Drawing in or Tapping out Drum Samples? | Lifestyle

by JohnGellei

Getting drum samples out of your head and into your sequencer can be a daunting task to noobs and the pros as well. There are actually many methods that are promoted on forums and other online spots, but two have come out on top in most debates over and over: tapping them in via dedicated MIDI controllers or using software to draw them in using a visual 'piano roll' editor.

Drawing in drum samples into a piano roll editor is very easy on the eyes and the muscles as well. No physical input or effort is required, and you can even do it while slouching in your chair! It's also very fast to put out, because one can simply click and draw. Getting sounds from your head to the screen and out of the speakers has never really been easier than this, and that's why it's so popular!

Tapping out drum samples requires some MIDI hardware and a good sense of rhythm in most cases. These days, many programs actually supporting mapping the keys of a regular computer keyboard to musical notes in your sequencer program, establishing, for instance, the letter B on the keyboard to the note D3 in the piano roll, which could be assigned to a snare sample.

One of the advantages here is that you don't need to constantly look at the screen to see where drums go - you can hear it all. In fact, if you're using a pad controller, most of them now have start/stop/pause message buttons on the actual device, and even undo buttons, so you can take a break from the screen for the entire duration of a drum samples loop recording.

Each has their disadvantages as well. With tapping in drum samples, you need to be careful and pay attention to the velocity. Unless you want a very stale drum track, you should vary the velocity of the different drum samples and also the panning sometimes as well. It's sometimes very hard to create a natural-sounding pattern by simply clicking in. One major drawback is that clicking can sometimes result in auto-quantization, where all the notes 'snap' to a grid structure, which sounds even more robotic.

When playing on drum samples pads, it can be a bit hard to keep overall rhythm to start off with. Also, unless you have very nimble and athletic fingers that are flexible and super fast, you won't be able to generate a lot of intricate patterns. At least not in one go of recording, but most even fail at stacking their patterns properly due to a lack of precise rhythm. What a lot of producers do is build the base track by tapping in the main drum samples - the outline. Once the outline is completed, drawing in the other samples using an on-screen editor seems a good idea.

DISCLAIMER: This article is provided as information only and is not to be taken as financial advice.

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