jampack 3: will it do rimklicks like la grange (zz top) ?

Is it the sound of the drums that bothers you or the complexity of GB's drum patterns? If it's the latter, it's very easy to weed out the (green) loops by deleting notes in the editor or build your own simple loops from scratch - I think for the purpose that you describe, you don't have to be a drummer yourself.

If you want a less "polished" sound, one possibility is to play around with the Equalizer and deliberately lower the fi. There's also some free lo-fi loops around (I have some on my computer at home, could tell you about it later), but since they are all samples (blue loops), you can't edit them and it's not very likely that you will find exactly the patterns that you are looking for.

I can't say I have looked for the rim sounds you speak of, but I don't recall hearing them in there anywhere. I just got Jam Pack 3 and there are 10 more drum kits in it. But, I haven't had the time to completely explore all of the sounds in each.

Aside from the rim clicks, I can get that Frank Beard sound pretty well using the Pop Kit for cymbals and snare, and the rock kit for kick and toms.

If you are starting with a loop, be aware that the loops can have effects applied to them. The first loop you use of the software drum loops will "set" the track to that kit and set of effects it has. Then any other SI drum loop you put in that track will play on the original kit, with the original effects. I just looked at one loop, and it had reverb and some EQ applied to it. Taking that off or altering it can make the drums sound a lot different.

Well ... let's see: First of all, you only can change green loops. When you double-click them, the editor window opens in the lower part of the gb screen. You can see the beats as bars in a grid. From left to right you see the time line, separated into bars, quarter notes, eight notes etc., depending on the magnification that you set with the ruler on the far left side.

Quarter notes are the ones that you normally count "one, two, three, four", eighth notes are half of that etc. So these little bars tell you where a note begins and where it ends (in case of drum sounds, the length doesn't matter, each note triggers one "beat" on the drum).

On the left side of the window, you see a piano keyboard sideways. So the horizontal lines refer to the respective keys of the keyboard, normally the pitch of the sound. With drums, it's different: Each piano key (and every horizontal line) represents a drum sound, like bass drum, snare, closed hi-hat, open hi-hat, cymbals ... you can hear the sound by clicking on the piano key. Almost every drumset also has a rimshot snare sound, just try to find it! (In GB's Rock Set, it's on C#1, the black key just above C1.) Listen to the loop and watch the cursor go by: You literally see the bass drum, the snare etc. do their stuff.

So if you only want the snare, e.g., just go ahead and delete everything that's not on the snare's line. You can move all the notes around in time and create new ones: press the apple key, and your arrow cursor turns into a pencil.

That should give you something to start playing around a bit. "Quantizing" will be lesson 2.

Christoph,
The rim sound he is looking for is not a rimshot, but rim only sound. It is just the stick on the rim, with no head coming into play.

Good instructions 🙂

i don´t want to spoil the original loops.

Nothing you do in the timeline or editor will change the loops in your Loop Browser.

One thing you might want to do is to turn off "snap to grid" and move some of your beats around. A swinging drummer is probably not playing on the grid all time.

Once you get a beat you like, you can drag it into the loop browser window and GB2 will make it into an Apple Loop that you can use like every other loop. It will open up a window that will show how it will be tagged and what you want to call it.

Yeah, it's not easy, and it's good to start with an already existing groove, so you see how a drummer normally uses the bass drum, the snare, the hi-hat ...

If you understand by a shuffle rhythm the same thing that I do, you need to apply a different grid to your beat: Open your loop in the editor as before. The lower button in the second green column from the left probably says something like "1/4 grid" or "1/8 grid" or "1/16 grid", right? Go to that little diagonal ruler symbol in the upper right corner of the editor window. If you click on it, you can check several grid values. Try to check "1/8 Swing (strong)" (or so, my menus are in German). The button I mentioned should now say "1/8 SH grid". If you now select all your notes in the loop (apple-a) and click the button, your beats arrange according to this new grid, and suddenly a "straight" beat becomes a swinging shuffle beat. You can use that same function when you played in a beat using your keyboard and didn't hit the beat right - it magically pulls all notes to the nearest grid point (which can on the other hand make it sound too precise and machine-like - you have to play with it). That's what's calles quantization, and this was lesson 2. 🙂

I do my shuffles using the Triplets setting. The swing setting skips some grid points I may want to put something on. The triplets let you have the whole thing, so you can put a hit where ever you want and still be in the shuffle mode. I never figured out just how that swing grid works.

I appreciate having that swing setting, because swing is not necessarily a triplet feeling. That's why they have two different versions of it in GB (in other programs, you have a continuous scale between straight and triplet rhythm.) But you're right, when you have true triplets in a swing piece (with notes on all three triplets, not only 1 and 3), the swing grid won't put the second note where it belongs, and you have to turn the triplets on or grid snap off for that note. I just did a version of "How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You", where that occurs all the time.

I have a ball editing drums with GB. Sometimes I get a headache, too LOL But I usually end up getting what I want. Unfortunately, there are some things a drummer does that just aren't there. Cymbal swirls are not there. You get too much stick sound if you try a roll on a cymbal. So, in one of the demo sounds, there is an audio file of a cymbal swirl. When I need one, I use that. I never thought of finding the La Grange rim sound, but I am sure it's not there. There may be some loops or drum kits by 3rd party companies that do have that hit in there. I have long looked at the BFD drum thingie, but I don't hear anyone that has it saying how well it works and such. It's far too expensive for me to buy it and see for myself.

Indeed there are some things that a drummer does that are just impossible to find in midi. All that sloppy stuff that almost doesn't make sense. There are some loop sets in some of the Drums on Demand volumes that have that rim click...but once you start getting into Drums on Demand it's "abandon all hope all ye that enter here" because they are so good and they keep coming out with new volumes that have the exact loops I'm looking for. 🙂