ColdFusion
Active Member
A few months before 2020 began I bought a gently used electronic drum kit. It was very good timing. I was able to pass the time during the lockdowns by remote collaborating with various players I found on craigslist.
I discovered quickly that guitarists and songwriters were using something called "mapped drums" instead of live drummers. I had never used a DAW before so at first it just seemed strange that all these indie guitarists were making such perfect sounding drum beats.
These laptop drum softwares were making beats that were crisp, clean, dynamic, hi-fidelity, and in perfect time..
All with just a mouse and a keyboard. I was both blown away and horrified at the same time.
In one panicked moment I thought "Did all the intermediate drummers in the world just become obsolete?!"
Jokes aside, I am glad that home musicians can put cracking pro sounding beats on their original music.
In fact one of my favorite new studio games is "doing battle" with others people's daw drum tracks.
That is, take an indie song that already has a decent computer generated groove and try to write and play a more creative, more synergistic one. With V Drums you can compete sound quality-wise with a standard daw drum program.
I do get excited to see if I can smash already written DAW drum tracks with just the sounds on my stock TD-11 KV.
Don't let the kids talk you into buying a bunch of external drum sounds if you don't want them. You can make magic happen with just the handful of kit sounds on a stock TD-11 module.
I'm still not confident that someday we all won't be replaced by computers. Because really these drum programs sound so...freaking...good. It's got to be rough to have to compete with one of these things to get a spot on an indie recording collab.
We must evolve, or be destroyed...
I discovered quickly that guitarists and songwriters were using something called "mapped drums" instead of live drummers. I had never used a DAW before so at first it just seemed strange that all these indie guitarists were making such perfect sounding drum beats.
These laptop drum softwares were making beats that were crisp, clean, dynamic, hi-fidelity, and in perfect time..
All with just a mouse and a keyboard. I was both blown away and horrified at the same time.
In one panicked moment I thought "Did all the intermediate drummers in the world just become obsolete?!"
Jokes aside, I am glad that home musicians can put cracking pro sounding beats on their original music.
In fact one of my favorite new studio games is "doing battle" with others people's daw drum tracks.
That is, take an indie song that already has a decent computer generated groove and try to write and play a more creative, more synergistic one. With V Drums you can compete sound quality-wise with a standard daw drum program.
I do get excited to see if I can smash already written DAW drum tracks with just the sounds on my stock TD-11 KV.
Don't let the kids talk you into buying a bunch of external drum sounds if you don't want them. You can make magic happen with just the handful of kit sounds on a stock TD-11 module.
I'm still not confident that someday we all won't be replaced by computers. Because really these drum programs sound so...freaking...good. It's got to be rough to have to compete with one of these things to get a spot on an indie recording collab.
We must evolve, or be destroyed...