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Drum Perfect Pro newbie question - fills

Hi all,

I would really appreciate a steer in the right direction from anyone who knows about this amazing app. I just bought it, read through the manual, done some digging, but can’t seem to find anything about creating fills. Am I missing something?

How do you create / trigger fills? Can these be randomly generated? Or do you have to program them? I’d like to play along with the pattern and then trigger a fill at my own leisure. Or trigger a fill at say, every 4 bars.

Thanks.

Comments

  • Well, basically you have two options:

    1. Create “regular” fills. Those you basically program yourself and you put them in the correct spot in the timeline. If you have a 4 bar beat that repeats twice and you’d like a fill on the last bar of the second one you either have to copy your regular bar and adjust it accordingly, or you use the “link chains & probability” (below) on your “regular bar”.


    2. Use link chains & probability. Chains are basically linked hits that happen if another hit has happened. If the first hit didn’t happen, the second won’t happen either. The chain is therefore your "fill". For that first “trigger” hit to happen you can either set it to 100% probability but set it to only happen every second repeat of that pattern. If that is too much you can lower the probability of it happening at all, but that might also mean there isn’t a fill happening at all.

    I normally do a combination of both things above, to get natural variation of the fills, as I find it boring if the drummer would do the same fill every time, everywhere. It does mean I need to create more patterns, but as the copy/paste function is working really well, it is a rather quick job, for a really great result.

    The benefit of doing both is also that you can do the probability thing on various other random hits too, which means no repeat of a pattern will ever sound alike, unless you want them to.

    But no, there is no automatic “create fill” button. I don’t see how there could be given the nature of DPP.

  • Amazing thank you. I’ll investigate further. Sounds like DPP Does exactly what I want it to do - a real-sounding drummer who plays fills every now and then, but the fills aren’t always the same.

    Thanks!

  • It’s excellent at that.

    One repeating 8 beat pattern with all fills probability activated link chains.

    One repeating bar of 5/4 repeated with probability activated cymbals.

    One repeating bar of 4/4, divided into 16 sub beats. All the variation between each repeat is created solely by the DrumPerfect probablistic, humanising and two-handed restriction routines.

  • I have been DrumPerfect Pro curious. Does it come with a healthy-sized libraries of grooves that have these probabilistic fills in them that newbies can use as templates for creating their own?

  • @espiegel123 said:
    I have been DrumPerfect Pro curious. Does it come with a healthy-sized libraries of grooves that have these probabilistic fills in them that newbies can use as templates for creating their own?

    Umm, well having a look now, as you ask for it, I do see quite a bunch of patterns that I can load, and some demo songs. I haven't tested them myself though, as I prefer making my own. There is also an in-app store where you can buy themed ("jazz", "brazil", "rock" etc) kits, which includes both samples as well as patterns. Again, I haven't used those either.

    What I can say is that setting everything up in Drumperfect Pro can take some time. That is however time that pays back rather quickly after that, as you can copy/paste-non-destructively (i.e paste without deleting what was already there, so it basically just adds, it doesn't remove). This means if you do things repeatedly, chuck it into a pattern and forever after just copy/paste it in instead.

    DPP does take some getting used to. If you just wish to "rock on" with something really quickly, DM1 or Patterning is probably a lot quicker. However, if you are after the amount of control as some desktop drum software has, along with you already having access to multi-sampled drum samples, nothing else comes close to DPP on iOS. Yes, it will take some fiddling. Yes, it will take some getting used-to-time. After that you'll be able to rather quickly a song running where the drums sound both lively and real.

  • edited November 2018

    @jameslondon74 said:
    Hi all,

    I would really appreciate a steer in the right direction from anyone who knows about this amazing app. I just bought it, read through the manual, done some digging, but can’t seem to find anything about creating fills. Am I missing something?

    How do you create / trigger fills? Can these be randomly generated? Or do you have to program them? I’d like to play along with the pattern and then trigger a fill at my own leisure. Or trigger a fill at say, every 4 bars.

    Thanks.

    Hi,
    Hellquist has already well answered in detail this question, however as the man behind DPP IAP packs, I may be able to give more suggestions.
    If you are not a drummer it may be useful to learn and understand the function and form of a fill in different styles of drumming. There is a substancial amount of videos on YouTube that will provide excellent knowledge about it.

    But basically a fill is a piece of solo drumming that indicate the end of a section and the beginning of another. That’s why fills connect, in a traditional song structure, the verse, chorus, bridge, etc... they can be of any length, thought usually 1,2,3,4 beats or more and even anything in between is used. That means that the fill doesn’t always need to start on the beginning of the beat. However to keep things simple within DPP we could think of 3 lengths:
    Short: 1 beat ( replacing the last beat of the groove. )
    Medium: 2 beats
    Long: 3 or 4 beats.

    The groove can be played for 1, 2, 4, 8 bars before its end being «  filled « 
    The material used in the fill usually involves a combination of snare, toms and kick, with accents of a crash or splash.
    The rhythmic figure of a creative fill can be almost anything inside usual subdivisions of 1, 2, 3, 4, or even complex one of 5, 7.
    Dynamics are an important factor to consider too in a fill depending to where it leads.
    In DPP there are many ways to create fills. Not all are documented, it would take many volumes...
    Standard fills of let’s say 4 to 8 notes, are very easy to add to any pattern.
    To make many fills of your choice, you create empty patterns of 1/4 ( to 4/4 ) in which you program your strokes with the above mentioned drums. Then save them in a category named.... Fills, or Fills 1 beat, Fills 2 beats etc...
    Once you have a nice collection, make a copy of the groove pattern. Extend it to the number of repetitions ( 2,4,8 ). To do it Copy the pattern and Append as many times as necessary. You will get a pattern of 8,16 or 32 beats. Change the time signature to truncate the last beats of your groove corresponding to your fill length. ( 6, 14, 30 ) for a 2 beats fill. Then Copy and Append your fill to the modified groove.... et voilà! A groove with fill.

    Another way is to keep groove and fills separate and combine them in the song itself. Useful for long fills ( 1 bar ) . A nice way to try and choose many fills to a particular groove, is to insert your truncated groove pattern in the song timeline, keep a good collection of 1 or 2 beats fills, add them after the groove, and listen. Let’s say your groove pattern is 14 beats and next to it is your 2 beats fill. Put the « song in loop mode ( red button ) Select the Fill song pattern ( blue border ) and tap on any of your fills in the PatBank ( what I call the 64 patterns slots panel. ). You can listen to your groove with a different fill each time. If you like it it is possible to save it from the song ( glue ) or take note and rebuild them in Pattern view.

    Can the fills be randomly played, generated? Yes they can. But it may not be obvious at first. One may have to think out of the box. And realize the immense depth of DPP for creative drums tracks production.
    Not one but two ways here to do it. To your preference.
    As Hellquist very well explained, the Linked sets can be used to play randomly any of up to 16 fills per pattern. Not bad.
    However it is quite tricky to do if fills are long.
    4 fills of 1 beat could be a good start.
    Ex: 4 sixteen notes for the fills. Combinations of Sn, Toms, Kick.
    S-SS
    SSSS
    SST-
    SSTT
    STTT
    STTK
    TTTT
    TTTK
    SSTK
    ( for 2 beats fills, combine 2 fills of 1 beat ). Preferably end the fill with low pitched drums.

    Create 4 Linked Sets each with one fill. Same strokes can belong to any fill/linked set.
    Don’t forget to have all LS include a common stroke, which doesn’t need to play ( velocity 0 ). If each set is set to play at the same time ( every...at ) the LS ( fills ) will play randomly.
    It is even possible to augment the chance of a fill being played more often than others by duplicating it in a few other LS.

    The second approach is quite different. In Song View we need to create, for the fill following a groove, a random part. It is mostly for performance, although we can save the song which include many random parts in it.
    We need first to load few patterns of fills, same length.
    On the song timeline, just after the groove insert each of the fills you wish to play randomly. Select them, and LONG press the button Part ( this is the secret door to generative drumming... )
    The dialog open where you can give the name to the part «  Fill A « ....
    Close and now all your fills are inside a part.
    But instead of playing one pattern after the other ( usual behavior ) it will play once and they will be selected randomly. The more patterns of the same fill in the part, the more chance it has to play.
    Now you finally have your groove which will be followed by any fill of your cooking. For practicing with an instrument don’t forget to put the song in loop mode ( red ) . The more fills you add, the more variety it will give. This technique offers almost limiteless generative exploration once you master it. Especially if you wish to record the output on Audiobus for later on select and slice the best parts....

    If you have been able to read till now, you might be surprised to discover there are even more ways to randomly generate fills, as well as emulate a myriad of other realistic drums techniques.
    DPP doesn’t deceive there. But yes, like any musical instrument it takes time and dedication to become a virtuose.

    A last suggestion. The packs coming as IAP contains many patterns, songs, and kits using many of these techniques. Their content is amazingly accurate and authentique following the genre of drumming ( Rock, Jazz, Funk, Metal, Brazilian, Afro Cuban, etc.. ) . To study how they are built can give an insight in some best practices and serve as a good start to create your own material for different projects.

    @espiegel123 said:
    I have been DrumPerfect Pro curious. Does it come with a healthy-sized libraries of grooves that have these probabilistic fills in them that newbies can use as templates for creating their own?

    Yes, to a certain extent. Please see the last paragraph above.

  • @Gilbert : thanks so much for the thoughtful reply!

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