Drum Kit Demo

Drum Kit Demo

by David Westbrook

The kit contains 7 different drum sounds, some of which are standard (such as Drum) and some of which are mine.

All the different sounds in the kit are played by one player, using special words to redefine the instrument when- ever a different drum is to be "hit". In this way a reasonably full drum part can be built up whilst leaving the maximum resources for musical parts.

There are a couple of limitations: first, because all this instrument- swapping demands a lot of processing, things can go wrong if you try to play very fast on lots of drums; second, the mix between drums has to be preset since the mix fader will just raise or lower all the drums at once. If you want to change the balance, you can do so by editing the AMP setting in the instrument words.

Each sound has a normal instrument name, plus a 'calling word', which calls the instrument and plays a hit. The drum sounds available are as follows:

INSTR. CALLING

NAME DESCRIPTION WORD

drm Drum as bass drum dr

lcy Low-pitch cymbal lc

hcy Higher cymbal hc

sn1 First snare drum s1

sn2 Another snare s2

rsh Rimshot rs

whip Slashing noisy sound wh

A typical 'calling word' looks like this:

"s1"[1VOICEŸsn1 X]

In a score, the only words you write are the 'calling words'. A typical simple pattern would be:

"drumpart"[

dr/// dr/// s1/// dr///

]

This plays a simple 4/4 bass & snare beat, each sound being called as needed.

You can easily experiment for yourself so have a go - drumpart1 & 2 in this program illustrate the technique.

To get a SPOOLed version of the kit to use in your own programs, type 'spool' & have a disc ready to receive the program You can then get the kit into your own programs by typing '*EXEC S.drums'.