Article Preview - Behind The Groove

Since its very early days, sampling technology has been applied to drums. The apparently modest demands that drum samples placed on primitive samplers, in terms of memory and bandwidth, made them a fertile area for exploration, and basic drum and drum-loop sample libraries were some of the first sample libraries ever to become available.

As technology and our understanding of the true complexity of drum and percussion instruments and how they are played has progressed, however, it has become ever clearer that a sampled representation of a drum kit that has any pretensions to authenticity must be extremely sophisticated. Drums come in a multitude of shapes and sizes, and can be struck, stroked, bashed and beaten in any number of ways, by players exercising their art across all musical styles. No longer content with picking out a couple of loops from a sample CD, music producers who can't or don't want to use a live drummer are turning to a new generation of virtual drum instruments to allow them to create drum tracks that could pass for the real thing.

Some of these instruments use artificial intelligence to produce drum parts in styles to suit the user's requirements, while others focus more on extremely in-depth sampling of many different drum hits and articulations, enabling the production of highly realistic drum parts in the hands of skilled programmers. We talked to a selection of virtual drum instrument producers about their products: Steinberg (who make Groove Agent); Fxpansion (BFD); Submersible Music (Drumcore); Toontrack (EZ Drummer and, just released as we went to press, Superior Drummer 2.0); Digidesign (Strike); and Mixosaurus (DAW Drums Kit A). See the 'Product Background' and 'Company Background' boxes for more on these instruments and the people that created them. For now, we'll push on with the questions...

What led you to produce a drum sample instrument?

Digidesign (Peter Gorges, director of the Digidesign AIR Group, and Paul Kellett): "We wanted to raise the bar in terms of musical and authentic drum performance and there was a clear need among the Pro Tools community. That's why we did Strike."

Mixosaurus (Uwe Lietzow): "The idea for Mixosaurus was born during a drum-recording session at Berlin's Teldexstudio. Being a musician first and technician second, I was always very dissatisfied with what the drum-sample world had to offer, because none of the products was able to deliver a musical, natural-sounding performance that could follow a song's dynamics and feel, one that I'd like to play to as a musician, or to listen to as a music lover. And if there was one that could, there were mix options missing, or the sound quality wasn't right. Then one day, while tracking drums for a production at Teldex, we were so overwhelmed with the sound we had achieved that I started to develop a concept for my own virtual drum set, one that could legitimately be called an authentic reproduction of a drum kit in a recording situation. A musical instrument one could play, not an assortment of samples."

Steinberg (Helge Vogt): "Groove Agent 3 is the third incarnation of Steinberg's successful virtual drummer. Since the beginning, the goal was to combine a huge library of top-quality drum and percussion sounds with a range of player technologies, to create dynamic, ready to-go drums with a few mouse clicks: just choose a music style and a drum kit, and you're off."

Submersible (Dave Dysart): "We created our software in response to the owner of our company's frustration with trying to find, audition and export drum loops quickly for use in songwriting sessions. We then expanded it in response to comments from our owner's friends (Dave Stewart, Robbie Robertson and Peter Gabriel) to include MIDI beats in addition to audio loops — making a virtual drum instrument with multisampled MIDI kits."

How did you choose the drum kits?

Digidesign: "We tried to select a good balance of character and universally usable sound."

Fxpansion (Ted ): "To offer a good range of musical, interesting and rare drums that are out of the reach of the majority of people. To bring the best to the table, recognising users' desires to achieve many different styles and genres of drum sounds."

Mixosaurus: "The goal was to create a drum kit that would be programmable and playable in as diverse and detailed a way as a real drum kit, and it immediately became obvious that there could not be more than one kit created at the same time, because the recordings alone would take one, maybe two months — per kit (don't even think about the editing!). Thus the goal was to achieve a universal, 'standard' sound to make this kit usable for many musical styles and productions, yet with enough options to push the sound in one direction or another."

Steinberg: "The sound library of Groove Agent 3 was created to cover as many musical bases as possible. The idea was to tailor drum kits and percussion instruments to a perfect fit for each musical style, as well as to capture natural room ambience for every sound. In Groove Agent 3 we added new kits that recreate certain very distinctive sounds. One is modelled on famous kits played on many Swedish pop classics, another features recordings from a lovely old '60s kit, and the third is a powerful, clean and punchy kit that's got quite a modern, radio-compatible sound."

Submersible: "We normally use whatever the 'famous' drummer we are employing requests (Matt Sorum, Sly Dunbar, Terry Bozzio, Alan White, etc...). If we're doing kit sampling alone, we try to get the best instruments in a certain style or category."

Toontrack (Andreas Sundgren, CEO, and Mattias Eklund, Head of Sound Design): "We always work with the producer, engineer and drummer to get the result we're looking for in a specific product. If we do a 'vintage rock' product, for example, we want kits that correlate with that."

How important are stick choices, head choices and drum tuning?

Digidesign: "They're as essential as guitar tuning."

Fxpansion (Ted): "Stick choice has a role to play, but in my opinion the more important aspects are tuning and choice of skin, and drum damping. With two of the kits in BFD2 being well known and owned by famous drummers, it was important to research their tuning and setting up, as well as recreating, within reason, the manner in which they were originally recorded, in order to recreate, to a degree, the sound of the drums that are so well known to so many people. For example one of the 'tricks' used with Ringo Starr's Black Oyster kit was the use of tea towels over the drum heads to dampen the skins. On John Bonham's kit we used a very particular tuning regime and choice of drum head."

Mixosaurus: "Well, they're certainly as important as the choice of drums. Put the wrong head on the greatest drum (or tune it wrong) and it won't sound great at all. For 'tip' sounds on cymbals, the stick makes all the difference. A great cymbal won't sound bad, but take two very different sticks and you'll believe they are two different cymbals!"

Steinberg: "The tuning of the drums is vital in getting the maximum sound out of the drum heads: without tuned drums, the kit will sound muddy and out of pitch. Our drummer used several different heads and sticks, as well as brushes, mallets and rods, to evoke the spirit of a given era."

Submersible: "We think these things are very important. To get the sound right you need to consider the genre of music — is this jazz or metal? Wood tips sound different to plastic, and coated heads sound different to clear. Plus proper drum tuning really makes a kit sound great (or not)."