Drum machine basics and loading presets - Pro Tools Tutorial

- [Instructor] Okay so we're going to start out with Boom. Boom is a really intuitive and actually very simple drum machine to use within Pro Tools. Now, I love the way that Boom has been set up in terms of it's feature set because, I know a lot of Pro Tools users who really do enjoy using audio for programing drums. They take their audio, they drop it into the arranger over here, they cut it up, they move it around. That's all well and good but I like how Boom offers sort of a flip side to that because it's sort of quick and intuitive and that's not always the strong suit of certain features and work flows within Pro Tools. No offense to Pro Tools at all, but things tend to be a little bit on the complex side and this is something that's nice because some of the instruments we're going to talk about in this course actually do have a lot of intuitive features that are going to help keep you moving and get ideas down and that's one thing that is really going to be potentially helpful to many of you with these instruments is that you can get ideas down really quickly; if you're recording things, or you're setting up a full band, you're doing a big session as many Pro Tools users are, it's nice to just have a way of laying down ideas very, very quickly and to be able to sort of mock ideas up quickly to then play over or to re you know, to re-amp whatever you want to do. There's a lot to do here. And these instruments have a lot of different types of uses. We're not just doing things that are going to make it all the way to the final production. There are a lot of handy feature here that you can take advantage of. Okay so Boom is a very simple drum machine; if you've never used a drum machine before it's actually really simple, we have a handful of different sounds. Okay so kick, snare, rim, clap and so forth. We've got closed high hat, open high hat, high tom, low tom, ride and crash, okay. Now each of those different sounds has it's own parameters here, okay? And then we have a step sequencer down here at the bottom where we can create patterns. Now there are a couple of different ways to sequence using this instrument. I'm going to go ahead and call up a preset here. Let's go over here. Let's try Dirty Bell. Okay, and now once you have your midi controller set up and you've hit that control button and you've armed it, you can go on down there and see one, and actually play this this instrument and play the different sounds. (drumming) Okay. So there are a lot of different things that we can do here. One of the nice things though about this particular instrument is that we have a lot of different drum kits, but those drum kits also come pre loaded with certain patterns; now if I hit play in Pro Tools, then I hit play, (drumming) in my drum machine, then we get this pattern playing back. Now, for those of you who haven't used a drum machine before especially a virtual drum machine, it might seem counterintuitive that we don't have any midi in our timeline here, okay and that is the case. There's no midi there, but many drum machines do have internal step sequencers that work in a loop and that's very very handy because you can lay ideas down very very quickly. So we're just going to go through a couple of the presets and check out how to call those up. So I'll hit play here and then we'll start it. Alright that's solid. Okay. So we can do a couple of really simple things here. We can change to a different drum kit. Okay and we've got some that are sort of just genre specific and some that are actually sort of trying to reference actual hardware. We've got urban one and two, dance one and two, electro. Those are all genres. Same with retro; we can listen to that and see if we recognize anything from it, but urban dance and electro, those are sort of genre based things to sort of get you closer to those types of things. Now if we go over to eight-O and nine-O we're talking about eight-O-eights, nine-O-nines, these are sort of the patron saint drum machines of hip hop and house and techno respectively. And then we've got fat eight and fat nine which has more of a tape saturation type thing; let's listen. So as we change the drum kit, we're just changing the sounds; we're not going to be changing all of the sequences here. (drumming) Okay, here's urban. (drumming) Nice. Let's jump over to eight-O. (drumming) You may recognize that. (drumming) Nine-O-nine. (drumming) Now the fat boys. (drumming) So essentially what fat eight and fat nine mean are like tape saturated versions of those sounds. They have some nice crunch, some nice saturation, some nice compression to them. So we've got our patterns in there, we've got our different kits. We could go to a different preset and check out some of these. I believe these are sort of BPM based presets here where they're like okay we think that you'll enjoy using this particular kit at 68, so I'm going to actually get rid of a couple of my controls over here so that I can see my midi business; there we go. We're at 120, let's slow it on down to 110. And let's just for the heck of it just grab a kit that finds us around 110, let's see what electro sounds like (drumming) Okay. And I can change some really really simple things here. I can make it swing a little bit harder and what swing is going to do is the same as any other midi sequencer. It has it's own flavor, but essentially what it's going to do is it's going to slightly delay every other sixteenth note so we get a little bit of a shuffle to it. Okay. Then we can double the speed or cut it down. (drumming) Okay, that's good. (drumming) A lot of different kits in here; just remember that as you load up a drum kit right here, what you're actually going to wind up with is a different set of sounds verses up top here where you're opening a set of sounds and parameters and sequences, okay? Now, one last thing very quickly, if you'd like to record a sequence, just using the midi sequencer in Pro Tools here it's really no problem. We're going to go ahead and just zoom in a little bit and I'm going to record and I can, I don't think I'm going to use a click track today; I can just watch the counter up top two, three, four, one, two, three, four, (drumming) Aright so there I've got the backbone of my beat. If I want to use that, that's sort of the backbone of the beat, and then I'll pull that in. Get it, slip into grid mode here. I like to slip into grid mode; I feel like when I say that sometimes people find it a little funny, but, great big fan of slipping into grid mode. Let's go ahead and take that there. Then we can jump in here and there you have it. There are your midi notes; you can go ahead and you can quantize if you want. I was a little behind so maybe I'll move them in here and do a little manual stuff or you can jump on in and just say hey you know what Pro Tools, I'd like to quantize these, Event Operations, Quantize. And I'll preserve the note duration; we'll just do note on and I'm going to say quarter note because that's exactly what I played there. Bada bing, bada boom. That's the old bingo bango. And there we go; we've got our little pattern here that we can use. And there you have it. And you can always edit those drums and create the midi sequences within the arranger like this. It's faster for some people. It's all just a matter of preference. It's the same sounds, it's the same triggers. It's just some of these triggers are coming from the Pro Tools timeline and some of them are coming from the step sequencer inside of Boom.