Can we talk about creation of drums?

Ghost notes… are they just quieter hits you don’t really notice? What do you do to achieve them?

Typically, it’s a hit between the hits. With drums, it’s a snare hit with a lot less energy.

In electronic music producing, it will sound dull, so I use another snare / snare layer, with less volume or equal volume.

Here a pattern example I just did, ghost notes with the NI 70s drummer in Kontakt, you can see where I use strong notes (2 and 4) and where I use ghost notes (in between).

Sorry I didn’t see your message earlier, feel free to ask me whenever you struggle with drums.

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I found an easy trick to get a good swing without midi inspired by your video. A signal delay pushes all the 1/16 even trigger forward in time

This is the patch, transit control the ammount of signal delay swing2.vcv (75.0 KB)

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If you want more advanced swing (and venture into actual micro-rhythms), I recommend the Quad Algorithmic Rhythm and its Groove Expander. You can set up various length swing patterns all under CV control :slight_smile:

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This is a great question. I will be thinking about the answer for days I think. Could you give some background, or influences? Possibly a patch? What sounds “good” and “interesting” to you? If it’s too random, is it even yours? Who knows, but thank you for igniting thought.

I tried qar with the expanders today the groove one and after with warp i love them , especialy modulating warp expanders give resault that i like

and your compressor!

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I am really into the new Bifurcator for ghost notes. It gives you random CV and single triggers (1,2,4 or 8) - combine that with different drum sounds and use the cv for modulating volume and/or sample and you have instant groove when mixed with a “normal” beat.

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I have not messed around much with drums yet, because I’m more interested in sound effects, but I’ll sometimes set up a random note generator & quantizer just to test out some sounds. I decided that completely random got boring, so I hooked up LFO-1, CLOCK-DIV, SEQ-3, Strum’s GATES, Stalys’ “8 NOT Operator”, Bogaudio’s UMIX, OFFSET, QNT, Squinky Labs’ SLADE, ML’s SHIFT REGISTER (with a slow LFO-1 triangle wave feeding it, nicer than Noise).

The star of the show is the Shift Register. A fresh value is clocked in every time the “16” o/p from CLOCK DIV goes low. I couldn’t figure out what was going wrong until I realized that I needed a NOT operator for the trigger.

The SEQ 3 selects which of the Shift Register’s outputs are sent to the quantizer. It sounds nicer if the quantizer is limited to either a diatonic or pentatonic scale in one or two octaves,

At any rate, I get a random melodic phrase that repeats a couple of times, then changes by getting a new note at the front and dropping the oldest note art the end. Just enough similarity to make it seem almost planned.

So I’m thinking this could make an interesting thing to do for percussion. A random phrase that changes regularly by just a bit. channelling Steve Reich