really understand this Hydrogen concept.. Aren't there other VST that also can be used as drums?

As said, take a look here
http://www.kvraudio.com/get.php
and issue a search as you like;
this one for instance is limited to free VST for windows 32bit, related to "drums"
http://www.kvraudio.com/q.php?search=1&q;=drum&os;[]=win32&f1;[]=vst≺[]=f

For each plugin you can usually read a brief description and also get a link to its homepage where you might find more detailed documentation.

As for the pattern composition for drum machines, it should look very similar to guitar tablature, with drum elements instead of strings, and dots instead of numbers as the finger info is irrelevant.

Even if you decided to use the DAW internal MIDI tracks to drive a drum machine, the MIDI editor in your DAW would probably look like this horizontal piano roll, just (usually) for the whole song instead of patterns.