Making beats and more with Battery 3

Talking about Battery today, Native Instruments’ drum sample engine. I got this program as part of the Komplete 5 package when it was on sale a few summers ago and, much like the tons of other programs that come with Komplete, I was slow to get into all the features of Battery 3.

It’s a drum sampler loaded with tons of kits plus the ability to load your own samples into the grid and edit every imaginable parameter. I’ve had a chance to use it on a handful of projects lately and I find myself mainly using it to perform the drum parts instead of step editing manually like I used to. What makes this easy is I have an auto mapping feature on my M-Audio Axiom 49. The eight drum pads are intelligently mapped to at least one kick, snare, hi hat, cymbal and tom sample in the grid and for whatever else I need, the templates for each kit map each slot in the grid to its own key (i.e. C5, D4, etc.).

Beyond your run-of-the-mill acoustic and electric kits there are also a ton of world drum kits. I used the Middle Eastern one on a temp track I was working on a while back, because it actually has a few slots in the grid devoted to sampled loops that you can play and loop by holding down the key that is mapped to that slot. Pretty cool. In fact, on a lot of the kits there are certain slots that are devoted to things like different snare articulations, rolls, and even one or two kits where I’ve found that there’s a sample mapped for release triggers, i.e. when you let off the key/pad another sample is triggered, like a kick bounce.

These are useful in some cases but you’re probably wondering, how do make my own effects like this? Well, that’s what I’m here to tell you. Interestingly, it’s pretty easy to do basic things like flams and rolls. Load a kit, say, the first acoustic kit, “Basic.” Select a cell, for example, the “snare left” cell third one from the left on the top row. On the Setup tab, close to the right side, there is an articulation section.

First make sure that it is selected, i.e. turned on, by clicking the circular symbol in the top left corner. The various articulations possible are Alternate Stroke, for achieving the sound of alternating left and right hand strokes, Release Stroke, which will retrigger the sample when you release the key, Flam which effects a grace note, Drag which is an exaggerated version of the flam, Three Stroke Ruff, think military snare drum, Roll, a continuous drum roll as long as you hold down the key, Buzz, produces kind of a bounce, Muted, exactly what it sounds like, Speed Roll, my favorite which produces a really really fast roll that in fact, shortens the sample, and Geiger Counter, which triggers the sample randomly like a Geiger Counter.

The possibilities don’t end there, of course. Remember how I was talking about those sampled loops that were in the world percussion kit? Suppose you wanted to set one of those going. Or load another drum sample and have it play while you perform over it. Well there’s a latch function and a retrigger function as well in the setup tab. Latch will let the sample play until you hit the key a second time. And Retrigger will play the sample over and over at a speed that you determine using the numerator/denominator. These options can work well together as well. Try setting a hi-hat sample to retrigger 1/16th notes and latch the sample so that it continues playing until you hit the key again. Now you have a constant 1/16th note pulse going on the hi-hat and your hands/fingers are freed up to tap out a bass and snare beat in time with the hi-hat pulse.

The possibilities are indeed endless. You could latch other samples besides drum samples, (I’m thinking pads or extraneous noise) that you could load in yourself and get a whole song going.

And we haven’t even left the setup tab. You can map different samples according to MIDI velocity in the mapping tab (some of this is already done in a lot of the kits), you can edit the waveform in the Wave tab, shorten samples, etc. set loop parameters in the Loop tab and LFO’s in the Modulation tab and effects such as compression and EQ in the Effects tab. So get going!

Author: timdaoust