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

Get Your Re-Groove On

Even with the many CDs full of grooves Submersible Music offers — both with the basic software, and as aftermarket add-ons — it's not out of the question that you may not always find a groove that works for you. But even if you're picky, all is not lost. DrumCore can still help, via the approach I call (with apologies to the Firesign Theatre), "re-grooving."

The idea behind this approach is to lay down a scratch track with any instrument (including voice) that nails the groove you have in mind. Even if you have to sing it with nonsense syllables, record that and get the basic feel of your groove on a track in your DAW. Then find the MIDI groove in DrumCore that's closest to yours, and put it on the timeline next to your scratch track.

Usually, the simplest groove you can find is the best. I started with a guitar track with an eclectic, reggae-esque feel, and found a Sly Dunbar groove that was close, but doesn't fit the guitar groove exactly the way I wanted:

• Sly and I (52KB MP3)

Notice I laid in a number of iterations of a MIDI groove — a practice I recommend, just for flexibility and experimentation. (See Figure 4.)

Fig. 4: Cakewalk Sonar lets you make any timeline event, such as these MIDI clips (the orange squares) into a "groove clip" that you can drag out to repeat itself several times.

But the groove can be fixed. I looped the first bar and visually zoomed in tight, first on beat 1 and then beat 3. In this example, I didn't even have to listen, since the guitar transient and drum note were visibly far off on both beats. In Figure 5, for example, notice that on beat 3, the attack of the guitar strum is earlier than the kick and snare notes. The guitar anticipates the beat while the drum notes come after the beat. So I slid the drum notes earlier to line up more with the guitar hits on these two beats.

Fig. 5: In this groove, Dunbar plays the MIDI kick on beat 3 later than my guitar strum.

Figure 6 shows you how I've moved the MIDI note right onto the beat. In this case, I wanted the guitar to anticipate the kick a little.

Fig. 6: I slid the kick notes earlier, to line up with the guitar.

After tightening up the kick on beats 1 and 3, I moved on to the backbeats on 2 and 4. When you do this to your own tracks, at this point you should be hearing significant improvement in how the two tracks lock up. But you'll usually need to dig a little deeper. Since my guitar part had a bit of a shuffle feel on top of the reggae groove, I also moved a couple of the off-beat hi-hats to line up with the late guitar off-beats. I moved the second hi-hat at 1:01:572 and the ones just before the 2 and 4 a few ticks later.

You can get as tweaky as you like. As you hear problem areas, zoom in to one of those spots, use your ears to isolate any beats that sound ragged and see what you can do with them. Just sliding a few of the MIDI drum hits earlier or later lets you sting the guitar hits real tight.

The result in my file is a weird reggae/shuffle combination. I don't know if I'd use this in a song, but you can hear how much these small changes can lock the two parts together and give the drums a different feel:

• Sly and I — Tweaked (52KB MP3)

One thing I want to mention is that the MIDI versions of the DrumCore grooves are surprisingly good. They're filled with the same subtle ghost notes, tempo shadings, and generally hot playing as the audio files. So even though you shift a few of the basic notes around, the subtle stuff stays in place and keeps the groove live.