Drum 1 - How to set up MT Power Drum Kit 2 On Reaper

I found this really cool free little drum machine a few days ago for Reaper - or pretty much any other DAW you're using. It's called MT Power Drum Kit 2 and it's pretty sweet sounding. Not only does it sounds really good, it's free to use, and it's really fast to lay down a good long drum track with varying fills.

To set it up all you need to do is copy the downloaded files to your VST folder for Reaper and you're ready to go.

Once that's done, you can fire up Reaper and create the first track.

Click the FX button to open up the FX window and select instrument and MT Power Drum Kit.

Click 'skip' on the next window (or donate to remove the window) and your drum kit should show up.

Now if you had a midi keyboard you could set it up to play these drums manually but I sold my keyboard. Maybe someday I'll get a new smaller one but it's unlikely unless I find something good but cheap.

I started with some of the included drums to test it all out before I drive right in to start programming my own. It's very fast to add a nice long section of drums. Just click 'grooves' and drag a sample from the groove section and then one from the fill section. You could tweak this to fit the song by changing the bar length for the groove section if, let's say you didn't need a fill or something.

Once you've got a good number bars laid down, you just drag the whole section up onto the first track that was created and the whole midi track will show up.

Alternatively, you can just drag each individual 'groove' or 'fill' onto the track to add in pieces to make it different. You can also edit all the midi when it's copied over so you can completely change how it sounds in many ways.

And then you can either duplicate this 16 bar groove, or you can create another one however you think the song should go.

Hopefully, you pressed play on the SoundCloud Player before reading this far. If not, scroll back up and give it a listen. I'll wait here.

Okay, the song you're listening to up above was made using this drum kit, the grooves that came with it, and two tracks of guitar.

All the plugins on the song are also from the Free version of reaper and it's sounding pretty good. I found a bunch more plugins for amp models and such, but I haven't gotten a chance to try them out yet. That will be the next jam session.

So that's it. Any musician looking for a quick and realistic sounding piece of software to keep time better than a metronome can get this up and running in a few easy steps and the possibilities are limited only to the fact that it's a drum kit.