One of the biggest weaknesses in the home or small studio has always been recording drums and percussion. Other instruments were easier: whether you went the all-synthesizer route, or chose to mix MIDI sounds with guitar, piano, or other acoustic instruments, you could get some pretty good results.

But setting up real drums in a small studio . . . brrr-r-r. Tricky mic placement, lots of gear, lease-breaking volume levels. The alternative — playing a drum track on a keyboard, or even a good MIDI drum controller, was always a challenge. It's hard to play a credible drum part on a keyboard, even if you are a practiced drummer.

DrumCore: the database that grooves.

And if that weren't enough, finding the right sounds was always a challenge. After years of gathering all the drum samples I could find, I actually got to the point where I found that having a lot of drum samples on my hard disk was almost a bigger problem than not having enough. If you take the time to get all that stuff on there, you oughta be able to use it when inspiration strikes. But in reality, you usually fall back into the swamp of searching and auditioning.

Now, from the land of the Experience Music Project, comes a program designed to solve those problems, and it has really helped and impressed me. Submersible Music DrumCore is essentially a database of celebrity drum grooves that plays in perfect sync with Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software such as Ableton Live, Apple Logic, Cakewalk Sonar, Digidesign Pro Tools, MOTU Digital Performer, Sony Acid, and Steinberg Cubase.

To use DrumCore, you simply pick a famous drummer by his name or style and then drag and drop his groove into a track (audio or MIDI) in your DAW. But you can also customize the sounds and phrases extensively, as I'll explain.

DrumCore runs on both Windows and Mac. It contains stereo audio loops, MIDI beats, and a MIDI-controllable virtual drum instrument (i.e., a soft synth). The version I reviewed lists for $249 but street price is $149. There's even a free version (see the "Different Drummers" sidebar).

The Basics

DrumCore comes with a sizable and useful bunch of loops, arranged in a songlike format which Submersible calls GrooveSets that groups a basic beat with associated fills and variations. Different styles are represented by an array of hot professionals like John Bishop of Ernie Watts fame, Missing Persons' Terry Bozzio, Jeff Anthony, Luis Conte doing Latin percussion, reggae master Sly Dunbar, the dynamic Matt Sorum of Velvet Revolver, Brooks and Dunn's Lonnie Wilson, funkmeister Zoro from Lenny Kravitz, and others. You can also purchase a number of add-on sound libraries called DrummerPacks that are mostly great.

The grooves are presented as both audio loops, MIDI versions of the loops and MIDI-controllable samples of the individual drums in the kit. The component recordings feature 48kHz, 24-bit resolution.

So how does this abundance of grooves work with my too-many-samples problem, you may logically ask. And I'm glad you did, because it brings up DrumCore's clever database capabilities. It is really easy and fast to find lots of loops, and audition them either solo or in the context of any tracks you may have already laid down in your DAW. You can also use it to organize your existing loops; the database reads common file formats such as WAV, AIFF, Acid, and REX, Propellerheads' sliced-audio format.

DrumCore's main window (Figure 1) is simple but powerful. You can set the main scrolling area to search by Drummers, Styles, or DrummerPacks. As soon as you highlight any one of these, the "Basic Grooves" area to the right displays the names of all the basic grooves available for that Drummer or Style. At the same time, the area below that shows all the available variations of the basic groove you selected, including fills and single hits, in both MIDI and audio format.

Click on one, hit your spacebar, and it plays, either solo or in sync with your DAW tracks: your choice. It's simple and efficient work to go through the choices this way, narrow them down, and find what you need. Most grooves offer four to ten variations, but some have nearly 80. But overall, there are plenty, and they are plenty useful.

Fig. 1: DrumCore's ergonomic main window gives you about 95% of what you need to use the program. (Click to enlarge.)