Graduate School for Drum Programming
The Grateful Dead band is playing next weekend, and I’m going deep on a few tracks that are new so I can learn them and not use crib notes. In addition to that, I’m going to try to leave my concentration face at home because I look like I’m about to punch somebody in the face when I’m up there playing sometimes.
That being said, I’ve stemmed out a bunch of stuff with Ableton and am looking to do a practice track. And I’m using the MPC for it.
I realize that I have kind of four sampling universes. And what I mean by that is using a sampler as a drum machine: Teenage Engineering KO series, Ableton, MPC, and the Roland SP-404.
The temptation is to think that everything can do everything, but it can’t. The easiest and quickest way to get anything done, at least for me, is the MPC.
I saw a great video of John Taylor playing thru Planet Earth, and I’ll link it here. He had what looked like an MPC 60, and that’s what he used to practice bass parts. Sounded amazing.
The subtlety of Grateful Dead drums is amazing. And I feel like it’s graduate school for drum programming. So I cannot wait to dig into it.
Not sure what drum kit I’m going to use yet. I may make one of my own. That’s one big thing: the drums have to sound good and inspiring. But I don’t like to use real drum sounds because it’s so hinky. If you have fake drums, you should make them sound fake. In my mind, anyway.
The MPC won the sampler-as-drum-machine battle. More on that later.
But the idea is to learn these sections intimately as I go. I’ll work through the intro and program that. Then I’ll work through the first verse as I program that. Then I’ll do the tag, then the weird B part, and so on and so forth.
There’s probably only three or four parts, and then you copy and move them around and put them in different places. It’s actually super fun. And by the time you’re done, you know the song.
So that’s that. We’ll see if it works, and we’ll actually see if I finish. I’ll report back.
Typically, I would abandon stuff like this and just practice with the track. But I have enough time, and I’ve been doing a lot of programming in the MPC, so it’s useful as well as timely.