Advanced Drum Programming Tutorial: Extreme Metal

[Music] hello YouTube my name is Charlie and this video is gonna be going over some drum programming tips and techniques specifically relating to extreme metal in this case death metal and thrash metal this video is gonna function sort of as a part two to the other drum programming video that I released last year this one is gonna be going more in-depth and it is gonna be substantially longer so if you are looking for basic tips and tricks to just get a good sound fairly quickly then check out the other video I will link it below so first I'm gonna go over like mindset things when approaching drum programming and then I'll be going into this particular song which I'm gonna use as a demonstration so what is the goal when you're programming drums this entirely depends on the project for this project I wanted the program drums to sound like a world-class drummer has just recorded these tracks and that might sound fairly generic but a lot of the time when people program drums they want something that if not sounds like a drum machine they want something that sounds edited and perfect and you know like a sample junket that isn't really what I was going for here my goal was that when I would be done I would print out the drums and in my head I could be like okay Mike Portnoy has just laid down these tracks for me and then everything I do to the tracks afterwards as far as adding samples and removing dynamic range and everything else I have that option after the fact the goal thought this stage was to get something that sounded like someone has actually played these drums and a large part of how you go about doing this is by adding imperfections I wouldn't say mistakes because if you were recording a world class drummer and they made a mistake you would obviously ask them to do it again or worst case scenario you would edit the tracks to remove the mistake most likely so we're not adding things that are wrong but we are adding imperfections and essentially things that a human might do that a machine will not or - look at it from the inverse we're removing things that only a computer can do so for example playing two drums at exactly the same time because a driver cannot do that how natural you go is entirely up to you like I said for this project I wanted to go pretty much completely natural but it is worth bearing in mind that the more natural you go the longer this will take and it will take exponentially longer the further down that rabbit hole you go there will be diminishing returns the longer you take so you want to spend half an hour and get something that sounds good then feel free if you want to spend and in those three hours and get something that sounds amazing then this video is hopefully for you so a couple of last things before I get into the programming and that's how I have this session set up so first of all zoom levels so up here on Pro Tools you have your presets which are the number keys on your keyboard and I'll just show you how I have those set so this is different to how I have them set when I'm editing drums or if I'm mixing a project because well for example the the furthest en I can zoom my number 5 zoom is here which isn't actually that close like if you're editing audio you might wanna go you know stupidly closely you can actually see the waveform when you're working with MIDI there is no reason ever to do that so the zoom presets I have if we go to here where there's a bit more drums that's the closest and that's sort of the farthest away view that I would ever use because that shows sort of maybe an 8 bar section at once depending on the tempo and it just gives a good perspective if we zoom out further you know that you can't you can't program drums with a view like that but I just have that so I can see an overview of the whole track so set you zoom ZUP and learn them and it will save you a lot of time a couple of other things so the this is my mixer ignore these two because this is just for the stream which I apparently clipped earlier whoops so I got the drums and I've also got the guitars there which I will tell you about in a minute so these are the outputs from ggd invasion which they will go into in a minute essentially I'm treating these as if they are live microphones in front of the drum kit that I'm pretending that I'm recording right now how you set this up I'm not going to go into because I'm not an expert with contact we're with contact at all but the ggd guys do have multiple videos for pretty much every door so you should be able to figure it out but essentially we've got every drum so kick is being routed to kick and also it's coming through the overheads and the rooms which is then being routed out of contact and into Pro Tools so you can see it playing there and what that means essentially is that when I'm done I can record arm these tracks hit play and it will be as if invasion is my drummer and I have recorded these tracks as full levels and panning this is eyeballed so this does not need to be exact because obviously when you're mixing you can change this completely but it does make sense to do this now it takes about you know 10 seconds to do because otherwise you end up with your toms coming down the middle which can be very distracting and especially like so with invasion it has an extra floor tom which is on the left so if you have that pan central along with the right floor tom then it may get screwy in your head the only level adjustments have done a turn down the snare bottom because I don't need to hear that that loud as well as the top and then I brought down the rooms a little bit because the rooms an invasion do sound amazing but I don't want to hear too much room when I'm programming because it can get distracting and then these are just the same levels that are being sent to the stream so you should be able to hear what I can hear one other thing quickly I said when I finish I export the drums as if they are a real drummer but something else that I've changed in my workflow in the last year which I strongly recommend is triggering samples off of MIDI directly when mixing so when you use slate trigger you have the option of triggering either from audio so in this case the audio that I've printed out of invasion or by just taking this exact MIDI note and triggering from that so I found that with trigger specifically it is more accurate you're less likely to get phase issues when you're working with MIDI and that's important when we're talking about program drums because these aren't drums that I've converted to MIDI this is the raw drums that are playing the audio so it doesn't make sense to me to program MIDI to trigger audio and to then later take that audio to trigger further samples why not just use the same MIDI to trigger both so the way I do that very quickly I'm just gonna do this for the snare for now but the same principle applies for kicks and toms so you just create a new track MIDI track copy the MIDI down delete everything that is not a snare and then we have just the snares on this track and when we're done they will be nice and humanized but for now they sound like a machine gun so then you just rename that snare export and then import that into session and use that to trigger trigger and I'm not gonna go into how to use trigger now because I think that should be in a different video but there are multiple guides on exactly how to do that okay so with invasion itself this is a fantastic kit from get good drums I love it to bits it sounds amazing and it's also pretty damn big as I'm sure you can see I will quickly show you the samples that I used for this project so that if you want to use the same ones you can so for the kick I used the Tama maple snare I used the Tasmanian Blackwood which I love by the way that just sounds amazing the Tom's they give you the option of a high tune and a low tune so the top three are high the bottom three are low the cymbals I'm not going to show all of them because it will take too long but I think I will show you that this is a stack and I also have to splash cymbals no that's a hat where's the other splash there it is two splash cymbals of different sizes as well as the bells which I do use so in this project I use well I know that I used the entire kit in this project whether I use the entire kit in this song I can't quite remember but we will find out another couple of other quick setup things so I have my kick sub routed into the kick so both of those are going into here so you should be able to hear this so that's just the kick and then the sub and both together so the reason for this is that when I'm mixing I find more often than not I don't need a sub track so I've just sort of blended them at this points and both into the kick track okay the mapping so this is my map pause the screen here if you want to copy it it is not the default map I think I adjusted it from the default map but this is the one that I use symbol mixer again I think this is default I may have brought a couple of things down here and there I can't remember so again pause it and copy me if you want to and velocity curve this is something that has changed in my workflow so previously I have used like drum by drum velocity curves I've now changed over completely they're just using the same curve for every drum because it makes it more simple when you are adjusting your velocities you don't have to memorize a hundred different numbers and it means that you can just kind of eyeball a section and more easily gauge how hard they are being hit regardless of which drum is being played at the time okay and that is it for what's going on inside invasion so the final thing I promise before we go into actually programming these drums is the guitar tracks so the these are the actual guitar tracks that I used on the EP when I program these drums for real I of course did not have these but I did have scratch tracks here playing the same thing they just didn't sound quite as good and I do think it's always important to have something when you're programming drums especially for this kind of music it can be MIDI instruments even if it's just like a piano playing you know a simple bass line or something but ideally you want guitars so here's a quick clip of the guitars with the unhuman eyes drums just so you can hear what the track sounds like [Music] okay that's the track so now I guess it'd be a good time to tell you about this track so this is the single from an upcoming EP which is gonna be released very very soon the name of the track is convert kill subjugate and the name of the band is Hellboy so keep an eye out for that I will be posting that when it's released in the next week or so so in terms of actually programming these drums I'm not gonna go into how I wrote these parts because again different topic different video so that you can follow along if you if you do have something in a similar state to this that you would like to sound more human I'm gonna kind of work on the assumption that your drums are fully written and finalized but that they sound like a drum machine like that did so here we have the fully composed but unhuman eyes de MIDI that I wrote for this song and I'm gonna go through and humanize it in real time so when I'm working with MIDI drums a lot of what I do is kind of add a habit so I don't really think about it when I'm doing it and I have gradually worked out a bunch of shortcuts that save me time without skipping anything and when I say shortcuts I don't mean like key presses I just mean you know small workflow things that over the course of working on an entire EP or album will save you time so I will do my best to slow down and show you all of those so a lot of the first things that we're gonna do here is we're gonna be selecting notes with this function on here as she mother doors have this but the shortcut for this on Pro Tools is option 0 and then select split notes so for this to work when you program your drums you need to make sure that the notes are as long as they are supposed to be and that might sound silly but a lot of the time when I get drums to work on they look like this so you might be kind of wondering what's what's the problem with that it sounds fine like it's in time and it sounds fine that's actually not in time that would be in time but the problem is that when we go to select the notes those as you can see up here I change to 64th notes and a lot of people for some reason program them with unnecessarily short notes I guess it might be cleaner to look at I'm not sure but the problem with that is that when you select your notes and you want to humanize notes of different lengths by different amounts I should say randomize notes of different lengths not human eyes this won't work if all of your notes are 64th notes regardless of how long they are so if I change this bit quickly here so now we have these two notes here which are now eighth notes whereas these are 16s but I've programmed them all as if they are 64th so that means that if I go on here select notes yes see it's gonna grab all of them even though it isn't grabbing the other sixteenth notes elsewhere in the track so so yeah that's why it's very important to make sure you program the notes to be as long as they are going to be you don't need to be silly with it you don't need to do this for example so here this this is just a note that rings out there's no reason to do that for example I mean some people might want to but I don't do that so what I'm gonna start with is the kick in G GD invasion and I guess maybe some other libraries I don't know they have the options of a left and right kick so that's why my kicks are here on c1 + b0 and there are two great advantages to doing this if you're programming song that has a lot of double kick which I'm gonna bet that any extreme metal song is going to one reason is in the case of invasion left and right trigger different samples so they sound very similar because it's the same drum but it's not the same sample so that can help it sound more human than just having Papapa Papapa bum on the same drum the second reason is that again it makes selecting notes that much quicker this bit here which is just a quick burst of triplet kicks so one very simple thing that you can do that's very effective when humanizing drums is being aware that you know when a drummer is doing fast double kicks their left foot is usually not as strong as their right foot so you do this and you drag them down obviously I'm not done but this is what it sounds like there we go so if I had programmed them all on the same track I would have to do this you get the idea so that would take forever especially if you've got a hell of a lot of double kick in song when this song doesn't have too much there are other songs on the EP that have almost entirely double kicks but yeah the amount of time it can save is ridiculous so I will put those back there so I will now show you just quickly selecting these kicks and then randomizing them by different amounts based on their length this is only a starting point don't just do this and think that they're humanized because by definition they're not I'm letting the Pro Tools algorithm do this bit for me and this is just to give it a little bit of an off-grid feel but then I'm gonna go in and move things that need to be moved so make sure that this is set to whatever note you're capturing in this case B 0 and C 1 because that's where my kicks are no duration 0 0 0 1 and then I just use the mouse wheel to go up and grab every note so there we go those are I believe 32nd note triplets and we can randomize those by for now let's just say 50% I will be going in and doing those by hand I'm just for now showing you how how to do this ok so then to make sure we don't grab the same note again we set this to 86 and then mouse wheel up again from there ok now we have the straight sixteenths sorry straight 30 seconds and if we randomize those by 50% they might go a little bit too far so just because I've programmed this song before I know that I want to randomize those to 40% there we go and again gonna go in and change them later down the line ok next a lot of notes 1 to 8 and because all the notes are subdivisions of themselves obviously with triplets it gets more complicated you can just memorize the numbers I haven't done that because it's quick enough to just do it without memorizing never needed to but you can okay sixteenth note triplets I'm going to move those down to 30% and then I believe everything else in this song is straight sixteenths okay so set those at 20 so one thing you may have noticed is that the longer the note duration the less randomization I am applying and the reason for that is because the well the faster the note or the higher the tempo if the song has tempo changes the further off the grid you can go without it sounding out of time a side effect of this is that it may mean that you have to go further off the grid in order for it to sound natural because if you have like the sixteenth notes so they're randomized by 20% if the tempo of this song was 300 instead of 130 I think it is then you would not be able to tell a difference so you'd need to nudge those notes by a lot more if you wanted to get the same effect although if the song was at 300 BPM you may not want to do that I'm just using that as an example and one other thing just to make this simple before I start playing with the kicks specifically is right now I have two kicks so load when humanising I don't think it's a good idea to do that because you essentially do the kick then the snare then the Tom's and then you listen to the whole thing and it may not sound right and you have to go over and do everything again but at the same time I don't think it makes sense to have everything else running at full volume so what I'm gonna do is this so I'm gonna select everything that is not a kick and just pull it down to about halfway so that means I can hear it but I'm very much focusing on the kicks so let's have a listen [Music] so this is even more important when we're talking about velocities because if you have everything up at one to seven and you start pulling down the velocities on the kick for example to make it sound more human they're going to get quieter which makes it harder to hear especially during like blastbeats sections if you've got the snare going away in your ear and you're pulling the kicks down to make it sound more you know human it's gonna be almost impossible to concentrate on that when you got this unrealistic shotgun shell of a snare going off in your ear that sounds impossible to play anyway so now I have randomize the grid position of every kick in the song based on how long the note is so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go through the song and I'm gonna move any bits that need moving and any parts that use different techniques I'm gonna stop at and explain how I approach doing them so with drum fills I'm gonna do them all at once at the end there's no point in me nudging kicks around and then leaving the snares and toms where they are I'm gonna handle it is one thing once I finished the rest of the humanizing okay so there's a couple of parts in this song that have these sort of machine-gun bursts this sort of babble or path so this is something that a lot of drummers do and it's something that I honestly love the sound of Mike Portnoy and Jean Hoagland or two that come to mind that do this quite a lot so here these are thirty-second notes but they do not need to be gridded in fact the fact that they are basically gridded makes it sound a little too robotic if we listen again so what we can do is one of two things we'll do this one using the randomization menu we set it to 32nd and we can just bump it up to say 50% and I go even higher let's put it 80% so that sounds okay but the way I would usually approach doing this is by hand so that pretty much needs to be on the grid because that's where the beat is also this first kick that's where the beat starts because it's boom pow buh buh buh boom PAH so this pretty much needs to be on the grid as does this first hit because otherwise it may sound like it's out of time these three kicks in the middle though it's just a blast of kick energy it you know when a drummer plays this they're not counting thirty-second notes they're just gonna be doing a quick blast on their feet two on each foot so they don't need to be gridded in the fact that they pretty much are is a giveaway that these have been programmed so we can do a lot of things when we move them so let's try a few different things so that I think sounds good you notice that when I had the kicks like that you could tell because there's a big gap in between these two here and those two there it didn't sound like a burst it sounded like some kind of weird impossibly fast syncopated pattern which is not what we want so let's do the same with this one well I say the same don't do exactly the same because again we're going for human there we go so that will do for now and those two kicks being so close together doesn't really matter because they're so close to this snare Tom hit and there will be other parts in the song where this happens so I will stop on those parts okay so our first sustained double kick part here and for this for these kind of parts that aren't bursts I do find it's generally better to use the randomisation menu so here if I select the notes they are sixteenth note triplets 80% is gonna be way too far but let's just listen yes oh that sounds like a sloppy drummer [Music] yeah there's a few dead giveaways there so at this point we can either lower the percentage or we could go in if we wanted to and move the notes that are quote-unquote wrong so if we do that quickly we end up with this so that actually I don't think that sounds too bad that sounds fairly human yeah I'm happy with that let's leave that as it is for now okay this is another one of those quick bursts so I'll do that one quickly so here I just want to mention this is a breakdown section which alternates between triplets and straights so when you're programming these and if you're using a left and right kick setup like invasion does then you of course need to decide which foot the drummer is gonna play these parts with so I decided that for these bibbidi-bobbidi-boo bits it would make sense for him to lead with the left foot because I want the right foot on the beat to be hitting harder and generally the right foot is stronger that isn't always gonna be the case for a real drummer and obviously you don't have to do that you could flip it and do the exact opposite of what I've done but it is going to affect how it sounds when you come to humanizing the velocities so it's just something to be aware of so that note feels too early and that one feels actually that one's pretty much on time but yeah I can hear that that sounds a little bit too early so the this is one of the reasons why you need to go through and do this manually because I forget the number that I used but if I humanize the sixteenth notes by thirty percent and the algorithm decides okay this one's gonna go thirty percent that way and this one's gonna go thirty percent that way you end up with a differential of sixty percent which is huge for a note of that length so that's obviously gonna sound wrong and like a mistake so it's something that we'd want to [Music] so this here is a another quick burst of triplets in amongst sixteenth syncopated sixteenths so again I had to decide which which foot he's gonna play with because there's there's actually a lot of left foot action in this part which to me felt like the most natural way to play it I'm not a drummer so any drummers out there who want to correct me then go for it this is simply how I programmed it but if this is in fact not the best way to play it as a real drummer then I would like to know so that I can improve my programming so this bit here is what's called a hammer blast so we have the kicks and the snare all hitting at the same time so that doesn't sound particularly convincing because the magic happens when we start moving the snares which I will be doing later on and that's a more traditional blast beat and again same thing once we start nudging the snares around this will sound a lot more convincing [Music] okay so this is a pretty ridiculous bit this is called a bomb blast and it's it just sounds ridiculous which is why I like it but I think it's quite easy to ever do so for this little bit here I thought it accented the transition quite nicely she's just like a split second of insanity and then it goes into the drum fill so the kicks here you can see there are some gaps because of whatever percentage are used but it sounds fine if anything I might note these a little bit more so these here are triplets and I really like the sound of these triplets sort of blended in amongst the drum fill here I will move them again when I come back to doing the drum fills cuz there's no point me getting these how I like them and then moving this over here so so you might notice on this section I'm not actually doing a huge amount and for a lot of songs this may well be the case especially on kicks this section is almost entirely just sixteenth note kicks and you don't need to do a huge amount to them because if you move them too far off they'll sound out but then if you move them dead-on then they will simply sound robotic so there isn't a huge amount of creativity that goes into doing this bit and if you just have a straight-up rock song or you know even something more like like this is kind of like a traditional metal court breakdown most of the notes are going to be of the same value unless it's something less conventional if the note duration is all the same for a distinct portion of the song then you may well be fine just leaving them as they are off doing the first round of randomization [Music] so this is one of two parts in the song where I use 32nd note triplets and when you're going this fast the drummer is not thinking okay these are thirty-second note triplets they're again they're just hammering away on their feet making sure they're not obviously hitting both of them at the same time and making sure that this snare hit which is actually gonna be a flam but I will do that later is on time so just take a listen again so the important bit is that that is on time this does not start on the beat so we can pretty much do whatever we want with it so I'm gonna show a couple of things here that we can try so we can either clump them even closer together so that they're almost like 64th notes I guess I'm just take a listen and again that doesn't sound wrong at all I quite like that or we can space them out a bit more so there we got a fairly big gap between those two and you can hear it yeah so whether you'll hear something like that in a full mix almost certainly not unless you're a drummer or a drum programmer potentially and but I like how that sounds right now so this part here is during what's gonna be the guitar solo and this is just straight-up sixteenth note kicks with these the easiest way to do it and I think the best way to do it is to set your randomization hit go and leave it there's no point really in moving around individual notes unless you hear that something is wrong and I do think it's important to say here if I haven't already that the best way to go about doing this is to go too far and then pull back so set your randomization higher then you may think so say you think that you're gonna be aiming for I don't know 30 percent randomization try 40 try 50 hit play see if it's too much and then dial it back because all of what we're doing here is we're adding human imperfections - what's the mechanical performance to our ears when we're especially if we're looking at this sort of analytically as if we're editing it if everything is gridded it may sound quote-unquote better but it isn't gonna sound more human so if you only randomized by five percent ten percent it might sound great to you but does it sound human that's what you need to pay attention to so to demonstrate that I'll just grid this bit I'll set it to completely on the grid and we'll have another listen so that I think does still sound good but I can tell it sounds edited it sounds unnatural and if a real drummer came in and did that then I wouldn't believe them but it depends on what kind of song you're going for if you're going for something that needs to sound mechanical because it doesn't make any sense to have like surgically type guitars and bass like for example born of Osiris everything that they do is so gridded that it would sound wrong if the drums were not because if you have I'm exaggerating here but if you have ten instruments coming in on this beat they all line up except the drums then you're gonna be like why are these drums out of time even if they're only off by I don't know that much should be like that's out of time even though there may be human so it depends on what your end goal is for this project I did edit the guitars and bass but it was very minimally I wanted it to sound like it well like a raw performance of a band so if I were to take my most the unedited guitar tracks and put them against a unhuman eyes drum track like I did at the beginning of the video it wouldn't sound right Maz I hope you agree so one other thing to be aware of here which doesn't strictly planned it humanizing like in terms of techniques but it's more of a composition thing but it does result in something that sounds like a drummer actually played it is here there's a tempo change if you listen again so when the breakdown starts again it drops in tempo by about 10 maybe 15 BPM so had this drum fill not slowed down it would have been a very jarring sudden change so we can do that quickly here so if the whole thing is thirty-second notes it would have sounded like this and that then makes this sound like it's almost deliberately slow which isn't really what I wanted so just change those last two notes to sixteenths and we have this and I just think it flows that much better [Music] so this is another bomb blast section and this one is longer so let's take another listen and let's play around with the kicks and just see how far we can go before it sounds wrong so if we grid them so that almost sounds like it's necessary I don't want it to be completely gridded but it is gonna have to be fairly close because of how fast it is so the other parts that were this fast but not as long I think I had at 80 percent randomization if I do that here that just sounds like a mess we dial it back to 40 so there are still a couple of bits that you can kind of tell it's not quite on so let's set it 15 so that sounds tight and with this kind of thing it needs to sound tight even if you're going for human and that's a little gravity blast there which I'll be messing around with more when I go to the snare so that does it for kick in terms of timing now it's time to move on to the snare so I'm gonna skip ahead and fast-forward this but essentially I'm gonna do exactly the same starting point as I did with the kicks so we select each note and snares on C - no it's not it's on d1 what am I talking about you okay so now the snares are roughly or broadly I should say randomized but they're still not going to sound entirely human so again we'll go through the song and we'll be making some adjustments so just before I hit play the snare is in my opinion the most important part in terms of getting a human sounding drum performance if you go too far and a snare is out of time it will very obviously sound out of time because the snare is in most styles of music even extreme metal that's what keeps the time but at the same time if you have a drum fill a fast drum fill and everything is that little bit too tight then it will be a bit of a giveaway that it's been programmed so this here is a quick burst it's thirty second notes and we can we can split those up a little bit just because of how fast it is there we go happy with that so see it's made a gap there but for some reason those three look like they're pretty much bang on so let's move them around a bit these I'll come back to later although I will quickly talk about flam's some libraries I believe all ggd libraries have a option to map flam's which sound like this so previously I used to map flam's onto a different key in this case c-sharp one now I don't because if you remember I said that I now trigger my samples through trigger using MIDI instead of audio and if I have a single MIDI node triggering a flam which is two notes then it will only play one sample on top of my programmed flam which will not sound right so what I do now is I make my own flam's by simply doing this so hold down the option key to duplicate and then there you go and you can adjust it as much as you want [Music] maybe back a bit here we go and I'll leave that as it is for now because again drum fills I'll come back to so this here is a quick burst of a traditional blast beat we can move the snare around and see what difference that makes but it is important to remember that snares probably gonna end up down there so for now eyeball it drag it down while you humanizing the blast beats that is incredibly distracting and you'll never really be able to focus on what you're actually doing if you're just listening for that so there we go something that drummers will do even like the very best metal drummers is for prolonged sections of blasting or double kicks it's not uncommon for them to fluctuate their tempo because a lot of the time drummers will want to hear the click in their ears and if they are playing theoretically perfectly on the click they won't be able to hear the click in there is so much because everything is happening exactly at once so they might naturally sort of slow down hear the click realize that they are in fact in time and then speed back up and this is something that may happen and just subconsciously but it's something to be aware of that is something that usually I would call a mistake as it is something that you would fix when you come into editing the tracks because if it's being recorded to a click and it is not on the click than that I guess definitively is a mistake but if we wanted to simulate that we could we would just need to grab the cake the snares and the rides and sort of collapse them on themselves and then add more gaps towards the end maybe have this bar start slightly early which I mean yes that would sound more natural but it's something that it's gonna sound like a mistake so I don't usually do that for this style of music okay here so this is I'm glad that this reminded me because they would have forgotten about this so this is a flamming of the kick and the snare they are supposed to be hitting at the same time on this bar at the same time as this ride I saw a ride that's China and if you take a listen they are not in time so at this point we need to decide which of these do we want to be in time it can either be the snare or it can be the kick or it can be both well that sounds a little bit too robotic especially during prolonged double kick sections I very very rarely like to put them you know right on top of each other but because that's noticeable I am actually going to move the kick slightly closer to the grid so you see on here the grid line is actually pretty much right in the middle of where the kick and the snare are just purely by coincidence and I think that that actually sounds solid because it's not so different as to be able to tell in your ears like you know someone I think even a drummer listening to that they're not gonna be like man that sounds wrong but they're also not gonna think that sounds like a machine so here there's a flamming between the snare and the Tom which I definitely want in that bit but I'm gonna go into that when I move on to the Tom's for now I'm just focusing on the relationship between the snare and the kicks that I've already done so those there are gonna be ghosts notes it's gonna it's gonna sound more like this for now I'll leave them there and when I turn them into ghost notes I will be adjusting where they are so this bit here is interesting because as you'll hear when I come to do the velocities the guitars are playing triplets whereas here the drums are playing thirty Seconds so the drum is actually going faster than the guitars on this section here so I know I'm gonna bring these way down because it's a it's a fast I guess there's a drum fill between the snare and the Hat so I also kinda want to bundle them up a little bit because of how fast they're going so for now I'll leave that as it is when I add the hi-hat in then I may well change that so that's another slight flam on the kick and snare it looks like a snare bang on yeah I have to zoom in loads in order to even notice that so let's listen to it again okay to be honest I like that the kick is slightly early but I like that it sounds sounds real this bit more of a transition than a drum fill but I am going to adjust it very slightly because the idea here is that the drummer would be playing weight be alternating between his left and right hand but because they're in groups of three you got China snare snare China snare snare he'd be playing the whole thing alternating between his right and left hand so be going right left right left right left right left I don't know what the actual name for this pattern is I'm sure some drummers can correct me here but when we come to humanizing the velocities of the snare it will affect what we do so there for some reason that's been noted really far that way and you can tell so I'm gonna pull it back okay so this is the hammer blast which I love so I said that the magic happens when you add the snare and well hopefully you can hear that this is a little bit too much magic yeah so particularly towards the end it's decided to bunch the notes up in a kind of an odd way so I'm gonna reopen the randomisation menu and change it there so already that sounds better and all I did is they reduce the randomization percentage by five percent which is should in theory be barely perceptible but you can definitely hear that there's a difference so for hammer blasts specifically I think the most important thing when you're humanizing is to not have kicks and snares playing at the exact same time because a drummer will not do that even if they're even if they sound like they're on time they're not so if we zoom in really really far those two hits are not perfectly in time but you can't tell because under a certain number of milliseconds I forget how many the human ear cannot determine the two sounds are occurring at different times so when a drummer plays they're never gonna be exactly on time but they may be close enough so if I pull down the snares and here we're not looking for specific notes because you can't tell it's just straight sixteenths of kicks and snares happening at the same time you know maybe like oh this one sounds wrong let's move it you're looking for sort of a broad feel of how it sounds as a whole and there I am actually happy with that so I'm gonna move on traditional blast doing it the same way we did before so they're actually meant to type in 30 not 40 but that sounds fine that that just goes to show you that numbers are and if you you know on on forums saying how much do i randomize my drums by just try it see how it sounds dial it back dial it up do whatever works you know maybe you shut your eyes and type in a random number and see how that works for you cuz you may discover that it actually sounds better than the guy who told you to set it to 30 for example so they're somewhere in there I can hear those snare sounds like it's out of time I think it's that so I'm moving it so yeah see even they are not moving it to the grid I'm just moving it so that it's it sounds natural in between the other two snares on either side so let's listen again there we go that's that now sounds sounds correct it sounds like a drummer played it so there that time because of the randomization algorithm I typed in 40 like I did earlier for the blast for the bomb blast and there it's given me a big gap there that I can very much here so we can either move this closer to the grid or we can actually bump these to be earlier so that may not sound right because now that snare is pretty far away from that kick like it's what would that be that's like the 64th or note off okay so when we're going at that tempo it's gonna be difficult to tell I can barely tell so I'm actually gonna leave it because this isn't a prolonged bomb blast if it was I would change this definitely I would tighten it up this is just supposed to be a manic burst of energy and I mean that's what it sounds like so I'm gonna leave it and I should say here that if I was editing these drums if some godly drummer had just played that and I'd been asked to edit it I would not tighten that up I would leave it as it is unless they had asked me to grid it because not everything needs to be gridded so there that's another flam and with this being the breakdown section I think it's very important that these snares as well as the kicks but the snares need to be pretty much on the grid here so let's let's zoom in and have a look so if we grid the snare leave the kick early so this hit here sounds slightly off I don't yet know if I'll move it so this this here is gonna be a flam as I think I said before the time that I add flam's is when I do the Tom's which may sound counterintuitive but the reason is because when they do the Tom's is when I do the drum fills so that is the time when I add any flam's on the snares of all the Tom's additionally because that's after I have I guess finalised the position of all my snares so you may notice in here there's a couple of lambs there and I think they're on the snares which I have left in so the reason I'm doing that here and not over here is because back here it was a syncopated sort of deliberate rhythm whereas here is just straight up sixteenths on the kick and the snare is accenting those hits if you grid that it will start to sound too much like a machine so I'll show you that quickly I'll find the one that's that's Fleming and then I'll correct it and we'll decide which one sounds better this one is so I won't grid that I'll put it on top of the kick and we can just listen yeah so even there that that now makes that one sound like it's Fleming which I didn't even notice before yeah I guess so Fleming but yeah that's gonna be lower down in velocities not as a ghost note but it's it's not on the beat so that's not gonna be anywhere near as high but anyway I hope that made the point that gridding that makes it start to sound a little inhuman [Music] yeah so that's the end of the straight sixteenth bits which this is all during the guitar solo again so any bit that's just sort of straight sixteenths or whatever tempo you may be it could be straight eighths at a higher tempo some flamming is always going to happen and it's also a good place to add flamming in order to make it sound more like a real drum performance and again if I'm editing real drums that sound like this this isn't something that I would correct unless I'd specifically been asked to do so if you want a good reference for something like this in a in a commercially released song have a listen to Brotherhood of the snake by Testament which has gene Hoagland drumming on it it's an incredibly good album and there are flam's all over the place but it sounds incredible because it sounds like gene Hoagland is playing the drums it doesn't sound like someone's you know gone through and programmed them so that that album the sound of that album is one of the inspirations for this particular project so there's you can probably guess I am gonna be adding in some flamming between the Tom and the snares but I will be doing that later now that sounds wrong so the randomization I guess bumped this note that way and then it turns into triplets here leading into this section and because triplets are a different subdivision two straight eighths or sixteenths plus these two notes being too close together makes that sound like a mistake yeah it sounds like these triplets are out of time so I'm just gonna nudge them back yeah that sounds better even though this one still is not on the grid that no longer sounds like it's wrong these kicks though sticking out to me yeah those need tightening there we go happy bunny okay another bomb blasts and this one is more prolonged so let's have a play with what we can do with the snare so that sounds that sounds way off that sounds like somebody doesn't know how to play a blast beat change it to 20 and see what that does so that sounds good because remember when I did the kicks I tightened the kicks more than I did elsewhere in the song because this is the only prolonged bomb blast so it needed to sound fairly tight which means that we can go slightly further with the snares without it sounding wrong so you should be able to see here yeah that makes it more obvious you should be able to see here that these snares are not perfectly lined up to the kick that won nearly is but let's have a listen yeah that sounds like someone playing a bomb blast to me now we have the only gravity blast which we'll take a listen to now so gravity blast same thing but I guess it's kind of the opposite of a bomb blast so you got a thirty second note snares where they're basically freehand rolling on the snare so these are gonna be way down in terms of velocity because they're not hits they're almost like roughs and drags and then the kicks are alternating so let's bring these down and have another listen yeah so that almost sounds like someone's just kind of scraping around on the snare drum let's play with the numbers and see what we can do so here yeah it's adding some fairly big gaps because 40 percents quite a lot for this but that to me doesn't sound wrong because they aren't accented transients it's more sort of a texture yeah I'm gonna leave that like that even though that looks pretty far off that to me sounds fine and what it sounds like is the important bit okay this bit needs a little bit of work on the snare but it shouldn't take too long so again we're looking at flamming so this isn't quite a four on the floor beat but we can treat it like that for the sake of this so four on the floor is when you got your kicks just going one two three four one two three four and then the snares hitting on every whatever beat as we know a drummer cannot play a kick and a snare at exactly the same time and every now and then they might get it close enough to where you can't tell but if every single one is perfectly in time it's gonna start sounding like dance music and I mean that kind of beat before on the floor beat is used all the time in that style of music and the reason it sounds the way it does is because the kick and the snare are hitting at the exact same time so here we got that one's off visibly the others look to be pretty on but let's see what they sound like yes so to my ears they all sound like they're pretty much on so I'm actually going to move them around a little bit to make it sound a little bit more natural this is actually a good demonstration of this so this one just completely by random I did not do this deliberately I moved this snare back behind the kick these three snares are all happening before the kick and one of them you can hear a flam more distinctly than on the other three take another listen so even though the differential here is more than it is here the fact that the kick is happening before the snare here means that this sounds more like a flam than the others the others sound like they're pretty much bang on but that one you can definitely hear two different transients so if we move these slightly further so now you can hear it but sounds like it's slightly too far out of time so I'm actually gonna nudge them the other way I'm gonna make them so that they're occurring slightly after the kick there we go that sounds a little bit more natural I won't say it sounds better because we're not going for better as in perfection we're going for something that sounds natural and you might ask why I didn't do that with all of them it's because a real drummer is not going to deliberately or intentionally do that with all of his snare hits so we're not going to either yeah so here we got three hits I moved one of them the other two sound like they're pretty much bang on this one now doesn't we don't want to do that with every single with every single one because otherwise it will sound like well like a machine has gone in and randomized everything and drummers may be imperfect but they're not random so that there listen to that that was actually a mistake that I made when setting up this session so don't if you can hear that it didn't sound like a flam but it sounded like a Phase II error on the snare sample listen to it again this one yeah so that is a dead giveaway and that is something that you need to be aware of especially if you're being sent MIDI from other people because if you if you put two samples on top of each other it might look like only one note but there's two notes there which means that's my sampler there in that case is playing two rides and in this case here playing two snares which results because of because of how close together they are it doesn't give you a flam it just gives you a out of phase kind of wobbly sounding snare sound sounds like an audio glitch so I believe originally that was a flam so that would have been there which sounds like a flam but then when I was setting up the session I must have not noticed that that was there and well gritted it so then when it was gridded both notes were on top of each other and then the humanising sorry the randomizing algorithm nudged them so that they were far enough apart to be audibly noticeable so cuz I'm not doing flam's yet I'll get rid of that but yeah that's something that you need to be aware of there is an option in Pro Tools remove duplicate notes here under the event menu which you can use but I don't because if you're dealing with notes that are not on the grid like I always do then it may incorrectly detect things like 32nd note triplets as being duplicate notes because they're slightly overlapping and that is not something that I want you know if it's a slow song and all the notes are very long it's pretty accurate but I don't use it because it's more trouble than it's worth okay now it's time to move on to the Tom's and in the case of invasion there are six of them so most drum kits real or virtual do not have this many Tom's this one does and I thank the guys at GG D for giving me the option of having so many Tom's because I love massive drum kits so what we're gonna do this time because we're going through jam fills gonna select all the drums and just bring them up to full velocity so we can at least hear them so because the Tom's they either used this doesn't just apply to this song but in general they either used in drum fills or they're used in broad sections of the song which may require a different sounding feels like a you know a break that uses the floor toms that kind of thing which we do have in this song I don't think it makes sense to go through and broadly do randomizing with the Tom's because you're gonna change pretty much all of it anyway so it's kind of a waste of time so we're gonna go through and remember the Tom's for now are still completely gridded I haven't touched them so we'll go through so these can move there we go a lot of the time you may get drum fills like this one snare we've already done and we got these two Tom hits there's how long did that take like two to three seconds or we can select them and go in here and play with the randomisation menu no that just takes longer so just do it like this now we have the triplets so something else I mentioned with blast beats and with prolonged double kick sections it's not uncommon for drummers to fluctuate their speed something else that it's not uncommon for drummers to do is to speed up during drummer fills I don't quite want to do that because that would mean that this you know if this whole drum fill gets faster and faster it would mean that this kick hit here starting the next bar is gonna have to happen early otherwise you got a giant gap so instead I want it to end on this flam here that has to be in time otherwise it will sound wrong because I know what the guitars are doing underneath which you'll hear later so I am gonna slightly compress what's going on and then it's gonna slow down during when it when it turns into this straight thirty-second section so for the triplets a I'm gonna compress them a little bit and I mean that in a timing sense not in n audio processing sense okay so that's the triplets so now I'll just do this quickly so because that was there that kick is there I don't want there to be a gap so I'm gonna bump this bit forwards a little bit sorry backwards a little bit so now the notes are further away from each other but they are fairly tight and then this bits gonna be more of sort of a flurry of notes and the last two kicks leading up to the flam are gonna be tight together so let's hear that there we go so we haven't even touched the velocities and already that sounds pretty damn good I think even though it's nine time but it's a drum fill so it doesn't have to be especially when you're going at that kind of speed okay our first Tom and snare flam's so this bit I want the snares to be flamming against the Tom's the snares I've already got where I want them so let's move the Tom's there we go so that sounds pretty damn big so when you Fleming snares and Tom's together it will make it sound not only natural but it will sound bigger because if you're hitting them at exactly the same time which I'll do now doesn't sound as big because you've only got one transient so there we go that that sounds much bigger to me and that's exactly what I want for this bit at least if it was going faster than I may not want that so this is a bit where I guess either I did this or the randomisation did this but they sped up the snares a little bit so they finish early so I'm just gonna bump these Tom's forwards so that that way there's not a huge gap between the two so again it's not in time but it sounds human so this here is a similar principle to what we did before with flamming but because there's such a big gap here we can have it flam even further without it sounding wrong so let's see how far we can go so there that sounds wrong probably because of the speed of these kicks that almost sounds like that's deliberately one note later than the snare yeah that that's too that's too far because now that sounds like it's deliberately there yeah I'm happy with that there as it is so this is another fast 30 second note fills so I'm going to slowly speed it up and have it end with this flam on the two Tom's [Music] there we go so for certain styles of music again this might be too loose this might be too imperfect for this project it's exactly what I want so here we have a snare flam which I've added okay this section here this is the build-up to the breakdown and the Tom's are all the same length as are the snares so I'm actually gonna go through and group these snares and the Tom's together here and play around with some randomization and see what happens so because of how relatively slow these drums are and that the idea here is it building tension before the drop in the breakdown I want these drums to be flamming a lot because this is a time when the drummer is just wailing on these Tom's this is something that you can hear all the time in Slipknot's music because partly they have three percussionists they're not all hitting the drums at the same time so can I have one guy hitting you know all snares across here and then they have someone else doing the Tom's down here they can't hit them at the same time so it's gonna sound even bigger because of how many percussionists they have I'm not emulating Slipknot here though I'm emulating one drum em so we'll see what happens here [Music] okay so this middle one sounded good the other two sounded out of time so let's leave that one as it is bring this down to 30 and that one and let's play it again so the reason why this sounds so big is because the kicks are not hitting at the same time as the Tom's so if you listen again that needs to move yeah particularly here so this to me doesn't quite sound like a mistake but you can definitely tell the kicks are not hitting at the same time as the Tom's okay this this bit slightly changes now so I'll just play it okay so first of all these are these massive floor toms I'm gonna do them by hand now so they're you can definitely hear that they're not being played at the same time and the reason I'm able to go that far is because of how sort of big and open this section is it's not in the middle of a very busy part also this is partly helped because in invasion we have at one time on the right floor Tom and another floor tom on the left so if these are both on the same side still sounds big doesn't sound that big so then this part of the Tom's they're doing something slightly more intricate than over here so I can't just use broad humanization so I am gonna do this by hand and again here I might be going too far if this was part of the main section of the song and it was in between two you know fast bits but because this is so big and open and it's a dramatic build-up I can go a lot further than I otherwise could and because of the tempo of this section I can actually make the flam a bigger flam or slower flam then it would be elsewhere so let's see how how far we can go that sounds about right to me let's go even further yeah that's too slow and if it was just a little flam like that doesn't have the same impact okay so this is the same principle as before I'm just not doing as far because this is part of the breakdown and I love this jump film I said before so I'm gonna bring these kicks in and make them more of like a burst have those notes slightly late and then have this one on so he's going a bit fast here then he's gonna slow it down and end on the note here where he should be [Music] there we go again that took barely any time a lot of people don't like free handing this stuff because you can just like select everything press a number and press go but that did not take me any time to do and it just sounds so much better so here we want some Flemming and you notice we're not going anywhere near as far as we were earlier cuz that's enough and it's again part of a rhythmic section of the song so that's another one I missed that snare sounded wrong sounded too high-pitched because it was supposed to be a flam now let's turn it back into a flam there we go [Music] so this is another triplet kick which it doesn't even have to be a triplet you could turn it into straight thirty seconds if you wanted that's just a little bit fast so I slowed it down so it's kind of an off-grid triplet cuz again that kind of thing does not need to be credit [Music] so this bear here cuz it's leading into the straight sixteenths which I already know a pretty tight I don't want to move this too far so this is it completely gritted if we move it too far it will sound wrong like this yeah you can tell you can tell that that's just a bit too far off so again as I said earlier go too far and then dial it back that's how we end up with that so this is another really fast fill here I'm having speed up and then slow down on here cuz again we got the tempo change here bring the snares in have the toms start slightly early so that isn't a tempo rally but I've almost simulated one by having the drum fill be fairly loose because if it was gridded then that would again be a very obvious tempo change so again here this is triplets leading out of a triplet kick section so we do not want to go too far and then this here is just a very fast - Tom hits thirty-second notes double kick and then a scenario so we're going to make that pretty quick and because of how short the amount of time is therefore the flam to breeze we want it to be a pretty quick flam that's a bit too quick that's about right to me and this here again is a thirty-second note fill ending in a flam and there's then a short break here after the flam so we can't afford to have it slightly longer so this bit here I actually free-handed the only reason these are locked to a grid is because that's how I reset the session back to zero for this video so this is the end of the track got a flam on the snare so this here is completely free time we actually don't even want to be considering the grid here we want it to be completely free time so it sounds little goofy here because everything's at maximum velocity and it's very much not going to be so I'll pull those down a little bit [Music] [Music] there you go happy with that for now so now I actually need to go to work so I won't have time to finish this right the second but through the magic of editing I will catch up in about five hours time okay so now it is time to sort out the timing on these symbols this is one of the I guess easiest bits because it's kind of difficult to it up so for now we're just gonna select all of the symbols and now I'm gonna go through and check I'm and I'm pretty sure every symbol and this is a sixteenth note or slower I don't think there's any fast fills that include symbols but I'm gonna go through now and check okay so the first bit that I think I need to adjust here is the rides during the blast there we go just keeping it a little bit looser okay so this bit I remember it's too quick thirty-second notes on the splash so I'm gonna adjust this manually [Music] so with overheads anything that isn't a shell you can be a lot more loose with when the drums are being played and unless we're talking about something that's like super super fast and the reason for this is because generally there are exceptions but generally they have far less defined transients they're the exceptions to this off the top of my head would be like a ride Bell or maybe a splash cymbal but like this China I can move that quite far [Music] so that was a little too far just try sticking it there yes so that there is Italy by a few milliseconds and you can't really tell so actually yeah let's leave it there so this is the snare fill that also uses the Hat so I'm gonna move these now because the hats are part of the drum fill in this case and the reason I'm using a different articulation here is because the main articulation throughout this course section is I believe it's open 3 is what it's labeled as inside invasion and this one I think again is open 1 either way regardless of the names you can hear that it's much less open and the reason for that is because it's being played as part of a drum fill so because of how fast his hands are moving hypothetical drummer it makes more sense for the hi-hat to be not anywhere near as wide and I'm also not gonna have immediate anywhere near as hard ok this bit here I need to adjust manually because these are triplets so I'm just gonna eyeball it I could put the grid on but I don't think I need to [Music] so this sounds ridiculous because he's whacking the hell out of that China but I'm gonna bring those down when I do the velocities so I'm gonna try something here that might not work so here the second the second hit in each bar is hitting the left and the right high hats at the same time as an effect really is one of the only places I used it so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna nudge them apart a little bit and because there isn't as much of a defined transient it hopefully I'll be able to get them wider apart and the resulting sound will be bigger this might not work but let's see what it sounds like okay so that's way too far so that there I quite liked I think that that sounded pretty good so this here is I guess a mistake when I program these drums so if you listen to this jump film so snare high Tom mid Tom low Tom and then immediately China and crash cymbals at the same time so that means that our theoretical drummer if I open invasion just to show you that means that our theoretical drummer is having to go from this tom to that China with his right hand because the left the left hand would be would be hitting this symbol so he's having to go from that Tom to that China in the space of one sixteenth note I'm not sure he would be able to do that but let's just have a look okay so that's something that potentially may be possible but what I'm gonna do because because air drumming that doesn't really feel natural to me at all I'm gonna try noting it back and if that doesn't sound right then I'm just gonna remove it because the easiest thing to do now if I was a drummer being asked to play this would be to just not play that China would be to end this jump fill with my right hand on that floor Tom and then use my left hand on that crash cymbal so I'll try nudging this China back a little bit - I guess simulate the time it would take for my hands to move there there so that actually works quite well because it splits up the sound of the China and the cymbal the crash and it also doesn't sound in humanly fast and here it's not an issue because this is a transition so whichever hand the drummer would finish that on although I think it's the same John Phil he's only hitting one symbol which is in this case of right crash cymbal so you can quite easily go from left there to right there because the last thing you'd hit with your right hand would be there so you've got plenty of time to move your hand up here so that is it pretty much as far as timing goes for this particular song there isn't anything in there that sounds wrong to me so I'm happy to move on to adjusting velocities so to keep this simple I'm going to select everything and drag it down to about halfway so just get rid of the ones I did before and that's halfway there so a couple of things about velocities the first thing I'm gonna go over is the first thing I would do when working with velocities which is broad randomization in the we did with timing with Pro Tools you can do this on the humanizing menu but any door as far as I'm aware should have a similar function the parameters that we use here I set it to no Don we don't care about note off set all too so that would be your midpoint I guess so for example 120 randomize of 5 I don't know if that's the percentage or if that's just an abstract number that more is more I'm not sure exactly how that's calculated but it doesn't matter because you just need to know what it sounds like and then limit to one one five one two seven so that would mean that every note is gonna be set to 120 it's never gonna go go below one one five and it's never gonna go above one two seven of course it can't go above one two seven because that's how MIDI works and the randomization the bigger that number is the more of a spread between one one five and one to seven there will be so this is a very good way to get something quickly that sounds less robotic than simply flat now flatlining everything at one to seven but it is not humanized because if we're just asking Pro Tools to randomize the velocities for us within specified parameters then it's not gonna sound the same as a real drummer so it's not humanized this is where air drumming can be extremely useful so if you can't play drums like me then just do your hands and your feet separately when you do this so when I go through kick I just kind of I guess air drum it with just my feet of course there's some parts in here that there's no way I can do that with my feet so I just slow it down and imagine how hard I would be hitting each drum another thing to be aware of is not only how hard you would hit the drums but also how hard you could hit the drums so it doesn't make sense if during a fast thirty-second note Tom fill you suddenly have a massive whack on one of the Tom's because I mean you might think it sounds good but if it's not possible then it defeats the purpose of humanizing aside from air drumming one other thing that is invaluable when learning tendencies possibilities and quirks of drummers is to watch live videos and if you have the time then transfer their performances I've done this a lot and every time I transcribe a drum track I discover something new which helps me when I'm either writing or humanizing drum tracks oftentimes if you just aquitar is to writes drums for your song they're invariably gonna sound like drums that were written by a guitarist because that's exactly what they are even if like me you can't play the drums for real doing everything I try to do everything that I can to try and get into that mindset because it just helps so much when it comes to producing realistic sounding prog drums so same as before when doing timing I work up the kid so I start with kicks then snare then toms and then everything else with cymbals I do mix it up a little bit but we'll come to that in a bit so this is where I see the most questions get asked in terms of humanizing drums what velocities should I use on my snare during a blast beat what velocity should my kicks be during a fast thirty-second note kick pattern there is no answer to this because a thirty-second note kick pattern at 200 BPM is completely different to 120 bpm same goes for blast beats and also depends on the kind of blast speed it also depends on how human you want it to sound if you want it to be completely natural versus something that sounds triggered already you're gonna use completely different velocities so that said I did create a list of velocity rules in inverted commas because rules are there to be broken that I created for this project so before I bring this up on the screen I want to make clear that this is not a cheat sheet go away broadband this is not a cheat sheet this is simply a rough guide that I created for myself to use as a starting point for this project with invasion so approach it with that mindset and of course feel free to simply copy the numbers that I have written down but what I would strongly suggest is that you create your own it will take time to work out what you like best and of course there is a lot of trial and error involved but if you put the time in to learn and understand why these numbers are the way they are it will save you so much time when actually implementing this on projects so I will bring this up now so quantize rules that I don't think I actually stuck to that of course I did stick to so here we go I would suggest make lists very light light medium hard very hard create velocity ranges and the way you do this is here we go we got a kick simply so there 1 1 4 and above we can here is harder than 1 1 3 so 1 1 3 and below is he's not hitting the drummer's hard because these are multi-layered samples but there aren't a hundred and twenty seven different layers there are I mean look if you look at the trigger files there are eight I don't know if they're actually more within contact but there are eight on the on the TCI files that come with invasion yes see so there I didn't I wasn't even looking at that that just is the same thing so one one three and above is a very hard kick hit for this project with these samples and importantly these velocity curves so I believe I left them as default but go in and check and if you're using a different sampler go in and check and make your own make your own rule set so can see on here I said that I wanted my kicks to be set at 105 with a let me bring it up on here there we go so one of my kicks to be set to 105 with a minimum of 98 and a maximum of 112 that's because I did not want any of my I guess normal hits to go into the territory of very hard because then if it's if it's a long pattern of hard kicks and then suddenly you get one that pops out obviously I would catch that because I'm going through it one by one but it's a waste of time dragging down all these notes one by one if you can just set a rule like this that you're going to then use and the six percent randomization I don't know why it's six and not five it I was just trying different numbers and six sounded good so let's start off with kicks so for now I'm gonna do what it says on here I'm gonna move this to my other screen now so you won't see it so if you want to copy these down then pause the video here so it's on my other screen just so I can work on here without having to keep bringing it up so the velocity rule that I set for myself just because this is what worked for this project is 105 for kicks randomizing by 6 with a range of between 98 and 112 go so it does that and this should be quite a good way to demonstrate this so if it's a randomizing 220 see the kicks are actually being pushed more to the extremes so much that a bunch of them are actually stuck at 98 because they can't go any further down so if your randomization I don't think it's a percentage but your randomization integer is too high then you end up with that so I'll set it back at 6 and then we're gonna go through and make changes so first of all these hits are not really part of a RIF they're just sort of accents before I forget this is when you bring in the guitars this is when you turn down the guitars [Music] so what I wrote on my little rule sheet is for hard hits set them to one one eight with a range of one one five to one to seven so in the case of ggd libraries if you've seen any of the videos that Knollys put out then you will probably know that they do their velocities slightly differently to how a lot of other drum software does such as in my experience superior drummer but as far as I'm aware ggd is something of an anomaly in the way they do this not that that's a bad thing I think this is actually a very good thing but anyway to explain the hardest hits so one two seven and anything approaching one two seven almost like a different way of hitting the drums so you could almost treat it like a different articulations so in superior drummer if you want a rimshot which is just a stupidly hard snare hit where you're also hitting the rim of the snare at the same time as the head and it gives this massive sounding crack you would need to use a different key you'd need to map it to a different key and have your snares across multiple tracks kind of like I do with the kicks for left and right the way ggd does it is they have it set so that the higher you go you will then end up with rim shots on the snare and the same way with kick if you go really high you end up with what's called burying the beater which is when you you put your foot down on the kick and you don't let it rebound you hold it against the head of the kick which results in a massive transient a bit less of a sustain so we can listen to that here so that's just a regular hit and you can hear that that has much more of a peak so I don't usually go anywhere near that high but for hits like this that are just sort of use accenting hits that are going in time with the guitars in this intro I will put them in in this kind of range and see how it sounds something else to be aware of here is these are all done on the right foot which is the dominant foot of most and my hypothetical drummer so if he's playing if you air drum this now so use your right foot and just tap with your tap with your toes where these drums where these kicks aren't so something that can be done here is we can reduce the velocity of the first of each double so instead of being Bom Bom Bom Bom it's bum bum bum bum which fits quite nicely with the guitar riffs so I just dragged all four bring them down I'm not looking at the numbers I'm just using my ears so it's a small difference but you hopefully you can hear it so that kind of thing I love doing it's all over my drum programming because that's how real drummers tend to play if a drummer was really really paying attention and they really wanted to obviously they could just play this by hitting the drum at the same level approximately it wouldn't sound as good because then I would argue that the drummer is trying to sound robotic which I mean if that's what they want to do then that's great but for this project not what I want okay then we have the drum fill and as with timing I'm gonna handle all the velocities at the same time once I move on to Tom's so just because I know the song and as do you by now hopefully because been listening to it for however long this video has been so far I'm just gonna select all the bits that follow this pattern and do the same thing so I'm not gonna go further than this first verse because I'd have to skip a bunch through the song and then I'd find other things that I want to tweak so the way to do this efficiently is to do it methodically okay so here we just have this fairly bog standard thrash beat so here the drummer is probably not gonna be hitting as hard as this this bit here even though the kicks are at exactly the same speed here he's getting into a groove so maybe the first one is harder so we can bring that one up but then also we have these doubles where if you again edge rum up with your foot so probably not hitting them quite as hard so we can bring down the first hit and the second hit because it is on the left foot and as we know our drummer is I guess right footed we're gonna pull those down so they are below the right foot and then take another listen so again remember once you hear the finished mix of this song these are gonna be much more audible because I do use other samples and with you know things like one-shots trading off the MIDI one shot samples don't care if the MIDI eight point is here here or down here it's gonna play the same thing so it's probably worth saying at this point that if you already know that you're going to mix using a lot of one shot samples as I know a lot of people do then it probably isn't worth your time doing this I would still definitely go through and do timing but playing with velocities to the degree that I'm gonna be doing now is probably not a good use of your time if you're just gonna be taking it with one shots [Music] okay so this is the triplet kick bit so what we're gonna do here is we're gonna simply reduce the velocity of the left foot and see how that sounds so when I click this over here you'll see a number appear so the zero is relative to its starting point that doesn't mean it's at a velocity of zero so if you wanted to you could say okay all of my left foot kicks are gonna be minus ten relative to where they were so if that was the case you would do that and that can be a good way to do it because it sounds fine but the way I prefer to do it is to not look there because then you kind of think of with numbers it's the same thing as he cueing with your ears as opposed to your eyes sometimes it's good just to close your eyes with this yeah I mean you can close your eyes but I just look at the line and then because this is random this this randomizing was done by the computer not by me I'm just moving some of these notes to make them a little bit more of a difference more of a distinct difference between the left on the right so let's take a listen [Music] and then again with the thrash bit so bump up the first couple and pull down the doubles doesn't need to be a huge difference between the two but some difference I find is usually more realistic so even though this is part of a blast speed it's I guess I programmed it as a lazy blast there's probably multiple drummers who would play it straight like that and if that were the case then they would not be able to hit the right drum as hard because if they're playing straight sixteenths they're with their right foot they're not going to be able to hit the drums if they're doing sixteenths doing right left right left right left so I guess that's why I programmed it that way but you can do it either way so now we have the first kick blast four four notes so here you can get very creative so you notice our drummer here is starting with his left foot which is also something that I have noticed Gene Okerlund does a lot so we know let's say that left feet are weaker than right feet in the case of this drummer so we pull down the left ones we also know if you if you ignore these so ignore both of those notes and let's just say that it's one two hits like that um first one's probably gonna be weaker than the second one so when you implement them if you think just about your right foot it's probably gonna be a fairly weak hit and then a fairly hard hit which results in this pattern here and I will bring the guitars down even more because I think they're a little bit too loud for this [Music] okay so this is the breakdown we're gonna be dragging velocity is kind of all over the place because again we're going for natural so one two one two three four five like that should have been yeah four not five I miscounted and then same again here and then we can just click and drag over here cuz again I know how the song goes the reason I am selecting these notes is because I am gonna make them harder by just pressing that button there so now we'll take another lesson so imagine the drummer is just hitting that these notes here that I've just pumped up he's hitting them harder and you'll notice it matches quite nicely with the guitars [Music] okay happy with that so now we have these triplets that are syncopated they're not they're not blasts of energy like this one again starting with the left foot so the same principle applies and something that I really like which is more of a I guess mike portnoy thing which I've only really seen him do is when he's doing these quick bursts he appears to hit his first right foot harder than his second right foot which results in this pattern here so low high lower and then medium so that shape there which sounds quite interesting because it means that the hardest hit is the second of the four which is in the case here these are these are triplets which means that it's not actually on a bar so if you take a listen listen to where the accent is which is I'll pull it up so it's even more obvious so I love that sound there so I just love little things like that but give the hypothetical drummer here bits of like personality and quirks so then here we have steady kicks the tempo isn't as fast and this is one of the important things about tempo because the tempo isn't as fast as the other sixteenths before I'm not going to drag them down by as much because the drummer absolutely could play these at pretty much the same volume if I decided that arbitrarily I want all of my double kicks which technically this is to be added o5 velocity lower than everything else that might make sense here but then if the next track on the EP is at 220 BPM that's no longer going to sound right and I'm gonna need to pull them down more because sixteenths at 220 are a lot faster than sixteenths at 120 one thing I should say about copying and pasting so you might notice here that this at least the kicks in this second part of this breakdown are identical to in the first why am I not copying and pasting because that once again defeats the purpose of humanizing drums if I had a Blake Richardson or a Matt Halpern or someone playing this material we would get it right we would not play it once and then copy and paste it so that entirely defeats the purpose of going through and humanizing drums sometimes in editing it might be necessary but I mean if it was me tracking those drums where it was necessary to simply copy and paste then I would ask the drummer to play it again so whilst copying and pasting may save time it's kind of counterproductive to what we're doing okay so this is the chorus and this is again another thrash beat so it doesn't make sense for this note to be that low the drummers are usually going to accent the first hit in every I guess groove even if it is a really fast one which I mean this isn't if it's sustained double kick they're gonna start harder than they finish some drummers do finish hard which means there might be a lull in the middle kind of like a smiley face and programming that kind of thing in is fairly simple to do and it will sound a lot better than well right now this is random because I simply asked ProTools randomize this for me and that's what I got so the doubles I'm gonna pull down and the right foot for the doubles I'm also gonna pull down just not quite as much there we go [Music] so here we have this little bit of triplets everything else is straight so for now I'm just gonna drag down the left foot and then the triplets I'm going to drag down again [Music] so these hits here because of this is the end of end of this section I see these being harder like the drummer is really gonna dig into those hits okay then we have the repetition of the verse riff which is different because there are more blast beats so we'll get to see how to do those so in the case of the hammer blast what the kick is doing is it's simply right left right left right left so exactly the same principle applies just drag down the left kicks slightly and again they're gonna most likely start hard so let's try and do that little smiley face thing that I just mentioned so I'm gonna just remove those for now to make this easy to look at so really don't want to go too too hard on this because then you'll end up triggering different sample layers and it might start to sound really kind of weird and you'll notice that I'm not using the grid here I'm using slip editing because even if I don't put it back exactly where it was as long as it sounds right that will add to the natural feel that's in the wrong place let's put it there in the right place [Music] so here this traditional blast played in triplets the drummer is only using his right foot so this is a good chance to show how a drama might actually play that so even though it's not a left foot we are going to bring down every other note because the drummer isn't gonna go up up up up up out he's gonna go pop a bubble pop pop pop up like that so because he's only playing with that one foot we can actually make the difference a little bit bigger than it would be if he was playing with two just for the purposes of this and we'll see how it sounds yeah I'm happy with that I don't think that's too far and if it is we can always bring it up later [Music] okay and this is the quick bomb bomb blast burst so for stuff that's going this fast the drummer isn't consciously or subconsciously gonna be hitting lighter with his left foot because his feet are just going berserk on cocaine so every hit here is going to be lower if you start pulling every other kick down in velocity so that it's triggering a different sample layer it can kind of start to sound nauseating so I'll show you what I mean [Music] yeah so that doesn't sound right to me I'd want them all to be lower I think even lower than that there so what we're hearing there is just a low-end rumble of crazy ridiculous energy okay now we have the build up so here the kicks are gonna be getting much harder so I'll just take the I'll take the individual kicks for now if you didn't know the way I'm doing this is by holding shift which lets you add to your selection and that's probably something else to mention is the reason I click and drag like that even if I'm only selecting one note at a time so obviously for dragging you couldn't do that but I'm doing it if I'm just doing one note is because if you you can hold shift and you can click absolutely you can click to add and remove something to your group but if you're at a zoom level kind of like this and you accidentally do that you end up changing the length of everything which then means you have to undo it so it's just an occasional extra click that you may have to do so here I'm imagining that because of the speed the dummy is actually gonna hit left and right at the same the same hardness cuz also he's smacking the hell out of the Tom's so he's just gonna be going nuts here so I'm actually gonna bring both of these up although not on the second half actually on reflection here because here he's doing the middle of a build up a pattern which means he's gonna be concentrating more on that and less on his feet so he's probably not gonna be hitting them twice as hard so I'll bump those up a bit more take a listen [Music] so doesn't sound too noticeable and until you know that I've done it and of course there you can see that he's hitting them not quite as not quite as hard bring those down a bit okay those two hits are gonna be loud because it's like that so when it comes to syncopated kick drum breakdowns like this and this happens all the time in metalcore oftentimes everything will just be maybe not at one to seven but it will all be the same or if not all the same it will sound like it's all the same once you start adding sample reinforcements when it comes to mixing I don't really like doing that for this style of music so I am still going to add a bit of difference [Music] [Music] [Music] so here we can do something pretty cool we can have the first hit is almost like a feather kick down here second here is reasonably hard and then bring the third one down and just listen to how that sounds so the idea of those trip that triplet kick there is it just kind of Li it flows into the drum fill and by having these velocities down here instead of way up there it just it's almost like a fade in okay so here this is a little bit different because this isn't gonna work as a fade in if I if I pull these velocities down and do the same thing I just did [Music] doesn't sound right because the point of this burst here is to accent this flam on the on the last beat so we want these to be a little bit louder yeah that's more like it okay so this is a one of the only I guess fairly standard I guess rock beats in the song so with something like this it's very easy to make this sound a little bit more human because you think about like ear drum this now with your foot so with me I'm kind of going bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum so every third um naturally just not hitting quite as loud so if we pull them down bump up the rest that already sounds better and I haven't we haven't touched the other drums yet and this is the solo so we're gonna do the same as what we did before just select the left foot bring it down slightly see how that sounds and make the beginning slightly harder yep happy with leaving that as it is here same thing bring those down bring those up done keep going so this bit here is kind of a weird it's not even really a fill but the the snares are gonna be fairly light and the kicks I just kind of want to give them a bit of a different feel here okay then we have the prolonged bomb blast so again we're not gonna just bring down the left kick we're going to bring down everything and this part here this break down everything needs to be up because the drummer is just going to dig in hard to this and we'll bring that last one up even higher because that's where he's doing the cymbal choke and this one we can bump up just to accent everything coming back in okay so that's the end of the kicks and you can see they look like that so yeah that's one way of knowing that we've done a good job the kicks now look like that and that's just the kicks so a couple of quick bullet point things to remember one is if the song has repetition in it so at course and you know that you did a thing in the first course for a reason then don't forget to do that same thing in the second course if the same thing applies so here this same drum fill I wanted these to be these two kicks to be slightly higher but the reason I did that is because I like how it sounded and a drummer could feasibly play it so I wanted to make sure I do the same thing in both choruses otherwise they might sound totally different if they were like two or three more things like that that I forgot to do in the second chorus then it would just mean that the second chorus doesn't sound as good which why would we want that okay now it's time to move on to the snare so snare flam's I've already gone over but I do have some snare roughs I'm gonna humanize them the same way that I'm doing the regular snare track but when it comes to them because they're in the chorus I will explain exactly what I'm doing so select all snares and the rule set that I set for myself is set them to 100 with a range of between 78 and 103 and we can bump that up to 10 just to see what happens to get more variety in the snare so snare as with timing velocities of the snare is incredibly important to get a sound right because I mean a robotic snare just sounds like doesn't it so it might look like here that the velocities are all over the place as a result of me setting the randomization to ten instead of five but as long as they're not crossing any velocity layers which they shouldn't be but I will be listening for but when I made those rules they will have checked it doesn't actually matter how far apart the two notes are as long as they're not crossing any velocity layers because if you have those two they one is louder than the other but it's not a different layer so it's not like this so of course you can do that and we will do that in the context of jum fills but for now you don't want randomly for there to be a bunch of notes that are way too quiet or way too loud so let's begin so right away for something that fast probably don't want em to hit that hard so we're gonna bring those down also for something that fast you do have again the dominant hand thing as with the foot so right left right left not gonna hit as hard with the left hand typically especially at that speed and something a lot of drummers do in fast drum fills is the last couple of hits are not gonna be as hard which there are other fills that'll be a better example of this the more than four notes usually it's because they know that their hands need to be somewhere else in one thirty-second notes time so let's have a listen yes oh that sounds fine what's important is that the impact is there on the first of the four we could even drop those even lower and it'll probably still sound fine yeah that sounds fine you can clearly hear that there are four notes there even though the last one is really really light so let's same again cuz it's the same bit okay so that one is a little bit different and I actually did that wrong so I went to light on the second hit which now means that the third hit is harder and instead of it sound like boom it sounds like buh buh buh boom which I don't want because this isn't supposed to be syncopated this isn't supposed to be a deliberate rhythm it's supposed to just be a port in the bin between the kicks there we go that sounds better jump fill I will come back to flam's I will do when I do jump fills okay so this last hit here we're probably gonna bring down because the drummer knows that he's about to play this quick burst and for this bit this thrash beat he's going right hand will be on the hi-hat here which means that he's hitting all of these with his left hand so right left right left right left right left all the way to the end which means that this is a left hand letting him start that fill with his right hand if this was a slightly different pattern and he was finishing with his right hand that would mean he'd have to start that with his left which would kind of throw off the rest and it can get complicated and I'm not well I mean I can't play the drums at all so I won't even say I'm not a competent enough drummer but drummers will generally try to avoid things like that and if a drum part is written with things where that you know you finished the thing on the wrong hand then you have to go all the way across the kit they're either not gonna play it or they're gonna adjust you know ask the band for it to be changed guitarists who write drums for their drummer will probably be familiar with this okay the first blast beat so those obviously need to be lowered down because in a blast beat so with it with a traditional blast you know I mean you are hitting the drum but you're not hitting it with any kind of real substantial force it's not quite a feather thing like it would be on the gravity blast which I'll show you later on but the sewol listen here so even there that sounds too hard too hard to me let's have a listen yeah it sounds like just you know blastbeats should not sound like that so one way that I approach blastbeats a traditional blast anyway is the kicks are on the beat and these snares are off the beat cuz that's how a blast beat works so if the snares are so loud that it sounds like it's out of time with itself then they're too loud at least that's the way I would approach it and same thing if I was mixing it you automate the volume down on the blasts you don't get that kind of disorienting feeling there so that sounds better and I mean what number is that yeah 48 so next time someone says where do I put my last beats tell them tell them 48 just don't give any other context don't talk about velocity curves don't you know tempo what kind of blasts speed what kind of drummer it's just just 48 [Music] okay these are being whacked like hell so we'll bring them up so there are better examples of this later on but for sections like this where it's a steady kick with snare hits on the beat if the stadia kick was not there and it was just boom pop boom pile like that absolutely the drum is fairly naturally gonna hit the snare really loud for this kind of thing because he's concentrating on his feet and being in time and being as consistent as he can he's probably not gonna be hitting with his hands anywhere near as hard so I don't want this to be way loud so we put it up here it's gonna sound wrong you know that just sounds weird blast beat again 48 approximately in 49 there we go oh no 53 what does that sound like okay 53 works it's not as cool as 48 but it will do okay so this is kind of the beat down section so we do have some ghosts but for the big snare hits that are on the beat they're gonna be loud so we pump them all the work well all the way up we pump them way up not that one I'll come to that one in a minute because that's something that I did to offset the groove so what is that one two three that's that's pretty high but again if you're programming with superior drummer velocity of one to three it's not gonna sound like that because it's probably not a rimshot so you may need to go high may need to use a different articulation it's up to you but with all the ggd packs this principle that I'm doing here works so those two are gonna be ghosts so the idea there you're not supposed to you know hear them well okay you're supposed to hear them you're not really supposed to notice them they're not really snare hits they're just there for texture so here this one we're gonna bring down not quite a ghost but we'll bring it down same thing here so here the beat kind of breaks slightly so these two are gonna be harder and not this one so I'll just show you what that sounds like and why so rather than the accent being here it's offset by so this thrash beat here in the course there are a lot of vocals going on at this point in the song gonna bring them down a little bit so it's kind of a songwriting choice as opposed to a physical limitation choice here because I wrote the song I know where there are massive amounts of vocals so if your song is instrumental you probably don't have to worry about this but I know that I'm gonna want the drummer to play not quite as hard on the snare during this part of the chorus so then these quick bursts where he's going a hat and then three on the snare so he's going hat with his right and then left right left so the pattern is still right left right left right left right left like any kind of standard drum fill but the snares need to come way down [Music] that's even a little bit too loud I think I'll bring em down more so then this second half of the chorus more ghosts like in the breakdown a couple of snare ups which give a nice again texture and the hits on the beat I want to be really loud so we'll bring them up [Music] so snare roughs I usually leave whatever I've set them at because of course is a lot quieter than the regular snare head so if you bring them down too much you're just not gonna even hear them so I generally leave them where they are [Music] okay so this is the pattern where again he's going right left right left right left right left but because it's in a three it means he's alternating which hand he's hitting the cymbal with so I I will redo this when I get to China but for now we know he's gonna hit that with his right hand and then left there so that's that will bring pretty way down then his right hand there then his left on the China so that would have come down a bit then right hand on their left right left right that's a kick left right left right right left so I'm bringing that up a little bit at the end of the jump fill let's see how that sounds like [Music] there we go so that just sounds so much better than flatlining it or using random velocities because that sounds like something a drummer might actually play I am gonna bring those two down a little bit so the hammer blast as cool as that sounds we got to bring those down because a drummer is not gonna whack the snares that hard when he's playing that fast so even that sounds a little bit too loud but something that we can do because if you physically think about the mechanics of a hammer blast you're probably gonna be hitting not as hard every other yet so we can try and add in that variation here [Music] doesn't need to be a huge amount but just enough to hear it there we go so again depending on the on the timing of the section this is going up up up up up up up you could have it going bop bop bop which can give some really really cool rhythmic feels to certain patterns especially if the kicks are just going in a two count so if the kick is going back boom bah bah and the snare is going bop bop bah then you can get something that sounds just awesome but because the guitar riff is going on at this point in time that would have just been distracting and felt wrong so I'm not gonna do that here another traditional blast 48 or wherever it is okay we'll leave that for now even though it's the same speed bring down the hammer okay so because the beat change is here I'm actually gonna bring these velocities down a little bit on the last couple of hits so that last one barely even a hit it's kind of like a little hit but it works so then we have the so then we have the bomb blast and generally bomb blasts you're gonna be hitting pretty damn hard relative to other blast beats but not relative to for example a thrash beat or a standard four on the floor rock beat so I'm gonna bring them down just not as much even though the speed is the same as the hammer there we go now we'll keep going into the break downs so these are gonna be hit really hard and then we get to do our first flam's we'll break our phlegm virginity these ones I'll do with the Tom's so flam's something that Joey sturgess's wonder named he has the hardest hit of the two flam's first so he goes flam is when you're hitting basically the drum at the same time kind of with both hands so he has the first hit louder which is not how a drummer would play it they would play it with the left hand going harder or the second hand going harder depending on which hand they're using the resulting sound is different there isn't a right way to do it but I'm gonna do the opposite of what I've done here because I'm going for natural so that's how Joey would do it unless he's changed his technique this is how most drummers would play it and I just think that sounds better so that's how I'm gonna keep it okay now these hits sound really weak this is the breakdown we do not want weak hits so the reason I know which hits I'm getting is firstly because I know the song but also because I know that the accent is on every half bar so 1 2 hit 2 1 2 hit 2 so everything else in here is just ghost notes accents that kind of thing which I do not want to bring up in level in fact I want to bring them down in level okay so this for this section of the breakdown it changes field the drummer moves over to the right so these interval bits on the snare they're not quite gonna be ghost note so I'm gonna have I'm hitting a little bit harder than in the previous section because a lot of what you do with the snare is about contrast which is why rules as I referred to them earlier and cheat sheets will only get you so far so this bit is actually I guess part of a fill and a flam so I'm actually gonna bring down the second of these hits so that the first is I guess more of a traditional hit the second is getting into ghost note territory which will again just change how it sounds I don't remember if I did this on the actual finished version of the song but it's an idea I just had and let's see how it sounds [Music] [Music] yep like how that sounds a lot ok guitar solos so here we have the option of deciding do we want the accent to be on the beat or off the beat and I will demonstrate both so on the beat sounds like this and off the beat sounds like this so I prefer on the beat because I want to keep it fairly simple as it is during the guitar solo so don't want to distract anything cuz guitarist has to have his moment especially when that guitarist is me so had I not added this change here then you totally or totally could have gone in and added a bit where the accent is not on the beat so same thing but alternating but here the rhythm of the snare changes completely so to me those are the naturally gonna be the big hits and then the one-two-three they're gonna be harder but not as hard and these ones I need to bring down a little bit just bring down the third one as well so this here is well probably the least busy section of the entire song so the snare is not doing anything except hitting every half bar [Music] so you know that means 48 no I'm joking stick them way up because the drummer is gonna the drummer the drummer is gonna hammer the hell out of the snare during this part and then this bit as I said earlier I want to bring the snares down a because the snares are not the focus it's the the bead is on the kicks on the cymbals [Music] so here then we have a snare hit on the left hand leading into a blast so this hit is not gonna be as loud as the others now we're gonna bring these down a little bit okay now this is the gravity blast and these are gonna come way way way way down that might even be too loud let's have a listen not quite loud enough I was wrong there we go so it just sounds like almost like a rough on here play one of those which I guess you could program it like that but I didn't again very simple parts these hits are gonna be really loud okay now it's Tom time just before I do Tom's a quick recap so bear in mind tempo because the velocities that I'm using here are only strictly applicable to this song sixteenth note double kicks at 150 are slower than sixteenth note double kicks at 200 and this sounds obvious but if your song has a tempo change and you don't pay attention to it or remember when you humanize your velocities you could end up with something that sounds ridiculous another thing to remember is in some samplers most samplers there is a distinct layer difference between the samples because the way they work is that they are multi layered and different samples are played at different velocities so it's not simply a volume increase so it's important that you know where these layer changes occur because if you're not sure and you decide to set your cake your snare between for example 110 and 120 but you don't realize that notes 1 1 8 1 1 9 and 120 are super super hard kicks where the drummer is burying the beater that means that 20% of your kick hits in that section are going to sound significantly different to the rest which will sound completely unnatural or if not unnatural it will sound random because that's what it is ok time to bring in the toms so my rule set for Tom's and with Tom's you do I mean the only reason I'm using this rule set here is because there's a lot of Tom's in this song you can just eyeball it and do them all by hand which I have done before but just as a starting point I'm going to set them as I wrote down when I worked on this for real okay so that's ball park and we're also gonna do jump fills as we go so let's go yeah so these Tom's do sound a bit too loud here especially for this tempo so I am just gonna drag them down so here same principle is with the snare start hard finish light here it's less of an issue because you got bird or the drummer has the kicks to break up the sections so they can absolutely go but it would have been bump a bunch without laying off too much on how how are they aim the drums [Music] so here this bit is just a flurry of ridiculousness and I love these kind of drum fills so right left right left right left right left right it's on the left but not by not by too much so we pull those down bring the second one up there we go all done so this bit here would be very tricky for a drummer to play but it would be theoretically possible but there's no way they'd be able to hit the Tom's this hard so bring them way down to there there we go so there'd be two ways to do this you could use one hand for both and sort of drag between the two or you just have to hit these splash cymbals really really light because how fast you'd have to move your hands but that as it is sounds good to me [Music] so for fast fills where the drummer is transitioning between two different drums in this case you've got four hits on the snare and then four on the Tom the first couple hits on the Tom generally not gonna be quite as loud as the others but because this is only four hits it doesn't have time to you know get loud so we're just gonna pull down the first couple of hits and the last couple hits on the snare just to make it flow a bit more naturally so let's have a listen okay so this kind of thing here is I guess a traditional metal drum fill where you got everything's just in pairs but Papa Papa Papa Papa bump but quickly like that so yeah left hand is gonna be weaker than the right hand so for starting point pull down the second of every pair there we go cuz the important one is the is the first hit of each I think I can bring all of them down a little bit and yeah again because of how fast the hands are moving much as I'd like them to whack the hell out of these floor toms they probably can't so we'll bring them down a little bit here same thing although we start with a flam so end of the drum fill kind of tail off a little bit because he knows he's got to move over here to the hi-hat with his right hand which is what he's using for this hit here [Music] so for these kind of fills that I guess start before the start of the bar I like to have the Jama sort of build into it so you'll see what I mean here that kind of thing just sounds great to me okay now the big open tom bit so here we're gonna do these by hand the drummer again left hand is weaker than the right hand but because of the speed that he's playing at and remember he's whacking the hell out of these toms because I told him to we want to keep them all fairly loud actually just bringing up the floor tom here that's all that I think really needs doing for this bit okay so this bit here he's not using the hi-hat he is hitting the left and right floor toms those bits I just want to sound like cannons so we're gonna bring them up [Music] okay now for the actual fill itself which is the same thing three times it's just going up up up up up up the quick bits are not gonna be hit as hard which should be fairly self-explanatory so the hardest hit in this group of four notes that bah bah bum bum is gonna be this one the third usually can of course mix it up and again this I could copy and paste but again if this was a real guy he would not play this exactly the same every time so even though drum sample libraries including invasion if I if I just copy and paste the MIDI it's not gonna trigger the exact same samples so it isn't going to be exactly the same performance but I also don't want it to be even that close of a performance I want to have complete control over being able to move every note if I want to so for this kind of film I imagine the this Tom hit would be lighter than the snare so the accent here would actually be off the beat and then it goes into the more traditional drum fill so that I went a bit too light I bring that up a little bit he's not gonna be hitting them as hard as he was in the break but he's still hitting them pretty damn hard so here because this is part with the snare flam he's gonna be hitting these really hard so this bit I'm can't really explained why I did what I did I just kind of imagined how I might play it so just on the table or I mean sometimes I use pencils I don't have them to hand at the moment just play it out and if again you're not a drummer slow it down like that and just kind of figure out how hard you would play these notes okay so this is the fast thirty-second note fill between the snare and the Tom's these are not gonna be anywhere near as hard as this cuz that just sounds machinegun e so we're gonna pull them down so even though these last two notes of sixteenths and not thirty seconds because of how fast his hands are moving just in general he can't hit them as hard as they would be if they were up here so let's have a listen to that yeah happy with that so for bits like this you have a choice you can either just leave them semi flat like that or you can have them go bable bable or bow but bow so we'll see what works best so I like that let's try the opposite no first one sounded better definitely so we're gonna bring up bring up these second two bring down the first two so the accent is on the second hit so this bit is triplets on the Tom's so I kind of want it to build up and have the accent be on the fourth note that's a little too quiet I'll bring those up but you can still hear the accent is definitely still where I put it so for this freehand bit we're gonna bring these way down because this is not supposed to sound like hammers going off in your ears [Music] yeah happy with that okay now time to move on to the symbols so as before we're going to apply broad humanising to them and then we're gonna adjust them section by section so which is selecting every thing that is not a shell change velocity what are we changing them to 120 105 1 2 5 randomizing 10% go done and that's the song finished no I'm joking we need to go through one by one otherwise it's not really done so these bits here before the refrig actually starts we know he's gonna hit harder so high hats I like to bring down a fair bit cuz they're naturally a very loud jump anyway [Music] okay these during the blast he's not gonna hit them all the same volume so we're gonna bring down every other one and then bring the whole lot down [Music] China's usually when they use they get smacked to hell so we can bring those up [Music] it's almost always appropriate to smack them the hell okay so for slower bits like this the drummer is obviously not doing quite as much with his right hand which means that he will be hitting these cymbals harder so we can bring them all up okay we're gonna just bring down these high hats a little bit because they're slightly too loud yeah they're still too loud partly because they're very widely open so they just kind of cake the whole thing in hi happiness should I really want here so [Music] you might notice I'm not doing anywhere near as much with the with the overhead tracks the cymbals and the hats because you don't need to do as much to get them to sound realistic because again no defined transient generally so the main thing is to just think about roughly how hard they would hit for each section and then blanket them bring them up bring them down a little bit that's it so you'll rarely be doing anything particularly integrate with the overheads the one exception to this I've found is the hi-hat because there are so many different articulations you really can spend all day on a hi-hat because a well humanized hi-hat just sounds incredible [Music] [Music] so for this bid on the hammer blast I'm actually gonna leave the hats that loud I'm not gonna bring them down because it doesn't they don't sound too loud compared with what's going on down here so here during the blast we got the ride and the ride bells so the ride I'm gonna bring down a little bit because I want the accent to be on the beat that of course needs to come down bomb blast bring the cymbals the China cymbals way down even lower than that I think [Music] so the reason I'm adjusting every other note on the ride but not really on anything else like I didn't do it here is because again rides have a very clear transient they have the ping and then the decay whereas the China it's kind of like a washy splash of noise it doesn't need to be done there I can do it but this case of where am I gonna allocate my time so break down usually on the China this is no exception bring them up this is one of the things I love about invasion they just got these little effects symbols that you just add quite a lot of life to the drum tracks so something you can do which I'm not gonna do here because I didn't think it needs it but if you listen to this beat again so the reason I'm not doing it here is because there's other stuff going on in the original play here but when you hear it you'll hopefully know what I'm talking about but if this was a maybe slightly slower more open feel I might do something like this and bring down every other cymbal so a lot of the time drummers will do this doesn't sound right for this section which is why I'm not doing it here ok so here's some intricacies on the ride ok this is the more traditional rock beat here so we're using two different hi-hat articulations and because of the speed it kind of just sounds like a wash of hi-hat can't tell he's alternating between the two so we just want to kind of bring those down a little bit and maybe bring these ones down a little bit more because if you think about how a drummer would really play this with his right hand he's gonna hit harder on these notes so there you can hear I went too far because that sounds kind of like an oompa beat which is what I want to do yeah that's a little bit more subtle here's more intricacies on the ride [Music] [Music] so as with the snap here this is not a very busy part at all he's gonna be smashing those cymbals and trying to break them so here is actually a good example because of how how the how the part sounds and where the cymbal the china cymbals are placed that maybe is a part where I might alternate how hard he's hitting which sounds like this so that works quite well with the beat going on below so here the left hand is accenting on the hi-hat and that I want to bring down a little bit because it's not supposed to be too distracting okay so I think I'm pretty happy with the way these drums are sounding and at this point I would leave it and then come back tomorrow and see if anything else needed changing which pretty much wraps up the goal of this video I've humanized this track from start to finish and if I do make any other changes they're gonna be very small here and there and I hope this really has demonstrated that this does take a lot of time to get this kind of result but that it's actually not very difficult and you know if you can do it once you can do it 20 more times and then you'll be able to do it so much quicker yes so that's where I'll leave this video and hopefully you found it useful and hopefully able to implement some of this into your own drum programming if you do any of what I've been through differently to how I do it then let me know in the comments because I'm more than happy to give it a go and maybe it will work for me so add everything that I've been through on here I've kind of figured out over the years of doing jump programming myself none of this was like taught to me as like a proper way to do things I just kind of figured it out so it's about as efficient as I think I can program drums but if there are things that I've overlooked or some shortcuts that I've missed if you've you know if you've seen me keep pressing a button and you're thinking oh there's a there's a key keyboard shortcut for that you idiot then tell me in the comments as well because I would like to know I hope you enjoyed the video and this song along with the other five will be released during November I will post a link on this video once the album is released thank you for watching goodbye [Music]

Channel: Charlie Munro

Views: 3,003

Keywords: drum programming, midi, ggd, get good drums, metal, death metal, thrash metal, guide, tutorial, advanced, extreme metal, advanced drum programming, heavy metal, rock, blast beats, hammer blast, bomb blast, gravity blast, double kick, fast, holy sadist, hellbore

Id: 8y5Sd-3E4Yo

Length: 162min 22sec (9742 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 08 2019