by Jason Johnston
Many of us couldn't fit a drum kit into our home studios, much less what the sound would do for any relationships in the house. Good news: MIDI Drum beats and sounds have come a long way. You can now produce realistic drum beats at home, with a little knowledge and select equipment, and even keep your marriage. (For a quick tutorial on how to play drum beats in through a MIDI keyboard, see our video tutorial at the bottom of this article.)
Top Ten Tips for Programming Killer MIDI Drum Beats
1. Never Quantize 100% unless it is dance or electronic music. Every recording application has an option for the strength of the of the quantize. In Cubase it is called "iterative strength." In Pro Tools it is called "Strength." Often you'll find a randomize feature. Play with the settings, quantize and undo until you get the feel.
2. After recording your beat, move your snare slightly forward or backward without a snap to grid. It's amazing what a slight adjustment of the snare can create. You can apply the same principal to other parts. Real drummers make mistakes even, and your MIDI drummer can too.
3. Real Cymbals never sound the same twice. Change the velocity for each one.
4. The pedal hi-hat is all that should be left of the hi-hats during a solo. It's impossible to do a tom roll and an open hi-hat hit at the same time.
5. In general, think about what is realistic for a human drummer. Even if your listeners are not drummers themselves, if they have listened to a lot of music they will probably sense when a beat is physically impossible for someone with only two hands and two feet.
6. Does a drummer do the exact same roll every 8 bars? Should your MIDI drummer? No. You can copy out the same 8 bars initially and then go in and make slight adjustments to drums being played, velocity or the number of hits. Often "less is more" when it comes to rolls and MIDI drums. Too much could be a dead give-away and make them question whether you really did have Neil Peart in your studio.
7. Can't keep up while playing the parts in real time? As long as everything is still MIDI, set your project tempo much lower than the target speed and do your recording. Then do a little edit/quantizing clean up and put the tempo faster again. You'll sound like a pro. If you can't slow down the project you're working in, record the drums in a separate session and then export the MIDI for importing into the original session.
8. Add a kick drum when you hit some of your crash cymbals. It's a typical thing to do for a drummer, it adds more punch and it might help hide the fact that it's not a real cymbal being playing.
9. Invest in a good quality, multi-sample drum sample library. We love Native Instrument's Battery 3 software drum sampler around the studio and use it all the time. The new Strike! for Pro Tools is amazing too and comes with 20 GB of samples. They help make the drums sound realistic by adding multiple samples, layer upon layer, for each drum part. For instance, the studio snares layer various samples that are triggered depending on the velocity of the note. You can hear the snap of the snare happen as the strength increases. Your original source sound will make a big difference to the realism and how long it takes you to mix in the end.
10. Load an MP3 or WAV file of your favourite music into your recording application and play along. You can experiment with different beats or mimic the beat on the song. You can always listen back and cut out the parts you want later. It might be good just for inspiration or to build up a MIDI drum library of basic beats you can use later. Hope these tips help you make more realistic MIDI Drum beats. The best part is you don't even need a van to do it.
Click below for our Basic Keyboard MIDI Drumming Tutorial
