DAN AGOSTO: Hi. I'm Daniel Agosto for Gearwire.Com, and we were just making some samples that we used to replace other drum samples with actual drum samples when we placed them some sounds that we made with the microphone, and here they are right here in Session Drummer in Sonar 6, and while we're at it, you know, we're kind of making some weird sounds here, I was thinking It would be probably a cool time to take a look at some of the weird things that a convolution reverb can do, and so we're going to be using Perfect Space, which is the convolution reverb that comes with Sonar 6, but you can pretty much use any convolver as long as it takes WAV files, something like SIR is a free one. It's a free VST that you can do stuff like this. We're going to be using perfect space because I like the GUI a little bit more. So, let's listen to our loop again, and just real quick go through Session drummer and just try a few different things that you do with it. Probably the best thing about it is that you can switch to these different sort of patterns, and it's like feeding itself MIDI internally, so you got all these different patterns that you can kind of go through. I kind of like this one. I also like this one a lot, so let's leave that one on, and I'm going to open up the Perfect Space plugin.

So right now, it's not really doing anything, but what we can do is actually go out to the Perfect Space folder, and it comes with a lot of different files, and they're all organizing these different folders. One of the weirder folders -- First, let's take a look at some of the regular things that it can do. It's got the Plates folder and fire up the medium dark plate.

[DAN AGOSTO APPLIES MEDIUM DARK PLATE PRESET ON CAKEWALK SONAR PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN TO SESSION DRUMMER TRACK]

So basically what this is an impulse response that they put across a plate reverb and we can control the dry signal and wet signal separately. We can take out the wet, we can completely take out the dry and let's just listen to the wet sound.

[DAN AGOSTO CONTINUES PLAYING LOOP ON CAKEWALK SONAR THROUGH PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN]

One of the other more interesting ones is they have outdoor sounds, some of them which shouldn't -- don't even sound like regular reverb. This is called dead horse at 10 feet. Dead horse at 30 feet, just kind of gives that feeling like it's outside, and probably what the weirdest one, weirdest stuff is in this skull, in this folder called U, and then one piano.

[DAN AGOSTO ADDS PIANO PARTS TO THE MIDI SEQUENCE]

It's basically I'm an impulse going across the piano, we can go through some off these. So what's it's doing is just making it sound like it's inside the piano. A lot of them, it's just the sustain pedal is dressed up so it's piano reverb basically. So If we can do that with Piano , I meaning why can't we do it with anything, so I was thinking of trying was actually putting these loops through actual samples, and some of the samples that come with Session Drummer are actually pretty cool to do that with. See? Okay.

So here we have our folders and just different types of drums. Let's try putting our beat through a snare drum and we'll choose a 13-inch snare. We'll just use this just randomly

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS A LOOP IN A CAKEWALK PROJECT]

So this is our dry signal and this is the signal we're getting by putting it through the snare drum sound, and what it basically a few different snares being hit. Let's try a few of these other patches. Here we have a side stick. See what that sounds like.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS A SIDE STICK LOOP ON CAKEWALK SONAR THROUGH PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN]

Pretty interesting. We can now also go to rim shot.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS A RIM SHOT LOOP ON CAKEWALK SONAR THROUGH PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN]

Let's check out a kick drum.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS A KICK DRUM LOOP ON CAKEWALK SONAR THROUGH PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN]

It's a bit loud but kind of an interesting sound.

[DAN AGOSTO CONTINUES PLAYING A KICK DRUM LOOP ON CAKEWALK SONAR THROUGH PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN]

Let's try some of these cymbals. First of all, we'll try some hi-hats.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS A HI-HAT AND SNARE LOOP ON CAKEWALK SONAR THROUGH PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN]

That's pretty interesting.

[DAN AGOSTO CONTINUES PLAYING A HI-HAT AND SNARE LOOP ON CAKEWALK SONAR THROUGH PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN]

Definitely of use for some sort of techno or IDM type thing. Let's turn up the tempo a little bit. I'm going to go up to, let's see, about 180, one of my favorite tempos, and start the look back up.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS A HI-HAT AND SNARE LOOP ON CAKEWALK SONAR THROUGH PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN AT 180 BPM]

Let's try a different drum. Let's try some of these cymbals. Try a ride cymbal. We'll do a 20" flat ride

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS A RIDE CYMBAL LOOP ON CAKEWALK SONAR THROUGH PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN]

We're starting to hear some weird rhythmic ambient sounds.

[DAN AGOSTO COMTINUES TO PLAY RIDE CYMBAL LOOP ON CAKEWALK SONAR THROUGH PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN]

Crash cymbal.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS A CRASH CYMBAL LOOP ON CAKEWALK SONAR THROUGH PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN]

Cool. You get a weird sort of almost electronic sound in the back ground.

Let's do some toms. I'll do a high tom. I'll give that a try.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS A HIGH TOM LOOP ON CAKEWALK SONAR THROUGH PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN]

Also very useable, and one floor tom real quick. Pretty much the same deal, just a different pitch.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS A FLOOR TOM LOOP ON CAKEWALK SONAR THROUGH PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN]

Tambourine.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS A TAMBOURINE LOOP ON CAKEWALK SONAR THROUGH PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN]

That's pretty cool, and a cowbell. Let's start with the low cowbell.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS A COWBELL ON CAKEWALK SONAR THROUGH PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN]

I'm going through the different samples right now or the different convolution files as they are acting as. Cool. I could mix in different levels of our dry signal and our wet signal to get some interesting stuff and we also can change our pattern as well.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS DRUM LOOPS ON CAKEWALK SONAR THROUGH PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN]

I'm back to our original sample. All right. Well, that was our little experiment with convolution reverb. Definitely you should try this effect out and don’t use if for just the things that you think it's supposed to used. There's lots of different things you can do with it. You can even feed in like an entire song into most of these, and while I'm at it, I think I'll just try that. I actually have a really short of freaked out version of one of the pieces I did for Crosstalk. Let's see how this sounds, just probably I have to turn up the gain a little bit just for fun.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A SONG ON CAKEWALK SONAR THROUGH PERFECT SPACE PLUGIN]

All right. That's some weird stuff, so thanks for checking it out at Gearwire.Com.