Hoping someone can help point me in the right direction for this.
Currently I use the Fender Tune app on my phone for drum tracks to jam with. It must have about 50 different types of rock/swing/blues/etc beats. I pick the beat and bpm and hit go. It plays the beat, and does minor fills and variations to keep it interesting.
I’m looking to replicate something like that in Reaper, but also pick a number of bars. Eg, 24 bars, 120 bpm rock drums. So it would finish at the set number of bars.
I’m specifically not looking to program a drum track manually (too labourious) and not a pre-recorded specific length backing track (not configurable enough).
Does anyone have pointers for what that kind of thing might be called, or any software to point me to? I don’t mind paying for a good quality one.
And similar to what @Socio suggested, JK, is MT Power Drum Kit which is free with option to donate.
Like EZD it comes with many preset drum grooves. Yoy do have to do a little listening to put together the sequence you want which can include intro, a set pattern, and matching fills.
It also doesn’t sound bad.
I started with it and used it on my first few originals. A year back I upgraded to EZD on a Black Friday super sale that made it a more affordable value for money acquisition.
I cannot speak for Reaper, but I know that Ableton and Ardour both have a “cue launching” capability along with supplied drum, bass, and chord sequence loops that are pretty good for building backings.
For Reaper, I suspect EZ Drummer or MT Power Drumkit are the best options.
JK, I don’t know, if I get you right on this, but I think I understand, that obviously you are looking for an option to create a defined number of bars, rather than an endless, steady, ongoing drum track.
Last week, I checked out some options / first steps in Garage Band. You have the option to add virtual drumtracks in separate sections of the same track that can be adjusted to individual needs, but you don’t have to configurate them. You are able to create drum track “regions” (is that maybe the expression, you are looking for, as it’s used in other applications too?), for any desired number of bars. Will say, you could split the whole drum part into sections (“regions”), adjust them for the different parts of the song (more silent/louder/intro/outro/switch off parts/instruments of the given drumkit) to create some alternation between the parts of a song with a reasonable amount of effort (that’s how it should be ). So you don’t have to go with the same beats through the whole song, but can accentuate different sections.
What I don’t know is, how it’s possible to export out of GB and import this track into reaper into your song project.
Sorry, if I wasn’t on the right track…
Good choice JK. You can either drag and drop the samples into your Reaper track or use the song builder option to create the kind of loops you are looking for. Loads of samples of all song parts. Plus if you ever want to import a GuitarPro multi track midi file, you can tweak the drum sound if you have a number of kits to draw from. Enjoy.
Well I choked a bit on the price of EZD, I thought it was 99 euros but that’s the upgrade, it’s 179! So I tried MT Drummer which is pretty good, but the kit sound isn’t what I’m after. They’re both pretty easy to use though, it turns out. Took a bit of fiddling around but no manual reading. EZD sounds insanely good.
I’ll see how far I get with the 10 day trial of EZD and cross my fingers a discount code comes up.
My kids were kind enough to gift me the cost of EZDrummer, so it got installed once I’d done my recent computer / audio interface upgrade. I’ve only had time to scratch the surface but I’m quite impressed. It’s easily plenty for my needs.
). So you don’t have to go with the same beats through the whole song, but can accentuate different sections.
