Why Did I Ever Break Up With That SuperModel and Why Haven’t I Been Using This Piece Of Software I Paid Good Money For?

Life is full of many important questions. Here’s one of mine. You’re read a great review of a piece of software, you buy it, install and run thru the presets and then you get busy, you go back to your old tired ways. You load up that same overused Metamorphosis loop or the boring conga samples you always use. WTFN? – it’s not like the deaf producer you’re workin’ for can tell a difference between Tito Puente and your stiff, grimy fingers poking at your keyboard-right? Why am I not currently using something I bought?

So I stumble across a piece of software the other day – launch it and begin messing around, thinking it sounds really good an why the fuck I haven’t been using it - and decide to really dig into it. It’s kinda like finding the phone number of that booty call you used to frequent, then kinda forgot cuz you were in love, and just looking at the number makes you all dizzy and makes your stomach churn like a 13 year old girl at a Jonas Bros show.
The booty I called up is Drumcore and it’s inner child Kitcore. Drumcore is a standalone working thru Rewire and Kitcore is an “in your host app plugin.”

I originally bought the Submersible Music product (hence lovingly referred to as Sub - www.submersiblemusic.com) because of the reviews, the sound quality online, the variety of sounds – and my frustration with Stylus’s lack of real drummer grooves and kit selection. Don’t pressure clamp my balls and rant about Backbeat – I burned out on those grooves 3 years ago. The Sub products fell into the area I like – killer sound with a quick and easy interface.
Well, Drum/Kitcore and I got to know each other again with some really great makeup sex involving wire brushes.

The Preamble (aka Scooter rants on making music not clicking the mouse or staring blankly at computer screen):
1. Manuals: I never read manuals. Believe me, after I have gone thru the usual excruciating process of installing my new purchase, authorizing it, getting it working inside my host seq – well, Martha – I just want to fucking play the thing - not read another intolerable manual.
2. Interfaces: All software interfaces should be at a 3rd grade reading level or lower. Developers need to put all the usual knobs/sliders, the actual knobs/sliders people use - really big and obvious on the first page. Put all the fancy shit programmers jerk off to on another page.
3. All developers should be required to have short tutorials on their website on how to setup their product on various DAWs. Some do, including Submersible, most do not.

Back to the story . . .
Sub did a good job here meeting most of my requirements of great software for working fast and making money. Talk about easy? Kitcore is like a drunk, soon-to-be divorcee perched on a barstool looking to get even with her cheating Ex. Even the bass player has a chance!

48 Pads of drum samples divided into 2 pages – Drums & Percussion. You select kits in a pull down menu. Sub violates one of my cardinal rules here on the interface – where’s my humongous forward/backward preset kit button to change kits???? To beat a dead horse – I’m pretty sure everybody who buys a soft synth at some point is going to want to change patches – and since it seems more likely that Sarah Palin will win the Nobel Prize in Physics before manufacturers come up with a standardized method for keystrokes, I want a big damn UP and DOWN button. OK, rant over, I’ve cried in the shower and I feel better.

Thank God Kit’s list pops up to the last one you selected and you don’t have to scroll down to the bowels of hell to find what you want - like when selecting a font in Word.
Hold Control (never read a manual just try either Control or Option while clicking anything – never fails to work) and click on a drum sound to substitute another kick from another kit – that’s sweet and easy. Basically you have to stick to the layout though – kicks only go in the kick slot. Snares only in the snares slots. Fine 99% of the time unless, of course, I wanted to record my multi movement symphony of cowbells – a brilliant work, btw, that features 71 players with different cowbells all playing as loudly as they can.

Hold on – let’s talk sound quality for a moment. What I’ve been doing is like telling you I just got laid and never once mentioning how beautiful and charming the girl was. Because when it comes to picking up girls – uh - working with software, easy is one thing – but quality - that inescapable desire to hit it over and over – is where the nectar is. And Sub has it. The kits are built from famous drummers the world over. These guys have slapped more skin than a bipolar foster parent with an empty beer fridge. These kits really, really sound great. Lots of samples per key. Easy to play, easy to make sound good – even if you lost half your digits in the wood chipper. Of the drummer packs that I have, by far the strength of Kit is in creating a realistic drummer vibe. But HipHop, drum machine, processed collections aren’t absent – just not as profuse. Kitcore’s real strength is real drumming.

I found a few patches (Ben Smith Oil, Alan White Brownesque) that I felt the kick drum was too low in volume compared to the snare. No big deal. I highlighted the kick pad, then in the “Pad Settings” raised the volume slider and I got the mix I wanted. I then changed kick drums but when I went back to one of those patches – Kit had kind of saved my settings. But it didn’t save it. Hold on, what if I change to another drum kit preset? Does Kitcore automatically change the one I just left? Yeah, it does. Now I fucked up my Alan White kit. Ahh, but if you reinstantiate Kitcore, Alan White is back! I talked to Sub about this and they had two ways of going and it makes sense. Say you are working on a HipHop track. You’ve picked the kit you love, now you want to hear all of their famous drummers play their licks with this kit. That’s the way KitCore works now and that’s the way most of us would work in real life. However when you first load it up and you’re just bouncing thru sounds, it was a little disconcerting to hear Matt Sorum’s big badass rock kit playing New Orleans style rhythms. If Sub did it the other way, where the original kit was loaded when you selected a groove, then you’d have to keep reloading your HipHop kit to hear it the way you want. I suggest Sub keep it the way it is and add a button that says something like “Load Original Kit Used On This Groove”. See? I just solved another one of the world’s problems - now onto corrupt Italian politics.

Each drum pad has Pan and Pitch as well – easy – right in front – the pitch is a nice feature and simple – I do wish “Option Click” reset the fader to the original pitch cuz it slows me down trying to get the slider exactly back on zero. The pitch has the word “original” that pops up when you get back to center – Vol and Pan do not – which led me to notice that panning is subtle in the presets. All of the samples are super high quality stereo 48k/24b files and Sub is leaving it up to you to get more extreme, dare I say risqué, in your panning if desired. I like a wide stereo image – just like my women - so I found that I was pushing the Pan sliders pretty far left and right – and because this is all about me - I wish Sub had set things up in a wider stereo placement as part of the preset – just to make my life easier – and then let me pull the cabassa more center if I wanted. All this pushing and pulling and pulling and pushing. I’ve got this weak, arthritic wrist thing going. My Mom warned me about going blind – but she never said I might not be able to thrust and tug on my sliders. Small gripe? Absolutely.

KC (cuz we’re BFFs now) has a thing called Live Drummer, which is a slider that brings some realistic feel into your lifeless midi grooves by subtly changing velocities on samples – this thing really works! No more messing with velocity on individual drum hits – I love this feature. The newer libraries with lots more layers on each drum work best. Now if only Sub made it for that Euphonium player that was in here last week! Talk about no feel, no emotion! I’m going back to bass trombone from here on out. I might have had some fun with the labeling of the slider though– you get only Off at one end, Default in the middle and Max on the right (with 100 variations in between) but how could they not have labeled these “Stiff Republican Robot Drummer With Nonexistent Feel” on one end and “Doped Up Groove Meister Most Likely Carrying Weed You Can Bogart From Him” on the other??

Groove Section (midi grooves) – this is too easy! Like hooking up with your sister (shout out to my Nashville friends – what’s up????!!!!!) Select either Drummer or Style. You can further filter by selecting Feel. That reminds me of the only good line in “Leatherheads” – Clooney says “You’re only as young as the women you feel.” You can also cut to the chase by going with Fills or Loops. Thank you Submersible for allowing me to search fills – all the fuckin fills (yeah, you hit ALL on the left, unclick LOOPS on the right and make sure you have selected FILLS and sure as mommy did the milkman, every fill in your Kitcore library is there.) Do I want more Fills? Always, but being able to list the fills and choose? Priceless. Why is it that every time I hear a drummer play all they do is fill, fill, fill. Then they make a drum loop library and there ain’t a fill to be found!

Attention Drum Loops Makers!!!! The fills are the hard things to create for us rhythmically challenged Neanderthals. Please add shitloads of fills to your libraries – better yet, release libraries of fills only.
Also! The ability to search for all fills should be required of all drum software makers under penalty of death! No even better – torture them first – then kill them.

Time to import your groove to your seq? Just drag either the name of the loop or the cool little midi graphic to your Seq – blam! AC/DC is on the phone.

KC has a cool window under the midi groove that displays original tempo, meter, duration and feel - this is where Sub could tell me which kit was originally used to create the groove - especially when it comes to Latin styles and quirky grooves where the right samples on the right pads is key to the sound. Yeah, I know a Latin groove with 808 samples is dope and “I’m a genius cuz I swapped out some drum sounds on a midi loop” – but if I want authentic Latin, I gotta keep bouncing around thru drums sets till I think I get the right one. And did I? Is Luis Conte gonna beat down my door when the timbale part is erroneously being played on the conga rim?

When you have both Kitcore and Drumcore installed, you have a choice of pointing to either data library. I have mine pointing to Drumcore. But if you do that, not all of the audio grooves in Drumcore exist as midi files and Kitcore only plays midi grooves. So if you open the folder from MPC Lockbox, there aren’t any midi grooves because none exist – which is stylistically weird since all the grooves are Hiphop/dance things. Also, my MPC Lockbox single drum hits won’t show up if I steer the Kitcore Data location to Kitcore and not Drumcore. This seems awkward and I feel like I would be missing some killer sounds by pointing my Kitcore to the wrong data. Granted, I imagine not many users own both Drumcore and Kitcore so they’d never notice it but still, it should be addressed. (Sub says they are going to put up a FAQ that explains how to incorporate the KitCore kits into the DrumCore database so you only have to have one Uber library going.) – Note to self: Can we get an editor in here to make sense of that paragraph? It was long-winded and confusing and started to sound like a typical review in a music magazine.

Which one should you get? If you absolutely love the audio only grooves that some of Sub’s drummers recorded, and you like to roll your own, i.e., load custom drum samples into DrumCore and make your own presets – you have to go with Drumcore. On the other hand, Kitcore is easier to use than Drumcore. The drums are plainly laid out, the controls you need are handy, it’s just right there at your fingertips, all on one page. Drumcore is a bit deeper but you get more. When you select a groove, you get all of the audio and all of the midi and all of the fills laid out before you. It seems quicker to get a full groove laid out for a song. But you also gotta open another window to change individual drum kit sounds. And with Drumcore you’re working in a stand alone program so you gotta keep switching back and forth and remembering to either turn on the Transport/Sync button to control your host and vice versa – or not. BTW, I found it disconcerting that when you load a kit in DrumCore, no sound is made the first time you hit the key. I had to gliss up and down to load all the samples so that I could play a groove. The default is that the sounds are not loaded until a midi event is sent to that pad. It saves on memory because you’re not loading a bunch of sounds you aren’t using. There is a setting in the DrumCore preferences to check that says “Preload drum kit on startup or select.” Personally, I don’t care about memory. I’ve lost most of mine thru careless, immature behavior so why should I give a damn about the memory on my MacPro? Sub is considering changing the default to loading all the drum sounds on select and I agree 100%. Coincidentally the same amount I think Obama should be President.

Since I have both Sub programs (visualize blatant boasting and displaying of large male genitalia) – I use Kit for my drums and midi grooves cuz it’s easy and I prefer plugins over standalone software. I use Drumcore for all of the audio grooves I can’t get in Kitcore plus I’m toying with creating a couple of custom kits.

Kitcore is my go to realistic drum sample program now. I’m even beginning to transition to using it on some dance tracks but I have to run it in multi out mode in order to get the separation for each drum (which usually has some kind of effect/processing going on).

For me, there’s always a fine balance between killer sounds and ease of use. I won’t touch anything that doesn’t sound great. And that includes female singers. But if an app is too difficult, I won’t use it. When you’re on a deadline or too drunk to screw, you don’t want demanding and complex. You want instant, straightforward satisfaction and no last names. Or cell numbers. Yes, you can buy drum software that comes with varying mic placements and effects and 1,000 options and 14,000 ways to waste your day. Or you can hire a real drummer. Submersible covers that middle ground where most of us work most of the time and does it really, really well.

Be sure and download their latest manual online since it has more info than the one on my install disk and check out the nicely done video tutorials at www.submersiblemusic.com.

Also, I’ve been told that Submersible will be releasing a new drummer pack from Stephen Perkins of Jane’s Addiction fame on November 25th. That will be sweet and rockin’.

The “If I Controlled The World” Section:
I wish dance/techno/rave/house/breakbeats were better represented but that might be in the works. I also believe -because of the effortless interface - film grooves – you know, cool, atmospheric, phased, filtered, odd drum grooves – would be extremely popular for Sub to release.