I Write Songs At Home

In putting together my standard band I start with the drums. Battery, which is part of the Native Instruments Komplete suite includes perhaps the greatest collection of sampled drum sounds ever committed to software. Of course, I would probably say that about every component of the Komplete application.

I am not familiar with some of the Komplete applications. That includes Battery. Some people enjoy the learning curve aspect of getting into a new application. I am not one of them. I like to just know and go. In a case like this I try to find out just enough to get done what I need to do and learn the rest later.

I do ultimately try to sit down and read the whole manual. I would STRONGLY suggest that you do that with any new application. Today’s software is so mature that doing so always produces pleasant surprises that makes things easier in the long run.

My original plan was to create a custom drum kit to be my standard kit, but Battery comes loaded with preset kits, so why stop being lazy now? A quick run through the kits and I made my decision. All of the kits sounded good, but I notices there were differences in how they were laid out on the keyboard. Because this is to be my standard and I normally use General MIDI format to set up my drums I chose the GM kit. I can always replace individual sounds when I need to.

A word about General MIDI drums: since the MIDI key layout is the same in all situations there is no need to ever get used to a new layout. That is why I settled on General MIDI for drums a long time ago, even though it was different from how I would have set up my drums. The geniuses who invented GM probably knew better than I what would work.

The untitled clip in the sidebar illustrates an early experimentation with the Roland TR-606 Drumatix drum machine. Although it sounded far from drumlike to my ears, it taught me that it was possible to make even primitive tools work depending on the situation. 

Also in the sidebar is Native Instrument’s own video about Battery.