DAN AGOSTO: Hi. I'm Dan and you're watching an instructional screencast presented by Gearwire.Com. And we're going to be taking a look at DrumCore, and DrumCore is a few different things. It's a ReWire device, a loop library, as well as a loop librarian like a database, and it's also an instrument on a few different levels, so let's check it out.

We'll be using Cakewalk Sonar 6 Producer Edition, and so here we have our Synth Rack view, and it's under ReWire devices. When you install it, it just shows up there, it's pretty nice, and so here's our property page and what we're going to be doing is it's going to automatically open a MIDI source track and the first synth audio output as well as the property page. Now actually, what I'm going to do is uncheck this for now so that I can show you how DrumCore actually instantiates when you open a file that already has DrumCore in it. So I'm going to press OK, and we have our MIDI files.

Now, when you open up your project, DrumCore may or may not, depending on your host, need to be started up. In Sonar, all we need to do is double-click the track and as you can see, the splash screen comes up, and we see the GUI of DrumCore.

Now, there's a lot of different things you can do with DrumCore. We're just going to scratch the surface in this first video. As you hear, we're already hearing a loop here, a basic beat, basic rock, and we're at 90 tempo-wise, and what I'd like to do actually is change our host tempo to 120, and as you can hear DrumCore keeps playing, and also change our tempo in here to 120. Okay.

And, just taking a look at DrumCore, we see some different information. I'm going to stop the loop. We see it's 120 Basic Rock is the file that is playing back. If we were to change the tempo, of course it would change, and over here it says this is supposed to be played back at 80 but we're playing it back at a tempo of 59 BPM so it's doing a stretch, and it's doing a pretty good job of it compared to a lot of stretching algorithms that you'll come across these days. So back to this one, and as you can see, it's playing a different audio file to match the tempo.

So, a few of the quick things to play with before we start delving into a lot of the different sounds that DrumCore can provide. There's different ways to organize your beats. Like I said, this is a loop librarian or database, so right here, you know, I'm going to turn down the volume. We're hearing an alternative beat. We want to hear blues, same thing, and we're all still at 120, country, we have a double time thing. Dance hop: so this is one of the non-acoustic beats. There's a few different ones. Latin is another one; actually, it's acoustic but it's non-kit. Hip hop stuff, so there's a lot of different styles, and that's just one way to go around looking at our loops.

We can also look at them by drummer say for example you're a big fan of Matt Sorum. You can just start clicking on bears that map, play themselves.

[DAN AGOSTO EXPLORING MATT SORUM'S DRUMMING ON DRUMCORE]

And one thing to notice. If you're going to be purchasing DrumCore, there's a few different options. You can purchase the full DrumCore which comes with all of these loops except -- I only have three here. These are different player packs, there's DX at the end. That's just the way that you know it's a player's pack. Everything else comes with DrumCore. You can also buy a lite version of DrumCore that doesn't come with any loops. You can add your own loops or you could also bring in the user packs, and if you just want to look at the user packs you have, you can do that. It's not that hard. So, and basically what that does is just bring up all the different user packs, and we're actually looking at that in MIDI format.

So, one other thing I wanted to take a look at in our first video is the Gabrielize function because it's kind of an interesting function. You can do this with audio or MIDI, and this one we're going to be checking out on audio so I'm going to hit that...

[DAN AGOSTO ENABLES THE GABRIELIZE FUNCTION ON DRUMCORE]

As you can see, it's just doing some different stuff. It's sort of a randomize function. Some of them are going to be cool, some of them are not but the great thing is one click and you got something different.

So that's the first video taking a look at the DrumCore ReWire device, and thanks for checking it out.