Programming Midi Snare Rolls

[brandondrury]

Does anyone else have problems with snare rolls when programming drums?

If I wasn't low on cash, I'd buy a midi / electronic drum kit in a second.

I guess I could experiment with doing snare rolls on the midi controller and see what happens.

Brandon

[richiebee]

Why do you think a MIDI drum kit would help? Those that I've heard have been as bad (sometimes worse) than those you try to create in your sequencer.

It's a difficult thing to emulate with the interaction of the actual snare and each hit on a realy snare drum. Best thing is probably a sampled roll. Second to that, use a kit with at least two snare sounds (left/right hand) and preferably with a round robin feature in Kontakt.

[brandondrury]

Why do you think a MIDI drum kit would help?

The (possibly flawed) logic is that there is some sort of combination between velocity and timing that would make doing the real thing sound "real".

Even with using drastically different velocities using DFH Superior, (which allows for left hand and right hand hits) they always end up sounding too much like New Order drums on the projects I've done lately.

I would assume that DFH has their shit together on this one or guys like Dach, who are much pickier about this stuff than I, wouldn't be so happy with it.

I'll just keep dicking with it. I'm going to try using the midi controller and see if I can get something reasonablely close to what I'm looking for and then reverse-engineer what I did so I can just program it later.

Brandon

[richiebee]

What about pitch?

The actual snare sound is fairly key here - one with a really short release isn't going to cut it. There is no "snare"!
Kontakt has a Humanize script that will help.
I'm not a drummer, but I'm thinking that all snare rolls are essentially the same speed (give or take a couple of BPM's!) regardless of song tempo. I find 1/32nd triplet notes at 120BPM to be fairly accurate to my ears.

I don't really know what kind of quality you're looking for. I think I'd be fairly happy to use these in my mix... depending on the suitability with the rest of material of course!

www.richiebee.ca/snare.mp3
www.richiebee.ca/snarewithreverb.mp3