While it's easy enough to make drum patterns and beats, it's a little trickier to make realistic sounding drum kits. Here's how to convince yourself and others using Propellerhead Reason.  

Build From a Solid Foundation 

What About Hats? 

 

Building An Environment 

Conclusion 

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Sound Designer, Musician, Author... G.W. Childs has worn many hats. Beginning in the U.S. Army back in 1991, at the age of 18, G.W. began learning electronics, communications and then ultimately audio and video editing from the Department of Defense. Upon leaving the military G.W. went on to work for many exciting companies like Lu... Read More

Discussion

Nhuyy
How to buy reason 6 or 7
cj
Hi! This sounds interesting but I get stuck at, "Of course, Kick and Snare are still on the same mix channel. I’ll grab the cable going into the right input (Remember: We panned the snare to the right, earlier.), and route it into the Mono input of the Snare drum... " I'm not sure what cable you mean. The only cables I saw in back of the rack are from MAIN AUDIO OUT. And the screenshots don't follow both ends of the cable, so I'm not sure where they begin or terminate. It would be great to see a pic of the final wiring.

As long as I'm asking, I'm confused why AUDIO OUT 3-16 doesn't include 1 & 2. Are 1 & 2 the same as MAIN AUDIO OUT?
Mitch
Those cables he is referring to are from the main audio out. He panned the kick and snare all the way to the left and right, so that the left and right cables on the main audio out would isolate the kick and snare.

As for 1&2 vs 3-16... if you look in the mixer menu for the drums (where you can set volume, pan, tone etc of each drum), you will notice an aux 1 and aux 2 knob. This sends that output (at the desired level) to aux 1 or aux 2. This is in contrast to routing the bus to 3-16, which is done by right clicking in the programmer. The reason for this is so you can use 3-16 for individual channels, whereas aux 1&2 are for multi-channel outputs.

Example: I want individual audio channels for each piece of the drumset (kick, snare, toms, overhead), as well as a drums-only output to put through Demolition for crunch, and a LF heavy full audio mix to be sent to reverb. I could go to each drum, assign them to 3-16 for the mix channels. Then, by using the aux 1 and 2 knobs for each individual pad, I could make the kick snare and drums all send audio to aux1 to be sent to Demolition, and make all pads (with higher levels for kick and toms than snare and overheads) send their audio to aux2 to be sent to my reverb module.

This allows you to create extremely fine tuned drumsets -- in the above example, I would have reverb receiving all of the drumset through aux 2, Demolition receiving all of the drums (no cymbals) through aux 1, have each pad go through it's own mix channel for compression and/or EQ, then have a multichannel mixer that receives all the pad samples, the Demolition audio, and the full-wet reverb, which can then be gain staged and panned perfectly.

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