I’m considering buying NI Battery 3 as in most cases I prefer to build up my drum tracks with individual notes - however, this obviously precludes me, for the most part, from the ability of chopping up a looped sample, playing with offsets etc. etc.
I’m interested as to what people’s workflows are regarding drums - for those of you that build beats from individual notes (either from a drum synth etc. or sample hits) how do you efficiently manage moving from your carefully constructed beat to a loop you can hack around with?
I’m aware that it’s easy to render a particular section as another sample, but the moment you want to change something, you’ve obviously got some re-rendering to do (-:
Really depends. Sometimes I am lazy and use some loops spiced with single hits, mostly I use single hits.
I regularly spend some time cutting the loops I get into single hits and categorizing them, so I have a pretty huge library. I use Battery2, I dont like version 3, I think they changed it to the worse, or atleast it’s not compatible with my workflow. And I just track my drums, I don’t render them to a loop or similar, I just like to have the option to change everything anytime.
Thanks Psnow and looza for the responses, appreciated.
Sorry, I didn’t consider a question regarding individuals’ workflow to be a beginner’s question - I’m comfortable working with single hits and/or loops and am aware of the various options available - I was just looking for educated opinions based on everyone’s experiences.
In the latest version 1.9 you can also slice the beats on exact measures so you can even preserve the “overall groove” in the hits if you like… [/quote]
I find battery to be useless in renoise, and actually i find renoise itself best tool for writing and mixing drums
learn to use renoise instrument properly, get library of breakbeats and chop/process them then save them as xrni files, sequence the drums as you like them and feel free to use various layers of them, i usually have one main kick/snare/hihat to which i add layers of breaks, and i send all of these to drum bus…
I don’t think battery is useless in renoise at all. infact battery is a great addition to renoise because it offers a load of stuff you can’t do in renoise : you can layer samples, you can EQ individual samples, you can mod stuff like decay or a eq with the velocity and so on and so forth. you might not need this if you only work with chopped loops, but as soon as you use single hits to build your drumloops and really put some effort in it battery has alot to offer that renoise can’t at the moment.
OK, an interesting point here regarding whether or not Battery is any good - in addition to the advertised features (which may or may not be any good based on the comments here) one of the main reasons I was looking to buy was the sheer amount of good quality drum samples provided - this being something I’m strongly lacking in!
Let’s assume I don’t treat myself to Battery for xmas, where else can I get my hands on quality drum samples (I write mainly Drum & Bass etc.)? I don’t mind paying good money for good samples…
I’ve used a loop twice since 1994… I prefer creating my drum lines from scratch, using loops is terribly boring for me (I’m not into jungle or similar genres, though).
I would recommend considering Kontakt as a more general purpose sampler instead of Battery.
in the future, Renoise sampler will have more features so that probably Battery will be really useless, but Kontakt will probably always be better than Renoise’s sampler.
OK, so putting aside workflow etc. is Kontakt going to provide me with a nice set of drum samples? I understand Kontakt 3 comes with gigs of samples but how many of them are drums etc.
Failing that, surely there must be professional drum sample sets (both accoustic & electronic) that can be purchased on cd/dvd?
kontakt has a completely different approach than battery, I don’t think both are comparable at all. Just because they can load each other’s files doesn’t mean they are very similar.
for good drumsamples … just check this thread, there should be plenty in there.
yes konakt is super
not so super for midi drums, but…
i am working only for real drums imitations,i noticed
samples from kontakt depends from velocity
and would be very very great that some randomines would be there,but…
for that aproach i made my self simple random sampler
and workflow is faster because for real playing imitation
it just greit to have randomines
You -can- layer samples in renoise, you can equalise individual samples, you can mod stuff like decay and eq differently within renoise, battery can offer you different approach but imo it really is not needed for drum work
ya all that things i know,
but these things a littlebit useles in my case, (available kontakt libruaries contain too small amount
of samples, yes it has about 20-30 waves in table but its to small amount , i use much more)
vst sampler tooks me to program 2 hours, scripting and kontakt libruary makeing will take my much more
now i can just point a folder with wav samples and its plais tham randomicaly
Yeah, you dont need Battery. The thing about layering and envelopes on invididual samples is redundant as you can just load your samples in as individual instruments. Then you can do anything you like. Layering is as easy as putting a sample next to another one on the same track (although, admittedly, these samples can not be auditioned together.)
I would spend time learning Renoise, instead of worrying about Battery and Kontakt.
Those other programs are there to take care of shortcomings in their respective departments where a host is concerned. ReNoise doesn’t have this problem, therefore using it in ReNoise is useless.
If you want to layer stuff, like single shots, put the samples on a pattern how you want, select a few rows, then render to sample, load it back into your ‘drum kit’.
Repeat to taste.
If you’re working with loops, again ReNoise will be superior…you can make/edit your loops without any external programs, you have a clear view of the loop in the editor and you can re-render the loop with any effect you want easily with render-selection-to-sample.
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