[Cubase] Making fills fit and work with in a song??

[regotheamigo]

Hey guys I have EZ Drummer, and just bought Drum kit from Hell and love it!! They’ve made my songs sound so much better and dynamic because of it. The only thing that I’m having problems with is making fills work within my songs? 9 out of 10 times when I want to use one for transitioning between a verse or a chorus they are either too long or to short. It would be great if they had grooves that had fills at either the beginning or end of each section so I could just paste that into the part of the song, but as far as I know I haven’t heard any? Also if I DO find one that works, they are too over the top, and sound like Keith Moon on speed 🙂 So anyway my question is how do you make a fill work so it fits the song? I use Cubase SX3. Thanks for all the help.

Reagan

Topic

[Scott]

It depends on the length of your verse. If, for example, your verse is 8 bars long and you want a fill going into chorus, you would need to decide how long of a fill you’d like (1/4 bar, 1/2 bar, full bar, belly up to the bar…)

So, let’s say that you’ve already dragged and dropped 8 bars of verse onto your Cubase MIDI track. Now you decide on a nice and short 1/4 bar (2 beats in a 4/4 time signature) that you want to fill at the end of the verse going into the chorus.

First, make sure you’ve enabled ‘Snap’ (Cubase SX3 manual page 147) and make sure you’ve in ‘Grid Mode’ and set your ‘Grid’ to ‘Beat’.

Next, you would look at the last bar of your 8 bar verse and grab the end of the verse MIDI file (lower right hand corner of the groove) and drag it to the left by 2 beats…basically making a ‘hole’ for your fill to fit in. Next, audition a 2 beat fill in the EZdrummer browser and when you’ve found one that floats your boat, drag in onto the space that you’ve just created on your MIDI track. It should snap right into place. Now continue building your chorus.

It is always nice to add a crash on the downbeat of the chorus coming out of the fill you made. You can do this by double clicking on the first bar on your chorus MIDI file and this will open the file in the Drum Editor (provided that you have loaded a Drum Map for the EZD library you’re using and you’ve gone to the ‘Preference Menu’ and selected ‘Edit as Drums when Drum Map is assigned’ from the ‘Event Display–MIDI page’ menu). Then, using the ‘drumstick’ tool you can draw in a cymbal crash on beat 1 of the groove. For added realism, make sure that you don’t have the crash being hit at the same time as the hi hat or ride hit because a drummer will not do this.

Scott Sibley - Toontrack
Technical Advisor

[regotheamigo]

Thank you so much for the help Scott. I’m not real computer savy, and most of what you told me to do went over my head, but that’s not your fault. I will definitely give it a shot though, and figure it out. Thanks again man!

[Scott]

Well, not much in computer audio is easy!

If you have some specific questions, feel free to ask away and I’ll do my best to make things clearer for you.

Scott Sibley - Toontrack
Technical Advisor

[Whitten]

Making fills work is not easy, even for a real drummer playing in real time.
It’s probably the hardest thing to make sound smooth for someone using programmed drums.
Keep at it!
With more experience I’m sure you’ll crack this.
One thing, try and listen to the fills on your favourite albums and analyze how they are constructed.

[Rogue]

on the subject of fills being too busy I’d like to add that you can quite easily remedy this by switching temporarily to 1/2 time to preview fills. This will double the length of the fills but using the technique already described by Scott for verses, you can cut the beginning or the end at your discretion to make it work for you.

… it really is not difficult to achieve technically, but creatively you of course have to know what you are after 😉

Rogue Marechal - Toontrack
Configuration Manager

[zazelsodo]

I use DFH almost exclusively, so I understand the frustration.  If you listen to Meshugah, etc…then the fills make sense  =D
 
One of the biggest “problems” are that the grooves don’t match the feel of the fill in a lot of cases…a good way to fix this it to open the drum track in the editor..and add the same kick/snare pattern to the first half of the fill.  IE, a 1 measure fill, you would edit the kick/snare pattern on the 1 and 2, leaving the 3 and 4 to the original fill.  This requires some understanding of the software that you’re using, but sometimes sliding a kick or snare a few “pennies” in either direction, help the feel of the fill.
 
I’m learning that the pre packaged grooves/fills are FANTASTIC jumping off points…but as already suggested, half timing fast fills and/or setting the appropriate lengths of each clip is a great place to start.
 
Another good trick if you’re doing anything fast or punky, is to double time standard beats, and then use standard time for fills…it give a great swaying momentum, leading into chorus’, etc…
 
Good luck!

[Author]

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