drum and percussion resources

[rob morsberger]

Hi. I'm about to dive into a month of relentless songwriting in a wide range of diverse styles. I will need to work at an extremely fast pace. In these situations, I find it helpful to have a range of percussion and drum loops that sound great and immediately suggest a style and groove. What are some great tools in this area? I've found Groove Agent helpul but have prettly much exhausted that one! I've just ordered RMX. Is BFD good in this regard? (I assume that for working quickly one has access to midi files?? Are they good and are there lots of them?) What about Culture? Are people liking this and does it come with a lot of midifiles? Any other suggestions of great percussion resources? Anyone using and liking the new Wizoo plugs, Latigo and Darabuka?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Rob

[spectrum]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the RMX support. I'd offer one suggestion to you:

Remember that every tool you buy, you need time to learn...to really get the maximum out of it, and to figure out how to best make it work for you. Getting tons of powerful stuff all at once is sometimes less productive musically (....at least for me).

RMX already does both things that you want to do...to work fast and to have access to working with tons of different styles of grooves and percussive elements. Since RMX is pretty vast and you are just getting started with it, I'd recommend focusing on that and expanding it with SAGE Xpanders and REX libraries if you need more variety than the core library...that way you can work in a consistent environment and combine, create and compose within RMX and all it has to offer. There are literally millions of fun and creative options there to explore and the better you learn that tool, those skills you develop will be extremely useful on future projects as well. There's really no such thing as "using up" RMX either :-)

The other tools you mentioned are also definitely great to have and worth checking out, but I'm just recommending to fully explore RMX first. It would be very easy to get overwhelmed by having a ton of new tools all at once and then end up exploring only 1% of what each of them can do.

Best,

spectrum

[rob morsberger]

Hi Eric,

thanks so much for your response. I had thought about getting some of the xpander packs as part of my solution and I really value your thoughts.

Sincerely,

Rob

[Mike Greene]

The RMX expander packs are a steal at $99 each. Get them all. Stylus RMX is by far the best plugin for the money I've ever bought, and I've bought a LOT (my 240gig soft synths drive is full and doesn't even have my EXS samples on it.)

I really like both Darbuka and Latigo as well. They're very simple, although Eric makes a good point about sticking to a few instruments. I should take that advice myself. :)

- Mike Greene

[rob morsberger]

thanks Mike.
I'll be setting up RMX tonight. Is there lots of percussion stuff or would the Wizoo plugs....which seem appealing to me...be a good extra resource? Since I'm very familiar with Stylus, I guess I'm expecting RMX to focus largely on drum stuff.

Rob

[Mike Greene]

For percussion you'll probably want to add Wizoo (or others, Beats Working in Cuba, for instance) for loops. Personally, I prefer the Wizoo plugs (Latigo and Darbuka.) RMX definitely has some (I forget the name of the are in Stylus wher the perc loops are), but it's not comprehensive. Very functional, though.

Culture is excellent, but I don't think there are loops. Maybe in a folder I never open? But IMO it's the best percussion sound set.

Stylus RMX is such an excellent platform, I would expect some third parties to develop some expanders. Q-Up Arts, for instance made excellent sample CDRoms of Latin percussion (Latin Groove Factory) that would make great expanders for RMX with (possibly) not that much additional work.

Some of the Intakt based percussion plugs (Beats Working in Cuba) are nice, but you just can't beat that RMX platform!

- Mike

[Angus_FX]

Is BFD good in this regard? (I assume that for working quickly one has access to midi files?? Are they good and are there lots of them?)


BFD comes with about 1500 such MIDI files.. it's a great songwriting tool straight out of the box particularly for rock / funk things; with the 8 Bit Kit add-on it can get in to more ethnic and experimental territory. The Groove Librarian built in to BFD works similarly to Groove Agent, but is a bit more flexible in some respects (you can do stuff like, layering the hi-hat patterns from one bank of grooves against the kick/snare from another). Feel free to email me about any specifics.

Cheers,
Angus.

[rob morsberger]

Angus,

I'm glad you chimed in, many thanks. I continue to appreciate your helpfulness getting me going with fxexpansion, which has been great.

I'll add BFD to my shortlist of tools then. It sounds like it would be really helpful to have in a time crunch, and I know the sound quality is there.

All the best,

Rob

[rob morsberger]

...and BTW, belated thanks to you again Mike...very helpful.

Sincerely,

Rob