Reason 5 for drum programming?

[theory of Forms]

Anyone else use Reason for drum programming? I've been using it for drums and synthesizers for a while.

 

[themike]

Depends what kind of drums your hoping to achieve? Id say its fine for electronic drums and VERY simplistic acoustic beats depending on your samples, but for any sort of realistic drums above a standard 4/4 rock beat it is vastly outdated.

 

[WarriorOfMetal]

I've been doing all my drum programming in Reason 3.0 for a number of years. Rather than using the ReDrum device, I built a multisampled, velocity-layered drum kit that matches up with the General MIDI drum map, in the NN-XT sampler....I did this in large part because my old computer wasn't capable of running SD2.0 or anything like that, but it can run this kit with relative little difficulty. I even have it set up so that I can record each part of the drum kit separately via Rewire, by using separate outputs on the NN-XT.

 

[Napalm]

Hey man I'm very interested in the technique you use for the Reason 3 drums. There any way you could help me set up a template to try out? If not thats totally cool I just thought id ask.

 

[WarriorOfMetal]

No specific template, without just sending you the kit that I spent hours and hours building. Basically, look up the General MIDI drum map, load your samples into the NN-XT, and then assign them to the appropriate notes. You can adjust what velocity ranges will trigger a given sample, so if you have hits of different intensities, you can set that up. If you have more than one sample of similar intensity, you can set it up so that it won't use the same one twice in a row. You can also set it up for each part of the kit to have its own output. It's all pretty easy to figure out if you spend some time with it.

 

[somniumaeternum]

I've been using Reason for a while now. I actually typically like the drum sounds much more than the canned DFH samples (although the cymbals are crap compared to that). I've been using the Drums Refill and it's pretty awesome.

I'm still trying to come up with a workflow that I like completely regarding what app to use for what. I've played with different routings in Reaper to use a mix of Reason and DFH as well as doing some simple sample triggering with Reaper. I did just get a hold of Battery 3 so I'll be trying that out.

Really though, I'm guessing the best sounding stuff (other than live obviously) will be something that offers you multiple mic placements, bleed controls and so forth and just trigger your own samples on top of that to fine tune it based on velocity.

I'd be interested in working together to come up with a workflow or full solution for making reason sound the best possible. Let me know if anyone is interested! And we can share any tips and tricks here maybe.