It’s February, already. Dammit.

I’ve been stuck on the drums in Future Imperfect for ages, succeeding only in making tiny incremental advances. Not working. 

I’m not a drummer, but when I flail wildly with the sticks on the old rubber pads, sometimes great stuff happens that couldn’t have been done on the step programming/pressing the keys on the synth technique. And I’m greedy. I want the coolness, all the way.

But this incremental thing isn’t working. There’s some drum fills and hi-hat stuff that I can’t do at 135bpm.

Therefore, I’m trying something slightly different. I’ve copied the entire project’s timeline and dropped the time signature to 120 bpm, and I’ve got a simple guide click track that follows all the 4/4 : 7/8 changes with beat hints, and I’ve replaced the new bass track (which rocks, by the way, no problem playing that in time) with a cloned MIDI version and dropped that into the new project – instant 120bpm guide bass to play along with (I know, I could stretch the original audio track using tools like Audition or even the built-in tech in SONAR, whatever it’s called, to get it to 120bpm, but this quantized MIDI bass track is working better for me, so there.)

If it breaks the block, it’ll be worth it.Now I’m trying to record the drums again, but at 120 bpm instead of 135. When I’m done, I’ll just copy the MIDI notes back into the original project, and hopefully we’ll have an excellent drum track, at the right tempo, that meshes with the existing bass audio and other instruments.