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Reason's Redrum: Drum Samples Made Easy |
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Written by John Gellei
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Sunday, 29 November 2009 10:35 |
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Propellerheads have really done something great with their virtual drum machine, Redrum. The Redrum is a combination of easy drum samples sequencing, loading and manipulation.
by JohnGellei
Propellerheads have really done something great with their virtual drum machine, Redrum. The Redrum is a combination of easy drum samples sequencing, loading and manipulation.
Redrum includes ten strips to allow the user to modify parameters like Pan across ten different drum samples. Each instance of Redrum has these ten strips and controls, and you can actually load up multiple instances in a snap. Along with panning, there are rotary knobs for volume and also velocity controls, helping you to really sculpt the drums any way you want. To the left of the main window, there is a volume control that lowers or increases the volume of that instrument instance as whole as it pertains to the global project. This is macro leveling.
Looking at the channel strips available in Redrum, we can see that some knobs and levels are more self-explanatory than certain others. One of the more straightforward controls is the length. What does the length control pertain to? It affects the length of any of the drum samples. If you find that one of the hi-hats has an unnecessary reverb tail, you can cut it off by lowering the length (turn the knob to the left). This will help you sculpt samples creatively.
Another option that is instantly useable is the Pan option. You can pan each of the drum samples differently, achieving a great horizontal mix within seconds, regardless of the set of drums you're working with. This is another great thing about Redrum in general - everything is instantly viewable and modifiable. You don't need to trudge through a hundred menus. However, people that have not used Reason as an environment before may get confused with the interface to start with.
You might think that picking out ten different drum samples by yourself every time will be a tiresome task, you could be right. It all really depends on the person and how much patience you have at that point in time. But relax! There is something that will help you. Redrum comes with many pre-selected and pre-matched samples ready for your picking, and they are included in the factory Refills that are included with the sound libraries that comes with Reason. These samples have all been selected because they complement each other, so it's unlikely that you'll have to go looking much further.
At any point, there are sixteen button-type inputs at the bottom of the Redrum. This is where you can click in the drum samples you want, and while you can never see all patterns at the same time here, you can export the patterns to the main sequencer to keep track of them there. This is very close to the way things work in the real world, and Redrum (in fact, Reason in general) has a workflow that will prepare budding audio engineers and music producers for the hardware world very well.
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