Beginner's Guide to Programming Rock/Metal Drums in REAPER (or any other DAW)

all right y'all um i've been getting a few questions lately about how i programmed drums so i figured i'd make a quick video and talk about that a little bit um this is my first time doing this so if it's not the most polished or professional thing you've ever seen i apologize but i'm gonna do my best here so let's get started here so i'm using reaper it's a daw made by a company called kakos i've been using it for a long long time i love it i know everyone's got their preferences when it comes to daws but this one's my favorite um it happens to be free to try i think it has like an indefinite trial period that's you know fully functional so uh yeah i recommend you give this a shot if you've never tried it before um but the things i'm going to talk about here are they apply to any daw so if you're using logic or pro tools or cubase or whatever they all kind of do the same thing um i can't really speak to what their midi editors look like but um you know if you like what i'm doing here you can always give reaper a shot and um do it the way i do it um so yeah let's get started i'm using a song that i recently released called monolith um recorded it at home and um i used toontrax superior drummer 2.0 on this this guy right here um this is not the most recent version of superior drummer i think they have 3.0 out now um but this is the one i've been using for the longest and the thing i'm the most comfortable with so that's what i'm using but um the principles of what i'm talking about in this lesson are going to apply to whatever drum program you use so whether that's superior drummer or ez drummer or the get good drum stuff whatever you're using this will apply to that so let's see where to begin um first i'll talk a little bit about my thought processes on programming drums so when i'm writing a song i'll usually start in reaper with just like a scratch track for guitar setup and i'll be playing i'll come up with a riff i like and i'll just record a quick version of it always to a click i'll set a tempo or something and then um i'll throw some drums on there so i usually keep it pretty simple at first and just get something in there just to have a skeleton of a song and as the song progresses um it gets a little more polished sometimes nothing changes sometimes it's just a simple drum beat sometimes i'll go crazy and add all kinds of weird stuff in there but um i think it's important to get a workflow going that that you're comfortable with for me that's recording songs riff by riff throwing some drums in there getting it sounding pretty good and then having parts that i can move around and arrange but here we're looking at the completed song got the stem tracks here and the top track up here is the finished version of the midi drums and then i have a track right below it here it says tutorial drums um that is blank so i'm going to go at this kind of from a total beginner's perspective if you've never programmed drums and reaper before i am going to assume that you have some knowledge of how to set up tracks and reaper and all that if you don't there's plenty of great tutorial videos out there that explain it so let's go ahead and delete this midi file i'm going to show you how to do this from the very beginning so set up a new track and let's say you know usually i'm just doing this riff by riff so i'm only making like small midi files but let's just make one for the entire track so i'm going to start right here i'll zoom in a little bit this is where the song starts i'll zoom out and you just click and drag the time selection that you want zoom out a little more and there you go um so you can see here that we have that entire section selected which happens to be the whole song in this case click on the track go to insert new midi item and there it is all right so you've got your midi file in there um the next step is to actually add the program or the plugin into the track so i already have superior drummer in here but if you were to do this from scratch here's how you do it so in reaper you go to add all your plugins will be here go down to tune track or whatever company you're using and then double click on the vsti and there it is i'm going to remove that instance because i already have it in there but that's how you do it and then you should be good to go um so double click the midi item there and you'll open up the midi editor um when you first open this um by default reaper is going to have the piano roll over here which is not that useful for programming drums you want to be able to see the names of the notes or not notes but the sounds in order to do that you want to go to view by default it will be on piano roll you want to go down to name notes or you can just hit alt to and when you do that there's going to be a blank list here of just numbers and in order to see the note names you'll either need to import a file with the node names on it or do it yourself manually i'm going to put a link in the bio to a great resource for tune track sounds it's got a bunch of lists of tune track libraries you can just upload in here and you're good to go i'm not really sure about other companies where to find their name note lists but i'm sure they're out there to import you'll go to file notes cc names load note cc names from file and choose your file i already have it in here but there it is all right let's start programming some drums a quick note here about the grid right now i have it set to eighth notes if you want to do faster stuff you can set the sixteenth notes there you see you have more grid lines to work with slower stuff you can go down to half notes gridlines go away let's start with eighth notes to insert a hit you just double click the line here to take it away double click that note again there it goes um if you wanted to you could insert hits anywhere if you unselect snap to grid you can just click anywhere it'll just go exactly where you hit it i'm going to undo all that but by default it should snap directly to the grid so it's just going to go right to the nearest grid line no matter where you click so let's get rid of all that this is how i would recommend getting started you can tweak things after you program the basic drumbeat to be more human but start out with just the gridlines so alright when you are inserting drum hits a quick note about velocities so over here on this bar um this clicking on this determines how hard the hit will be so if i click all the way over here to the right and i insert the hit that's going to be a high velocity hit the highest velocity so the robot drummer is hitting the kick drum as hard as they can and you see that represented here so if you click and drag down here this lowers the velocity of the hit so now it's a really soft hit it's at 60. 127 is the highest velocity hit you can have so slide this guy up and down to change the velocity just double click to get rid of that and if you want to start at a lower velocity click a little further to the left over here and then when you double click you'll get a softer hit to begin with i tend to just write like full velocity hits um as i'm writing um and then i go back and tweak it i humanize it later which i'll show you how to do um so that's what i would recommend um all right so let's put some kicks and snares in here so let's listen to the riff real quick [Music] i'm going to put in a really basic like lars alright tight beat kick snare all right let's see what that sounds like [Music] pretty basic um let's put a crash in there and put it in there like that w let's go back to the beginning [Music] pretty simple right now to save time i'm going to delete those two beats so right click and drag and you can select all these notes ctrl c to copy and you can pop those in here click on that line hit ctrl v and you've got those hits there so [Music] all right that's a super basic drum beat um another thing you can do to save time let's delete these here close out of the midi editor and we can split this again and kind of just repeat it over and over again so on the most basic level you could just do these two hits here so click that line there hit s to split and then delete this section and then you should be able to click and drag this and it just does that forever or as long as you want it to so you know if we wanted to we could have it sound like this so something like that is perfectly fine if you're just recording a demo um you don't care about how real or fake it sounds yet you're just trying to have some drums in there all right so let's go back to our basic beat open it up um and let's say we want to make the sound a little bit more human right now it's just full velocity the drummer is hitting everything as hard as possible exactly the same every time just not how a real drummer plays so one thing we can do first is to use the humanize feature this is really useful for just quickly varying up the velocities and the timing of each hit so it kind of pulls things a little bit off the grid it brings the velocities up and down you can you know adjust the parameters to make it more dramatic or less dramatic so let's see how that works so i'm going to hit ctrl a to control to select all these notes and then i'm going to hit the h key and that brings up the humanize notes dialog box you can select all notes or just the notes that you select so if you have a bigger section and you only want to mess with a certain part of it like a fill or something you can just do that and over here you can adjust the timing and the velocity so i depending on the part i don't usually do anything too dramatic five percent usually does the trick and then you can just hit new random seed and you see here the hits are shifting a little bit to the left or right of the grid and then the velocities changing a little bit down here um you can really bump this up to see um a more dramatic effect so now i'm you know the velocities are going all over the place this is probably going to sound super sloppy um so let's say you've been messing with this and you have everything all over the place and you want to go back to how you had it hit cancel and it should go away another thing you can do is hit the q key for quantize and that's the opposite of human eyes that makes everything perfectly robotic exactly lined up and yeah there you have it so let's go back to human eyes hit h um you know you could slide these around a little bit and make them a little more dramatic than five percent to see the real effect and now it's a little bit more human we'll play that [Music] let's extend that so you can really see the effect um double click that let's select all these notes again humanize again and then you know you can take a you know an extended like copied and pasted bit and humanize it and even though you know it's the same basic beat there'll be some variation in there this is a quick way to you know get some good pretty real sounding drums going without doing a whole lot of manual programming so let's do a random seed here and solo those you can see here the hits are not exactly on the grid sounds a little more real a little less robotic and let's select them all again hit q we'll quantize them again and now they're back to being totally perfect timing wise you can see the velocities down here are still a little varied and you can just since they're all selected you can click and drag up and that brings all the velocities up to full power and it sounds like that certainly nothing wrong with doing that if that's the sound you're going for but i find that sound a little fake so let's undo undo again and see what it sounded like when we had it humanized breathes a little more sounds a little more human yeah so that's a super basic beat and a super basic example of what i do when i'm programming drums um if you're a beginner i'd recommend starting there make a really basic beat get comfortable with plugging in the hits this can get really tedious when you're doing more complicated parts and it just all comes down to how much time you spend with it i've been doing this for a long time so i feel like i'm pretty quick at it but that's only because i've been doing this for years um like anything else it takes practice so you know be patient um and take your time be thoughtful when you're putting these drum parts together and yeah there's this is the way that i do it i just take you know i take my time and i spend a lot of hours tweaking and perfecting everything um and trying to think like a drummer um you can a good way to practice is to try to program drum parts by drummers you admire um learn how they construct fills and how they you know throw things in to you know from verse a to verse b how did they play it different the second time things like that um i'm not a drummer i don't know how to play drums but i really admire great drummers to me there's nothing more exciting than watching a really good drummer play or playing with a really good drummer um and that's where i get my inspiration from all right so let's go back to the finished drum part and i'll show you um a little more in detail of a more complicated part i'm not going to go through and program everything from scratch at this point but i will show you um kind of what a completed drum part looks like for me i'll zoom in a little bit here so it's easier to see the hits and this is that same intro riff again it's a little later in the song and i just like to when i reintroduce a riff um play with the beat a little bit um there's a lot you can do just by changing symbol accents or you know the kick pattern to make it sound more exciting um so let's let's listen here this is a little later in the song same riff let's listen to that fill real quick um you can see down here that the velocities are really varied um that's because this is kind of like a ghost note snare section um i really wanted to have some nuance and some dynamic there so let's listen to that soloed [Music] you can see here this is the snare these yellow notes here the velocities down here you know i varied them up so these are the softer hits the ghost notes [Music] then it goes back to closer to full velocity um i think throwing ghost notes in is a great way to sound a little more real and human um you know drummers love to do that great drummers love to do that and i love to throw them in there so let's go back and listen again [Music] so a lot going on there um but it's pretty simple um right here i just threw in uh the china kind of on the offbeat um and then give it a triplet feel here and then back to a more straightforward just double kick [Music] off beat there again a little ride accent up here and back just a one two three four one two three very simple just crash on the downbeat and all this is just you know manually entered i just went through and you know clicked in the hits you know i'll sometimes i'll go through and copy and paste something simple that can be repeated a million times you know like the kick drums i'm not going to go through and just hit every kick drum here i can just oh not that right click select these copy and paste and then just paste them as you go instead of hitting every single hit that would take forever but um you know after you do that go through humanize it um when you're listening if you if it sounds super fake go in and mess with the velocities manually um and again it just takes time time and practice but once you've been doing it for a while it'll start to come naturally second nature let's listen to a couple fills real quick um these can be tricky to get to sound real um they can sound super robotic if you don't do them correctly they might still sound super robotic here i don't know i did my best but let's listen to this guy here [Music] turn that click track off so toms um tom's gonna be tricky if you have the velocity up too high it sounds super fake like no one is gonna be doing 30 second notes on toms as hard as possible most drummers not that are not going to do that at least so bring the velocities down a little bit um and the timing here this is you know this is very imperfect right here um and you know with the fill especially like a faster fill that's a good thing if it's a write on every grid line it's going to sound super fake let's listen to it again another fill here super simple [Music] the thing i like to do is kind of alternate tom and kik on these faster runs instead of doing like super fast time hits just alternate kick in the tom i think it sounds pretty cool [Music] so that section there these are mostly like high velocity hits i've got a little variation in there you can see here especially on the kicks um so for faster louder heavy stuff that's a good thing for softer parts let's see so this is kind of a an interlude softer interlude part here let's listen to what it sounds like in the song i've got some softer dynamics going on here so you can see the velocities go from very high to very soft so for something like this i would probably um you know select like a softer velocity to begin with and program them in like that and then humanize it a lot of variation going on here and mostly that's just for me selecting these hitting h and just humanizing them um it's a really great way to do that quickly let's move on to this section here so that's pretty much it um that's my thought process when i'm programming drums again i'll say it for the millionth time like anything else this just takes time and practice it's easy to make a drum beat with full velocity that's just right on the grid it's simple it sounds super robotic the hard part is going in and being creative with fills and adding nuance with velocity and stuff like that um but with time and practice you'll get it um i hope this video was helpful um you know let me know what you think in the comments and if you want to hear more from this song uh it's called monolith i put it out on uh january 29th 2021 the guitar playthrough video is on my youtube channel um the song is streaming on spotify and everywhere else you find music and yeah thanks for watching hope this helped

Channel: Alan Simpson

Views: 4,724

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Id: jRS77d5x1o0

Length: 25min 8sec (1508 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2021