Review: Submersible Music DrumCore 2.5
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4

Speed of Sound

When you click on a groove, the tempo scale on the righthand side of the window — ranging from 40 to 240 bpm — immediately tells you the slowest and fastest tempi the groove will play without distortion. The red zones show where the samples won't sound optimal; black shows the good range.

This optimal range is usually pretty wide because of the way the grooves were recorded. In addition to the excellent drummers and top equipment, each groove, variation, and fill was recorded in increments of 10 bpm, to capture the subtle differences good drummers naturally impart to any given groove when they play it at different tempi. Digital time-stretching is a minor miracle, but if you've ever tried to use a loop played at 120 for a 80 bpm tune, you know it usually doesn't have the right feel. Obvious as a roach in the salad.

Another benefit of Submersible's multi-tempo approach is that because you don't have to speed up or slow down a single loop radically, you maintain the basic audio quality of the recording. Because DrumCore is a ReWire slave to your DAW software, the two communicate so that DrumCore automatically sets its tempo to the tempo of your project. This not only lets you audition loops at the right tempo, but tells you whether each loop will sound good at your tempo. Very convenient.

Of course, all these programmed decisions on whether a given groove matches a given song are suggestions — usually good suggestions, but suggestions nonetheless. Obviously, you and your muse can choose what you want.

Click on the Main Window's "More" button and you expand the window to show an even more detailed way to search. Dropdown menus and text boxes let you set search criteria by feel, file type, meter, single hits, comments, and filename. (See Figure 2.)

Fig. 2: The "More" button opens a set of detailed search options.

Overall, this setup gives you a fast, effective way to find the groove you need — ideal when you need to play and not spend time pushing computer buttons. For even finer editing, you can change around the drum samples each groove uses via the Drum Editor. (See Figure 3.)

Fig. 3: In the Drum Kit Editor, you can modify several parameters of the way the drum samples play back, including Mute, Solo, Volume, Pan, and Pitch.

Rocking in the Real World

The thing about the DrumCore grooves is that they aren't just loops, but are truly grooves, played by real drummers, and that's important. In every flavor of popular music, from jazz to bluegrass and punk to funk, what makes a tune work is the drummer, bass, and rhythm players consistently hitting certain beats of the bar together so they sound like one big instrument. It's important for lead players too, of course, but they usually have a lot more flexibility.

Rhythmic quantization, that great double-edged sword of electronically produced music, has been responsible for luring otherwise passionate musicians into accepting performances that technically are tight and on the beat, but often short on character. Unless you quantize piecemeal, you usually end up with every note locked to the beat or to some unvarying offset from the beat. But a groove played by a good musician has an individual character and feel in its phrasing, where notes on different beats are purposely on or off the beat to different degrees.

For example, a drummer might think of a tune in terms of two-bar phrases. He might hit bar 1, beat 1, dead on with the kick drum, but hit bar 2, beat 1, early. He might then trigger the kick a shade late on the third beat of both bars, and so on. It's really tough to make a drum line do this with quantizing.

But if you have a real drummer playing a groove that has the feel you want for your tune, you can lay in the drum track and then record the rest of the instruments, playing them so they lock to the drums, and end up with a tight, groove-intensive piece. And that's what you get from DrumCore's grooves.