Bruce.Delaplain Hi,
Just got EZDrummer installed. I’m going to use it to provide drum tracks. I understand that there is a library of beats, but I don’t know how to find what I might want. All the “grooves” just have numbers. The playing variations have some keywords — where are these documented?
Any help would be much appreciated. I’m just a musician, not a drummer.
thanks a lot,
Bruce
NathanI can’t remember what you might find in your “Grooves” library just after an EZD install, but generally the MIDI grooves are organised in a hierachial “tree” where you choose a title, choose a group (usually atype, time signature and tempo group), choose a song part (eg intro, verse, chorus, bridge, fills, etc) and then a variation under that.
you gan select and play the groove from the groove library by pressing the play button (small right-pointing triangle) or you can drag the groove item into your DAW to construct the drums for a song part-by-part.
The “numbers”, if I understand you correctly, are just the ID numbers for each MIDI segment (you can decode them to tell you where the item came from).
Hope I’ve followed your query here, ask away if there’s anything else you need help on.
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SD2.3, NYII, C&V, MC, MF, ED, Latin Perc, Twisted, Pop, N1H, Electronic, Classic, Funkmasters, Rock Solid, Blues, Indie-Folk.
Bruce.Delaplain Hi Planetnine,
Thanks for the response. Maybe the expansion packs have more info. What I’m seeing is…
1) I pick a category(or whatever it’s called) like “pop/rock”
2) It then shows a list of “grooves”. Here’s where the problem comes up. In one category there’s a list of 47 grooves — named Groove 1 through Groove 47. I’d like to at least understand the underlying organization of that list, so I’d have some idea of how to look for the right one.
3) then I select a Variation. these have descriptions which help immensely, even though I’m not sure what they all mean yet.
Do you know if the grooves are grouped by bass drum patterns? Or by snare beats perhaps? Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks again
NathanSorry, not in front of EZD at the moment, do you have the basic pack and no other libaries? It sounds like you just have a default MIDI install and I don’t recall looking at that.
It seems that this MIDI is a big list of a wide variety of beats and is probably not split into categories (a “sampler” or teaser if you like). I know this isn’t very helpful, but you might have to just trawl your way through them. For more specific (and more organised) beats you might need to get additional MIDI packs or sound libraries (which come with MIDI) -and other vendors produce MIDI in EZD/SD2 format too.
Are there particular styles you’re after?
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SD2.3, NYII, C&V, MC, MF, ED, Latin Perc, Twisted, Pop, N1H, Electronic, Classic, Funkmasters, Rock Solid, Blues, Indie-Folk.
Bruce.Delaplain Hi, Thanks for the response. (I seem to not be getting notified about these responses. Hope I can find a way to do that.)
I’ve made some progress since last post. And I just yesterday got my first two expansion packs. They seem MUCH more organized and meaningful in the terminology.
Thanks for your help!!
Bruce.DelaplainORIGINAL: planetnine
Sorry, not in front of EZD at the moment, do you have the basic pack and no other libaries? It sounds like you just have a default MIDI install and I don’t recall looking at that.
It seems that this MIDI is a big list of a wide variety of beats and is probably not split into categories (a “sampler” or teaser if you like). I know this isn’t very helpful, but you might have to just trawl your way through them. For more specific (and more organised) beats you might need to get additional MIDI packs or sound libraries (which come with MIDI) -and other vendors produce MIDI in EZD/SD2 format too.
Are there particular styles you’re after?
>
Well that’s the thing. I’m not looking for styles, I’m looking for beats/grooves. I’m coming from a blues background here. I don’t want a lot of clutter. There must be a lot of grooves with bass drum beats on the down beats and snare back beats. But I can’t find them. Okay, the very first groove combination in the Pop/Rock is simple. I mean really simple. But that’s about it. As soon as I start going down the list, all these extra beats start coming in.
I’m beginning to think that the expansion kits I have (Nashville, Classic, and the initial default) just don’t have what I want. Okay, I know I want to get the Blues pack, but it’s so expensive right now I’m hoping to get it later.
What I’d like to find is a search mechanism that would let me say “I want four on the floor” and all the non-applicable stuff will go away.
Enough complaining. Thanks for any enlightenment you may have to give.
Ps. the categories in The Classic include things like “top of my head”, “only a dove”. That doesn’t mean anything to me. What is that? I also saw words like “Brave”, and others. Thanks again
Edit… The one “sorta” solution I thought of is to select a groove that has too many notes, and edit them out. Not what I was hoping for though.
NathanI think those are song titles, they’re subdivided into parts.
The blues EZX may have what you’re after, but it’s always so hard to describe a beat unless you map it out on a grid and describe the feel -and then different people would play it differently.
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SD2.3, NYII, C&V, MC, MF, ED, Latin Perc, Twisted, Pop, N1H, Electronic, Classic, Funkmasters, Rock Solid, Blues, Indie-Folk.
Whitten There is no name you can give different bass drum beats (for example) in pop rock. The way we do it in a real tracking session is be referencing. Like ‘Pretty Woman’ groove, or ‘Bo Diddley’ groove. You can’t really do that on a commercial product, if nothing else, for copyright reasons.
In the end you just have to listen to the drum groove ‘songs’ first to see if they are in the ballpark.
The normal scenario then is that groove 1 will be less full (or complex) than groove 2. So groove 5 will have more going on than groove 1 typically.
Then you get the ride cymbal grooves, which substitute ride cymbal fro hi-hat and again go from simpler to more complex. then you get fills, which again tend to be simple, then later more full and complex.
In the end, you sort of have to audition the different sections and use your ears….. and personal taste.
Once dropped into your DAW, you can edit Superior grooves extensively to suit your song perfectly.
Bruce.DelaplainHey thanks a lot for responding Whitten. I’d like to ask some questions about how others use this. And I know the answers would be quite different depending on objectives. I think my usual objective is to get the song to sound decent so that a real drummer, and a real band, could tell where I want to go. I’m working on original songs. I want to eventually have a band to record them properly.
Could you describe the steps and processes you implement with respect to EZdrummer (or Superior)? For example, someone might say they
1) find a reasonable groove clip and repeat it throughout the entire song. How much time do you spend on that? Do you have a routine for searching?
or 2) find multiple groove clips to alternate or otherwise distribute in some repeated pattern. How long does that take?
or 3) do #2 plus finding fills (by the way, I don’t have a clue about selecting a fill right now. I’ve never found one that worked very well.)
or 4) pick a clip or clips and edit them to fit what you want? Again, how much time spent on selecting? How much on editing? Any tips on editing?
By the way, you mentioned that there were no names for bass drum patterns. This isn’t complete by any means, and may not work in every case, but here’s an idea. One eight-digit binary number can easily describe one measure of a 4/4 pattern if we don’t consider notes shorter than an eighth-note…
“10101010” — beats on the quarter notes
“11010110” — beats on “1”, “1-and”, “2-and”, “3-and”, & “4”
“10001000” — beats on 1 and 3
…and so on.
You could even represent those strings as a single number. For example, “10101010” is 170. “11111111” is 255. There are only 256 different bass drum patterns possible when sticking to eighth-notes.
I have found only one groove with “10101010” or “10001000” (in Pop). Would sure like to find more. I should think the Blues pack must have some, hopefully a lot.
—
I’m looking at the Nashville pack. Has anyone documented what these second-column names mean?
“Country Breakbeats”
“Straight”
“Trainbeat” Now this one is descriptive!
…And so on
Thanks for reading this far, and thanks for any help, tips, ideas you guys come up with.
ORIGINAL: Whitten
There is no name you can give different bass drum beats (for example) in pop rock. The way we do it in a real tracking session is be referencing. Like ‘Pretty Woman’ groove, or ‘Bo Diddley’ groove. You can’t really do that on a commercial product, if nothing else, for copyright reasons.
In the end you just have to listen to the drum groove ‘songs’ first to see if they are in the ballpark.
The normal scenario then is that groove 1 will be less full (or complex) than groove 2. So groove 5 will have more going on than groove 1 typically.
Then you get the ride cymbal grooves, which substitute ride cymbal fro hi-hat and again go from simpler to more complex. then you get fills, which again tend to be simple, then later more full and complex.
In the end, you sort of have to audition the different sections and use your ears….. and personal taste.
Once dropped into your DAW, you can edit Superior grooves extensively to suit your song perfectly.
Bruce.DelaplainI think I’m going to give up on EZdrummer for awhile. At least as far as searching for the right beat. My brain just doesn’t work that way. I’ll just start with a simple, basic groove and either use as is, or add/subtract a kick or snare note to make it work as a prototype for what I’m working on.
Thanks
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