Philoking.comfrom Jason Burns’ perspective…

So I am working on some music for Dawngrrl’s video project and here is my first clip. It’s supposed to be dark and industrial, kind of a movie intro/outro credits thing. Think intro to Seven or House on Haunted Hill. All Logic Studio.

Philocast HD: Yamaha 01x Review from Jason Burns on Vimeo.

I hope you enjoy my first episode done as a joint effort. I obviously hosted and Dawngrrl did the heavy lifting in Final Cut.

In the world of MIDI drums, there are a whole lot of options. The unfortunate fact is that many of them totally suck. The other sad truth is that the ones that don’t, usually cost upwards of $500 and aren’t exactly intuitive.

I have been working on some new music in Logic and needed some really good drum sounds. The included UltraBeat plugin is admirable for techno stuff, but if your love is rock and roll, and you want drum sounds that will kick holes in people when the bass drums fire, you are going to be sorely disappointed by pretty much any “default” drumkit for any software you buy.

I had done some research and checked out BFD/BFD2 and various other plugins, all with exceptional sounds, but less than practical price points for your average hobbyist musician, aka me.

I came across EzDrummer ($150) watching some videos on youtube and was blown away at what people were doing, that and the fact that it seemed tailor made for simple beat creation and rock oriented sounds. When the UPS guy showed up yesterday with the DFH Expansion for EzDrummer, my drum sounds went into the stratosphere. DFH stands for Drumkit From Hell.

When you look at the plugin interface, it really is a drumkit from hell. Beyond the kit you see here, you get various options for each drum and cymbal, and then the ability to mix and adjust the sounds at will. Compliment that with true multichannel output and you can mix this monster just like you had the real audio tracks laid down for kick, snare top, snare bottom, hi-hat, toms, overheads, room mics, etc. Talk about real flexibility, you can also control how much mics bleed into each other.

Each drum has a selection of different drums if you want to customize the kit with different sounds. Once you get it into Logic, or your favorite application (it supports RTAS, Audio Unit and VST) you can EQ, compress and tweak the sounds 1,000 ways from Sunday, and that’s a LOT of ways.

Now the default kit is very nice, but with the DFH expansion (I think I paid $72) you get:

Kickdrums:
• Sonor Designer Series 18×22" - damped and undamped neutral EQ, extreme eq,
• Ludwig Wood Fiber Glass 24"
Snaredrums:
• Ayotte 4×14" Maple Shell
• Ludwig 8×14"
• Pearl Sensitone 6,5×14" Bronze Shell
• Sonor Designer Series 6,5×14 Maple Light Shell
• Sonor Designer Series 5×14" Maple Light Shell
• Sonor Hilite 5×12" Maple Shell
• Tomas Haake Engineering 7×14" Pockenholz Shell
Toms:
• Sonor Designer Series 10×10", 12×12", 13×13", 16×16" and 18×18"
Hats:
• 14" Sabian HH Rock HiHat
Cymbal 1:
• 19" Sabian AAXtreme Chinese
• 21" Sabian AAXtreme Chinese
• 21" Sabian AAXtreme Chinese
Cymbal 2:
• 16" Sabian HH Medium Crash
• 17" Sabian HH Medium Thin Crash
• 19" Sabian HH Crash Ride
Cymbal 3:
• 10" Sabian HH Splash
Cymbal 4:
• 20" Sabian HH Crash Ride
• 21" Sabian HH Crash Ride
Cymbal 5:
• 18" Sabian HH Chinese/15" Sabian HH Medium Crash
• 15" Sabian AAXtreme Chinese/12" Sabian HH Splash
• 15" Sabian AAXtreme Chinese
Cymbal 6:
• 8" Sabian HH Splash
Cymbal 7:
• 22" Sabian HH Power Bell Ride
• 22" Sabian HH Crash Ride
Cymbal 8:
• 12" Sabian HH Splash
Cymbal 9:
• 20" Sabian HH Dark Chinese (Brilliant)
• 20" Sabian HH Dark Chinese
Cymbal 10:
• 21" Sabian HH Medium Crash
• 22" Sabian HH Crash Ride
Cymbal 11:
• 22" Sabian Ed Thigpen Crystal Bell Ride
• 23" Sabian HH Crash Ride

Throw in the included default kit and cocktail kit, and that’s a whole lot of drums for $225. The real cool part is that with between EzDrummer and DFH, I have over 16,000 extremely high quality midi loops made by real drummers to build my beats with. I can use the loop browser to find the beats I want, then just drag them into the sequencer, copy, paste and organize them to my hearts content. Throw in fills, edit midi to throw in some cymbal hits here and there, and you have some unbelievable drum tracks in no time.

If you are working on your own stuff, and don’t have a drummer, mics, nice room and very agreeable neighbors, you can’t go wrong with this product.

Of course you need to hear it for yourself, so go to ToonTrack’s site and listen to the sample MP3s.

Wow, that’s a heck of a topic for me, the biggest geek, biggest gadget head and most electronically obsessed person I know. I have a point with this though. Those of you who are into music are surely aware that the once lofty recording studio is going down to the power of digital audio workstations and the power of recording software. ProTools dominates the studios and anyone not hip to the DAW is considered a dinosaur.

I have been kicking with ProTools and more recently Apple’s Logic for probably 7 years or so now. I started with a DIGI001 on a G4 Mac and have never looked back to tape. Honestly I have never owned a tape recorder because when I was biggest into recording when I was younger I couldn’t afford one. My first recording system was a sound blaster sound card recording into an old program called SAW.

These days I am as digital as ever and I still haven’t gotten the sound I want. I had been toying around with this idea for awhile, maybe my beloved Ibanez just didn’t have the ass end I wanted and no matter how powerful Logic got, I just couldn’t add it in digitally. So I decided at the music store that I would do the unthinkable, I would consider the purchase of a Les Paul, not a real $3,000 Gibson Les Paul, but a more economical Epiphone Les Paul of the sub $800 variety. I played a few, decided they didn’t play like the planks of wood I always thought they were, and I brought home a beautiful honey burst Les Paul Standard that is just plain beautiful.

Tonight I started laying down some tracks and I have to say, this beauty was the difference. The meaty heavy hooks I have been trying to capture that weren’t translating to the recorded medium are now there, they are fat and they were mean.

The point to the story is that you, as well as I, many times make decisions to make shortcuts in some places to try and fix it later digitally (I find this to be especially true with digital photography) and sometimes the right guitar, the right lens or getting a real flash instead of the cheap copy makes all the difference in the world.