hi i'm jane and in this video i am going to teach you step by step exactly how to create your very first simple drum track I'm going to use Reaper you can download that and use it for 60 days to evaluate it so you can certainly work through this tutorial and then it's very cost effective to buy if you find it's a good piece of software for you at the end of the video I'm going to let you to some extra resources because once you've got your first track in place you're going to want to progress so let's head over to my screen and see exactly how you do it step one start with an empty project step two make sure that you can see the virtual keyboard view virtual midi keyboard make sure that c2 is in the middle you can use your arrow keys to scroll up and down the octaves the reason we want c2 in the middle is because we're going to start with a kick drum which is on letter M on your keyboard or b1 if you're looking at a MIDI keyboard or note number 35 make sure that the MIDI keyboard is transmitting on channel 10 she's very important this is the channel that you use for drum tracks step 3 let's set up and enable the metronome so if we right click on the metronome button make sure that you do count in before recording so that you can hear the speed of the beats and you won't want it running while you're playing back because it'll just distract you so let's uncheck that books now that we've set it up click the button to make sure that it is enabled step 4 let's insert an instrument on a track so if we go insert virtual instruments or new track what we're going to use is we're going to use and this just comes built-in to Reaper in the instrument section the cakewalk TTS 1 which is a standard set of MIDI sounds and if we use channel 10 you'll see if we just click here that channel 10 has a GM two drum set this is a very standard drum set and we'll help you get going step 4 check that your track is armed for recording usually when you just insert a new track it automatically comes up armed for recording now right click on this button here check that you that you have got record MIDI overdub the reason you want to do this is because as you're looping the track round you want to add MIDI events to it you don't want to be wiping out drumbeats that you've already recorded you want to sort of build up layers of drums one on top of the other let's just check that the MIDI keyboard is working so if I just click on any of the notes here I can hear the drumbeats if I use my keyboard on my computer and hit M so I've got my drums all ready to go step 7 let's select a four bar section that I want to record into so I'm going to record four bars at a time just to show you how this works step 8 make sure that you're going to loop mode if you look at the transport bar you need to click click this button here and it should highlight green and that will loop around a section that you've highlighted ok now I'm going to do is I'm going to click record and then I'm just going to click the keyboard to make sure that comes into focus so that I can start pressing M on my keyboard and record a kick drum okay so now I've got a few events if I double click here what the step 10 is opening up the piano roll view that's just a few bits setting up I need to do here I'm going to scroll in a bit so we can see the section bit bigger because I've already been programming some drums I'm saved my notes as diamonds if you don't see diamonds you'll see little rectangles you might want to go here and view the piano roll notes and make sure that diamonds is selected now if we click anywhere here you'll hear that your knots at hearing drum sounds you're hearing a piano sound so what we need to do is filter so that we only hear drum sounds so I click the MIDI filter button here and check channel ten like that all the notes that I draw from now on will only go out on channel 10 and so I'll only hear the drumkit the next thing I want to do is I want to customize these note names here these numbers are not very intuitive so although I can hear that they're drums I'm not exactly sure which ones are which now in reaper and then most doors it's possible to customize the names of the notes which will make it much easier when it comes to doing more fine-tuning into programming all I need is a little text file with a drum map now if you go to my site you'll be able to download the general MIDI – drum map I've already prepared that so what I'm going to do is I'm going to choose file customize note names load note names from file and import the GM to drum map and now this is looking much better because what I'm seeing if names of drums so we've got crash cymbal cowbell mid Tom open hi-hat all the drum names net labeled and we've also got the note numbers which is very handy if you're trying to map them to the notes on the keyboard so you see here note number 35 on M is a kick drum the next thing to do is to line these beats up because although they're not too bad they're obviously obviously you want your drum pattern exactly in time so what you do is click anywhere in the grid right click drag and you can select all the events that you're interested in and then if you hit the quantize button okay you should see that they all shift to be exactly lined up with the beats on the bar just have to click OK to accept but it just did stick now let's have a listen so what we've got now is we've got a kick drum on every beat it's a classic four-on-the-floor beat and I'd like to actually move the second and the fourth beat on each bar up to the snare drum instead to get a different sounding pattern so I'm going to do is if I click that well there and then hold my ctrl down and click every other diamond so that I've expected them what I can do now is move them up onto their drum okay let's listen to what we've got now we've almost got our first simple drum track in place just to show you how to over two more drum patterns into this and then add a hand clap on the end of each fourth B to be sort of mean okay so I can either do that by drawing it in directly here by double-clicking where's my hand clap there okay it's to leave that or the other thing to do is to see which note it maps to note number 39 so that's the three on my keyboard okay what I'm going to do is I'm going to set the loop playing on the core and recording and I'm going to try and beat it in at the right time so let's go to the beginning by clicking this button here and let's start recording one two three four and one not quite on the beat nevermind as you've seen before we can just highlight those notes okay so those are the notes I'm interested in press the quantize button I don't want to quantize all the notes just the ones that I've selected okay and you can see that it's actually move them right onto the grid okay let's just play that at the beginning so there you go a simple drum track that I could now copy repeat add extra drums into add files and so on so if you hop over to my site now you can download a cheat sheet that you can have next to you while you're recording your first drum track and you can also download the gm2 drum map that I promised you and finally I really suggest that you take a look at hit it the ultimate guide to programming drums I've only covered a very basic pattern here you're going to want to build the beat up it put in more um variations fills learn how to humanize your drum tracks and so on and I really recommend this book it's fantastic resource so follow the link below and thanks for watching see you next time
