Country Drum Loops

[Dan Beller-McKenna]

When gigging came to a screeching halt back in March, I decided it was time to learn to make recordings at home. I don't play drums (and I know I'm no bass player) so I bought a Digitech Trio pedal which spits out pretty decent bass and drum tracks with a fair amount of flexibility (seven genre settings--including country--and twelve style settings in each genre). Although I often get my buddy and forumite Chris Caruso to record a live bass part (and occasionally a drummer friend to do the same), the results can be heard on most of the tracks here .

I had a couple of projects in mid that needed a little more flexibility in the drums than the Trio pedal can give me, and I don't want to dictate every little nuance to my drumming friend, so last week I took the dive into midi and loops. I bought a midi controller, and I'm getting myself up to speed using it with the Steven Slate 5 freebie virtual drum. It's pretty easy to get going with these (though time consuming to enter in!), but I can see years of learning ahead. I'd really like to get going with loops too. Anyone work with them? I'm especially interested in hearing about good packages of country loops, including some with brushes.

Thanks in advance for advice!

[Jim Fogle]

Drums On Demand has a nice mixture of midi and audio loops. The site has one set that is exclusively brush audio loops. https://www.drumsondemand.com/collectio ... gKAjvD_BwE

Groove Monkey has been in the midi loop business for a long time. Midi loops have the benefits of not taking up a lot of storage space, more content for less price and can be stretched beyond the time shifting audio loops can handle. One con is you need to have a good midi instrument patch for brushes. https://groovemonkee.com/?gclid=EAIaIQo ... gL_MfD_BwE

Sampleson has a $39 US sale on their brushes VST/AU and standalone product, BrushifyPro. https://sampleson.com/brushify-pro-brush-drums-vst.html

Realitone RealiDrums are easy to use, sound good and include a nice brush patch. I like the program because it has an artificial intelligence that can handle breaks or fills starting at any beat in a measure (bar). Normally $199, presently on sale for $99. https://realitone.com/products/realidrums

[Dan Beller-McKenna]

Wow, Jim! Thanks for this great list. I'll work my way through the links tonight.

[Justin Emmert]

I use Logic Pro X as a DAW and just started messing with its Drummer program. I had no idea this stuff existed! I was just trying to record some scratch tracks for a few songs I wrote. I’m farming out the tracking of guitars, drums, bass, mixing and mastering to a friend of mine that is running a holiday special. I’ll overdub the steel and do vocals myself. Anyways, I found out that I can’t play guitar and sing to to a click. A YouTube video suggested using a drum loop instead of a click to stay in time. So I watched a quick tutorial on Drummer and threw a drum loop on a track to play to. It worked! I had to minimize the fills and swing to keep myself from changing the meter of the vocals, but it turned out good an in time. Anyways, I can see how I will use this in the future as I do more solo projects. The AI side of this stuff is amazing. Makes the track much more human. I can’t wait to play with it more.

[Eric Long]

If you want to take the dive into something a bit more advanced toontrack makes really powerful products.

I use EZ Drummer and have a few expansions. (They have country specific sample libraries and "country" drum sets.)

Supperior drummer is also under their umbrella and is even more powerful but I haven't used it.

https://www.toontrack.com/

[Brad Richard]

Another method I've used for years is to simply download a midi file of the song you're going to work on and then manipulate the drum, bass, etc. tracks as needed. This is mainly for backing tracks. If it's for original music, maybe find a song that's close and use that. Some of these midi programmers are really good and can give you a good base to start off with.