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Creating Professional Drum Tracks In CakewalkMar 11 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 is a very powerful program especially when it comes to MIDI.
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Cakewalk Pro Audio has come of age with its latest incarnation, version 9.0. Although I use Pro Tools LE 5.1 with Digi001, which cost much more than CWPA9, I find myself turning to CWPA9 each time I need to do something in MIDI. The MIDI capabilities of CWPA9 are incredible, much more advanced than Pro Tools'. To do justice to this very powerful program, I will attempt to, over the course of the next few months, highlight some of its features. I'll start by talking about the Session Drummer plug-in that comes with the program. Unless you have a MIDI-enabled drum machine which can generate drum note data to be recorded by your sequencer software, righting drum parts in MIDI can be a very tedious process (esp. if you want to create realistic sounding rolls etc). Being a backing track, you usually want to have a basic drum track recorded as fast & as easily as possible so that you can concentrate on creating the rest of the song as soon as possible. The Session Drummer takes the tedium out of this whole process. Here's how it works. CWPA9 comes with a folder full of rythm MIDI tracks. These are regular MIDI files except that they are in Type 0 format, which means that all data are recorded to one channel. Each of these tracks consists of a series of drumming patterns in a particular style, eg, tango, country etc. Each pattern within the track is marked by a marker. Each marker has the pattern name assigned to it. That's as clear as I can make it without resorting to diagrams! To activate Session Drummer, double click on the "Effects" box of channel 10 in the track view. From the list of plug-ins, select Session Drummer. Then, double click on Session Drummer in the opened (black) Effects box. This will open up the Session Drummer window. Select the drum styles (left panel) and patterns (right panel) and arrange them in the Song panel to create the drum track for your song. You should select Play in the main window to hear the drum track. After you're done with the arrangement, save the song by clicking the Floppy Disk icon on top of the Song panel. Now to import this drum track into your song, you need to go back to the main window (track view), select a track, open the console view, click on the "FX" button, click OK at the Apply MIDI Effect dialog box (make sure "Delete the Effects from the Track Inserts" is selected). That's it! Piece of cake(walk)! The power of Session Drummer lies in the fact that you can create your own Session Drummer patterns, so you are not limited to what comes with the program. Just take any drum track that you like, apply the markers at the points where variations occur & save the file as MIDI Type 0, in the same folder as the rest of the Session Drummer pattern files. When you next open your Session Drummer window, you'll see your very own pattern right there!! Quite a thrill!  |
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