Drum charters please read

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AbelArcher
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Drum charters please read

Postby AbelArcher » Sat Apr 29, 2017 9:33 pm

To drum chart experts that read this:
I want to chart drums more confidently, but I don't know much about it. Any general tips or rules of thumb I should follow?

Feel free to give a detailed answer, I'm going to need as much help as I can get. lol
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Re: Drum charters please read

Postby siavash » Sat Apr 29, 2017 11:12 pm

1. Make sure your chart is perfectly tempo mapped. Meaning you go through every measure the song and become certain that EVERYTHING is on-beat. All of my charts for the last two years have had hundreds of tempo anchors for this very reason. You can get by with crappy tempo mapping on guitar sometimes, but it's much less forgiving on drums.

2. Don't use tabs. Instead, see if you can find a good drumcam or accurate drum cover of the song, especially if you're having issues with some of the fills.

3. Drums are easier to chart since there's less room for "artistic license". What you see is what you get with drum charts. With that in mind, if the song uses more cymbals or toms than your charting program offers, then just focus on making the real-life hand motions accurate. What I mean by that is if the real song has a 16th note drum roll that changes toms 6 times, you should chart it in a way so that the player will have to move their hands to different drum pads 6 times as well. I hope that makes some sense.

That's all I could think of. If you're already well-versed in charting guitar, you'll find drums to be easier.
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Re: Drum charters please read

Postby ZSonicMaster » Mon May 01, 2017 8:43 pm

Synchronization is super important. With more well-produced songs you can usually just use a single beat anchor for the whole song (because the song is timed very strictly to a metronome), but as you reach further underground or further back in time, production values will decrease and the more beat anchors you'll have to add.

Use disco flip (hi-hat on red instead of yellow) in sections with fast hi-hat. It's too hard to play otherwise.

When charting a snare flam (two-handed hit on the snare, makes a loud cracking noise), chart it as two red notes as close together as possible. I used to chart this as a red and yellow, but I now realize that was a mistake.

In general, crash should default to orange, but often additional crashes will be used, which can be either yellow or blue.

Listen carefully to the music to determine whether the bass is going under a snare hit or not - it's a mistake to think this never happens.

Very very rarely it's permissible to chart red as a tom, in cases where you just absolutely need 4 toms.

If you make a song that requires 2 bass pedals to play (the case of most metal), make sure to make another difficulty that's playable with one bass pedal as well.
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Re: Drum charters please read

Postby AbelArcher » Tue May 02, 2017 3:48 pm

I know that a proper tempo map is needed, that's just common knowledge for charting. lol

And everything else is good to know, thanks guys. :)
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Re: Drum charters please read

Postby BombDude24 » Tue May 02, 2017 6:11 pm

No disrespect intended, but most of ZSonicMaster's suggestions are for GH-style drum charting, as opposed to the RB style, which I personally prefer. All my suggestions will be with RB style drum charting in mind.

Keep in mind that toms go in reverse order, compared to the 5 lane instruments (i.e., guitar, bass, and keys) meaning the highest pitched tom is yellow, and the lowest is green. If you use EoF, you can set cymbal notation by holding CTRL and pressing the respective color. (G for green, Y for yellow, B for blue) For cymbals, yellow is always closed hi-hat, (gives a very tight sound, there's no "splash" afterwards) blue cymbal is usually ride cymbal or open hi-hat, (in extended open hi-hat sections, I'd recommend using yellow instead) or splash or china cymbal, and green is generally just crash cymbal. There's songs where there will be exceptions, but those are the basics to keep in mind.

In sections with disco flip, make any notes that you want to be closed hi-hat hits into red, and change any snare hits to yellow cymbal notes, (cymbal notation here is important, yellow toms won't get swapped to red) and there needs to be a specific event to turn it on, which is [mix 3 drums0d] (this must be specific to Part DRUMS, which you can specify under Events in EoF) and makes all notes AFTER the beat with disco flip swap like previously mentioned. In order to turn it off, you need to use the Part DRUMS event [mix 3 drums0].

I personally wouldn't chart reds as toms in any circumstance, and I'd always chart flams as red+yellow tom at the same time. If there's a situation where it's not a flam, but two distinct notes hit one after the other with nearly identical dynamics, then I would probably chart them as two different notes, but just in general, hitting the pad with both sticks nearly at the same time feels a bit awkward.

Instead of creating a whole extra difficulty, you can add expert+ notation to bass pedal notes in EoF with CTRL + E. It might seem pretty simple, but a lot of people either overthink (or underthink) expert+. Expert+ notes should alternate, and in most 1/16th or 1/32nd beat rhythms, even in the case of when the beat is syncopated, (the focus isn't on the main beats) still have it so the pedal played on Expert only is on the beat, as much as possible. In triplet rhythms (i.e. 1/12th or 1/24th), Expert+ notes should still alternate, but at the very least, keep the Expert notes on the main beats as much as possible. In quick flourishes, like three hits in a row, have the first note be Expert, and again, alternate, so only the second note in that case should be Expert+. Also, if there's a rhythm that is constant double bass notes, the player should be expected to be able to play half of them with one foot each, seems simple, right? That means if there's a bass pedal rhythm that has half the notes of the aforementioned rhythm, you should be expected to be able to play it with just one foot, no matter how fast, if both rhythms are at the same tempo.

There's also ghost notes to keep in mind, which are snare hits that you can just barely hear, they're soft hits, but if you can hear them, you should still chart them. This also falls into the general rule that you should only chart something if you hear it, but filling in the gaps in a constant hi-hat rhythm or something where a few notes are played softly, is generally ok.

The last thing to keep in mind is consistency, and making sure that if you chart a yellow tom, all other same-sounding toms should be yellow, too, within reason, obviously if you're doing some Neil Peart parts or something, you won't always have the same toms on the same note, but it's just to make everything appear uniform. I've spoken to other charters a bit about this, but I'm a bit on the fence about it, but it might be a bit awkward to have hi-hat transition into yellow tom, because it might break immersion a bit, which is generally important to keep in mind with charting, like the most important thing. You might want to change what tom is being played to a different color than the cymbal you just recently used, but if accuracy is what you're going for, then do as you will.

That's pretty much everything I can think of off the top of my head without getting too crazy. I'd go with RB style drum charting, just because you can work with 3 colors of cymbals and 3 colors of toms, so you don't need to think too hard about how to use yellow or orange, in the case of GH-style charting.
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Re: Drum charters please read

Postby AbelArcher » Tue May 02, 2017 8:32 pm

Wow, you can't really get more detailed than that. lol

Thanks a lot. I'll upload a new song with drums soon, so hopefully I can get some feedback for it.
Last edited by AbelArcher on Tue May 02, 2017 8:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Drum charters please read

Postby MetalMuxxer » Wed May 03, 2017 6:02 pm

By the way, can somebody tell me what note is each drum note on a midi?

You know, like "Hit-Hat is A8, Snare is C8" and that kind of stuff, I tried to do drums with a midi but I got very confused, I don't play drums but I would like to be able to chart them :P
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Re: Drum charters please read

Postby AbelArcher » Wed May 03, 2017 6:10 pm

MetalMuxxer wrote:By the way, can somebody tell me what note is each drum note on a midi?

You know, like "Hit-Hat is A8, Snare is C8" and that kind of stuff, I tried to do drums with a midi but I got very confused, I don't play drums but I would like to be able to chart them :P


Use EOF. With that, you literally just place the color where they need to be, no need to have knowledge of which midi note they are.
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Re: Drum charters please read

Postby MetalMuxxer » Wed May 03, 2017 6:26 pm

AbelArcher wrote:
MetalMuxxer wrote:By the way, can somebody tell me what note is each drum note on a midi?

You know, like "Hit-Hat is A8, Snare is C8" and that kind of stuff, I tried to do drums with a midi but I got very confused, I don't play drums but I would like to be able to chart them :P


Use EOF. With that, you literally just place the color where they need to be, no need to have knowledge of which midi note they are.


I'm really lazy and it's kind of hard to me to get everything by ear, using MIDIs I make things easier for myself, I make charts faster in an accurate way. And I don't even know what color is each part of the drumset .-.
Last edited by MetalMuxxer on Wed May 03, 2017 6:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Drum charters please read

Postby AbelArcher » Wed May 03, 2017 8:07 pm

So, anybody that would be willing, give my BVB drum chart a try and tell me if it's good or not. It's at my album thread, which has just been updated, so it will be easy to find.

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