PG Music Home Forums PG Music Wishlists PowerTracks Pro Audio Wishlist A ptw new drum feature idea.

a feature request i would like to see
that no daw seems to have.
1. background.
drums can be a real pain in the rear, and there are lots of drum products on the market.
and i'm particularly thinking of mebe new folks here.
and how to make it easy for them to do drum traks n fills.
2. imagine the following.
like the bars window. a DRUM WINDOW...but with a difference.
there would be a timeline of course.
on the left hand side would be drum sample names.
(right clik to tell ptw which drum sample to use on the trak.
there would be 16 drum traks in the drum window.
on opening the drum window for the first time...
the user would see a row of boxes horizontally for each trak.
(stretching to the right under the time line).
the procedure the user would use would be as follows.
1. against each drum name on left hand side select sample for that trak(wav).
2. select tempo.
for example if the tempo of the trak was 150 bpm,.
there would be 150 horizontal boxes per minute horizontally
for each drum trak.
3. the user would then simple clik in the boxes on each trak where he/she wanted a drum beat
sample to be played.
by right cliking on a box the user could "nudge" a beat.
forward or backward. in milliseconds. say.
thus after a user had done his work (like the bars window) the drum window would show
beats as filled in boxes, and no beats as blank.
4. handling fills.
seperately from the 16 drum traks there would be say a further 8 traks for drum
fills.
heres what i feel would be very neat.please follow my logic.
haveing completed the drum boxes on the 16 drum traks (by cliking).
then the user proceeds to lay down his other bed traks like rhythm guitars n bass etc.
and other bed traks plus a ghost rough vocal.
then once the song has taken shape/been ruffed out the user would then play back
the whole shebang, and heres the KEY ASPECT.
every time the user presses an F (for drum fill) on the pc keyboard,
ptw automatically creates a fill across the 8 fill traks useing user
predetermined audio samples.
this real time implementation of fills i fel would be very handy.
(dont like a fill erase it. ). ie a very intelligent fill creator.
this would save some folks doing a lot of fills detailed work in the notation window.
(then doing midi to audio conversion.).
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the whole foregoing concept is different from some drum products today
where one creates a midi drum trak , and then feeds it to a plug in that creates
audio drum traks in real time.


i hope i make some sense cos i really feel this would help in drum
trak creation.
it seems a tad more complex than it would be in reality.
but i feel it would give the user complete control over what drum samples would be played at
what time points, plus of course the fills idea.
it would save people also buying real time plug ins.
they would simply need to buy sample libraries of drums.

one added benefit would be for film. the samples neednt necessarily be drum samples.
they could be anything foley related.
foosteps, creaks, eerie sounds...any sample one wanted.
people could even use such foley techniques n weird sounds in their songs.

for example if one wanted a audience clapping at a certain point in a song.
instead of needing to go into the ptw audio edit window to paste.
just clik a box at the time in the boxes drum grid and away one goes.

..........................................................................
haveing got the drums right...lets say more drum traks were needed.
for example mebe the basic drum trak was just a simple trak , but also added latin percussion or orchestral per
cussion were needed. there would be an option on the drum boxes display to fill a ptw audio trak
(after saveing ones work) with the drum mix set up in the drum boxes display.
haveing done that , a new blank boxes display would be displayed to the userr who could now
use the drum boxes for latin percussion or whatever.
in fact one could use the drum boxes display as much as one wanted for complex drum arrangements.
by transferring to a ptw audio trak once one was happy.
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hope i make some sense.
god bless.

That should do the trick.
Similar to the drum grid, but using samples instead and the entire song is available to view not just one measure.
I find it tedious to enter notes into the regular notation window, especially drum notes as their placement doesn't make much sense.
Upgrading drum notation would also help. I like a snare drum, bass drum, cymbal, toms etc. to be placed where I want them in musical notation. PTW should supply a translation to enable that to happen.

manning1,

Have you paid much attention to what products like Jamstix, EZ Drummer and BFD actually do? Each of them has various flavors of what you call the KEY ASPECT, with user defined fill points and such.

They are pretty sophisticated programs, come with killer drum sample libraries, and in the case of Jamstix, really require almost zero drum grid/horizontal box entry whatsoever. Pick some base patterns, tell Jamstix you want a fill at the end of the pattern repeat (say you have a 4/4 pattern repeated 8 times for a verse - tell jamstix to throw a fill in at the end of the 8 bars and there you have it.), etc.

PG isn't going to be able to implement something like this without lots of programming resources. I'd rather see VSTi support of Jamstix like products first.

If you don't have another host other than PTPA, it's pretty hard to evaluate truly how revolutionary Jamstix is in this regard.

actually i'm well aware of jamstyx and the others mate.
ive been writing songs with a mate that uses it !! for 2 years now.
the whole point is the box concept eliminates the stage of being driven by a midi pattern or choosing a pattern. been there done that. i want something a bit more user controllable.
the concept is based around the expansion of the current drum grid in ptw,
where one cliks in boxes....but spread out over a time line.
FYI ..awhile back i was at a store where a guy works who uses all the packages includeing BFD which he showed me.
he told me theres nothing like i describe. and he is a great drummer.
god bless.

Don't forget a track for the Cowbell. There needs to be a track for Cowbell

Hello and gredes from old germany.

My idear for the drumpart to separet the percussen from it.
So can I do the real 2/3 ore 3/2 sun clave made in my bossafeel backings.
Ore when I´ll had have a timbalero to play with a drummer in the song paralel,
so I´ve than a mutsh better feeling at my playbacks.

But now it the way for me about RB to make my playbacks whith the seperated drummers,
it ´s not a problem for me, but it whud be easyer when it is seperated in BiaB!

LG Matze

Jamstix works very different from basic midi patterns, and if only PT and RB would allow VSTi timing code it would be a very powerful add on to the system.