?As you may know by my bombardment of blogs pertaining to my recent jump into Steinberg Cubase SX3, I've jumped head first in midi sequencing (in between tracking a few remaining local bands). Today was my first day using SX3 with my writing partner, Daniel Sexton. I had a few major glitches that took their toll on the day's productivity. The biggest was figuring out that by default, Cubase SX3 wasn't choosing the proper M-audio drivers my Delta 1010. This was causing weird sync issues among other things. It turned out that is was a simple fix...if I had known that driver selection was done in a window called “VSTbay”. .....(I'm not near capable of writing anything close to what Steinberg spits on, but maybe “drivers” would have been a better title).

Anyway, after a few not so minor hangups, we were off and running. It's quite clear that Cubase SX3 is MUCH better for arranging (and everything else for that matter) than Cubase VST 5.0. I'm 100% glad I upgraded.

The big update for the day came from teaching myself about “groove”. You see, I'm no musician. I just like noise and bought a bunch of recording gear 5 years ago. I know nothing about school teacher terms except for what a few rock bands have taught me. Anyway, I've done a lot of reading online and there is a lot of talk about “groove”. While the word “groove” is not exactly “crescendo” (or however you spell it), it is not exactly explained in the home recording manual, either.

After sequencing a couple of songs that were EXTREMELY stiff, quantized drums, it was clear that there was a better way of doing it. After reading about groove, it was time to teach myself how this whole “groove” thing really works.

You have read about drummers being “in the pocket”, “ahead of the beat”, or “behind the beat”. Basically, the way I understand it, “in the pocket” means the drummer is pretty much right on beat. I guess you could sort of call this “neutral”. “Ahead of the beat” basically means the snare (I think) is being hit a tad early in relationship to the rest of the kit. This can create a “pushed” feel and make a song feel a tad faster and a tad rushed. “Behind the beat” appears to mean the same beat is played with the snare slightly late. This makes things feel slowed down.

It's important to note that this is fairly subtle thing. I really can't “hear” it. I just sort of feel it. You almost have to trust your gut somehow. (It's kind of like how if a guitar is out of tune a certain way it can make you want to throw up, only this is a tad more subtle).

I was amazed at how much I could get away with when it came to simply moving kicks, snares, and hi hats around. Basically, the drummers I've recorded are VERY human because I can do my best to randomly tear up a midi sequence and it will hold together pretty nicely. Just randomly moving the timing around of various drums seam to make everything sort of “come alive” if you will. It sounded a lot less like a machine playing.

I did A LOT of volume manipulation was well. I wanted every single hit to be as different as possible. I noticed there were certain trends where, for example, if two kick drums were hit very close to one another, many times the second needed to come down (for this particular song anyway).

After manipulating the timing of basically everything to be a lot more random and adding quite a bit more dynamics, I'd say my drum tracks improved by about 3000%.