Cinematic Drum Programming: Day One with Christian Henson

hi there christian henson from spitfire audio here hope you're well a few years ago i made a film about how i confronted my imposter syndrome overcame it and applied my skills as a drum programmer which is what kind of got me into hollywood to orchestral programming and how i became an orchestral programmer without going to a conservatoire reading music etc etc and really focused in on the thing that stops us doing stuff is a fear that we're not going to be able to do it now i wanted to turn that concept on its head and talk to you about cinematic drum programming i know by speaking to many of you that drum programming is maybe not your wheelhouse so like the film i made a couple of years ago i'm gonna give you just some basic pointers five basic pointers to get you up and running and using a part of the orchestral canon that is so important to our craft of media composition it's also just so much fun so i'm going to be using hammers by charlie klauser exclusively today i think because it is the most all-round drum percussion tool that i've ever used it's great for beginners because it's got some loops that are very kind of educational give you a real kind of guidance of how if you want to program the individual hits how to best go about doing that but also it's a very kind of pro-end tool for i guess kind of grunty old sea dogs like myself but the principles i'll be discussing today could be applied to any drum library whether that be the darwin percussion in albion the original cinematic percussion range or indeed hans zimmer percussion and the many other developers who make percussion libraries damage it al these aren't rules these are just pointers pointer number one it's not just about leathering it or as han zimmer says just cranking it out sounds good but it'll become very tiresome and unimpactful very soon so the first thing to consider is not just what you're playing it's how to voice it whether you're looking at a trap kit you know bass kick drum snare hi-hat or indeed a military band you'll notice that the deepest percussion plays the least the middle range percussion plays a little bit more and the top eye the hi-hats or your glockenspiels will play the most this is a good starting point for cinematic percussion and if you look at the cerdo loops say in hammers you'll hear the parts they're playing have a lot of space in between them so this is great pointer for programming these individual hits so let's start with the bass drums [Music] now i like to quantize to a slight swing so i'm going to do a 16 b swing i'll keep those quantized absolute because they're the kind of backbone but as we move up i'll lessen the strength of the quantization and i'll explain why i do that in a moment so let's move to the cerdos so what i'm going to do is play just a little bit more and for me it's going to be all about the way you accent the drums if you watch a drummer playing his snare on a drum kit you'll you'll see that he he's probably hitting that drum up to 16 times a bar but the notes that you really hear just on the 2 and the 4. [Music] and this is where i want to take the strength down a little bit so it just doesn't sound like a machine [Music] let's quantize that and again bring the strength down and basically the strength just puts in time the bits that are badly out of time and as we're moving up in pitch i'm just going to increase the frequency of notes [Music] but again with these accents [Music] so what i'm going to do is just add a little bit of interest here just even faster kind of notes by using some roughs and some flams at the end now i want to just do some more in between bits with the cerdos but instead of using the four player which has this kind of epic sound i'm just gonna go to solo [Music] losing a bit of headroom here starting to kind of clip and limit so i'm just going to pull this down now i'm just going to save that and just show you what happens when we tighten everything up so we go from these four player sounds to the solo sounds say for example from the four player here to a solo and then just make everything totally 100 tight so no swing at all just straight quantized here so it has a slightly less epic sound and that really takes to maybe adding a bit of distortion and really screwing up the signal etc etc the second pointer with cinematic percussion is to create light and shade the loud stuff will sound loud if it's next to quiet stuff so it's always great to create moments of of it heightened tension that isn't necessarily dramatic and epic so i'm going to go on to some of the scrap here again put that to a 16 b let's take the strength down just a bit for many of you you might not be actually playing this in you might be drawing this in and this is when it's really important to make sure that we've got a variety of um different velocities that's what makes drums sound real if they're all in the red running at you know 127 and it's going to sound like a computer you see the minute i start altering the volume so they're less constant you have a much more kind of groovy interesting rhythm so by doing a little bit of post-production like that you just keep the interest it stops sounding like a loop stop sounding like a computer i'm also going to add in some scrap loops that have been warped in this library amazing warps so let's go scrap and again you'll see that it just adds a bit of interest so let's adopt some of these principles of post-production to the frame drum part in the previous section so applying the light and shade what we're going to do is come back with this pattern but instead of being on frame drums i'm going to switch to the darbukas just to give a different kind of color there and from toms to roto-toms everything in hammers has been organized into bricks of six notes so we've got hit hit hit rough flam and roll so what i'm going to do is bring everyone back with a nice roll there the third principle think about gear changes so it's not just about getting louder and louder or bigger and bigger it's imagining that your drum kit is like a motor car and you're gonna go up a gear so you can do this in in two ways with simply with tempo and i'll just run it with the metronome so you can hear it so again using charlie's loops is a bit of a a drum tutor if you will it's going to be interesting have a listen to what happens when we use the bass loop and it swaps tempo so this is quite a busy loop for a bass drum chase's tempo it changes pattern to something that's less constant that is more varied this is because the loops have been specially curated so when you're speeding up it's not just speeding up or playing the same thing faster so when we're doing these gear changes it's always worth thinking about what you're getting your drums to play particularly with these fast 16s it just kind of sounds a little bit mickey mouse so what i'm going to do is actually switch to a triplet feel [Music] and again let's just pull apart these velocities that are similar [Music] [Music] so that's an interesting way of just kind of creating a little bit of a drum phase there and what i'm going to do is just put that at the top there now i'm sure you'll be used to the trick of doing a straight beat and then filling it with a triplet fill but you can do that the other way around so with a triplet rhythm pattern you can fill with a straight fill [Music] okay let's just go back a little bit and see where we're kind of at [Music] okay for me that's not feeling like enough of a gear change so i'm going to actually take this up to 180 bpm the next pointer is sucks and drops we've already got a kind of couple of these and then this roll in here where sucks are really useful is for those awkward cuts what i'm going to do here is i'm going to make this even more awkward i'm going to make this kind of uh come in here say duplicate the bass drums so what i'm going to do is enable reverse and make this as long as [Music] possible great stuff i'm going to do the same with the cerdos [Music] in order to create moments of real drama for me it's like the kind of the ocean when a really big wave comes you've got to let the water really kind of drag out before it crashes down so you're going to be going full pelt leathering it possibly and to really increase the drama what we've got to do is we've got to create some space and you do that with drops and sucks so let's have a listen to this so i'm going to repeat that bar but with absolutely everyone no shame toms darbukas and then let's get another suck in that wave going out crashing back in so for me i would tend to go in here and put real intention behind all of these separations of dynamics the use of roughs flams i don't have the blessing of time uh i think this is one of the problems with these tutorials is is that for a sequence like this how long is this a one minute sequence you know i would spend at least two days working on a rhythm sequence like this and that's what's also great about hammers is it can speed up the process for us so what i'm going to do is i'm going to swap out some of my program parts for loops right final pointer and an achilles heel for some of you and that is mixing with libraries like darwin cinematic percussion handsome percussion and hammers i really would advise against messing around with the quality of the sound too much particularly the bottom end so we have some problems here at the moment and that is that i'm pushing it too far you'll see that i've got everything going into a drums bus and it's all sounding very hot now you have to be i guess you can make the bus as hot as you like but the thing that you need to be very wary of is distorting the master bus because if you're stemming stuff out you're not going to be able to recreate that kind of squash sound something i find happens a lot with professional engineers is there's a temptation to compress drums like these i think this sounds just strangled so what i'm going to do is reattenuate the whole mix we've not used any automation so what i'm going to then do is just go through each sound see if there's anything i want more of if there's anything i want less of tweak that and then what i'm going to do with the drum buss is just make it a little bit more efficient so we can get back up to that dynamic level so let's just check the bus [Music] i personally wouldn't dare to add any more bass to the bassia drums that charlie has recorded and mixed he has been monitoring through seriously expensive monitors and has huge amounts experience of this so for me i know he's gone maximum fat and it would be in my humble opinion foolhardy to try and get any more out of that bottom end so i trust that and that's the whole point of these libraries that are curated so all i'm then going to do is just chop off the very bottom and then what what that'll do is take away all of the rumble we can't actually hear with our ears and make the mix that much more efficient so compare two and you can see there's a lot going on there it's already got quite a bright clicky sound to it so i'm not going to do anything there i'm just gonna do this and i will probably copy this across quite a lot of the channels [Music] see that's a bit overwhelming that bottom end there okay and what i might do is just give that just a bit more of a boost here so you can really hear it bring up a bit more top end maybe i might just compress this slightly to to make the quieter stuff come up a bit reverse again i'm gonna do that one and i'm going to copy this over to that too okay with this i'm actually going to get rid of a bit of this bottom end so we don't get too muddy [Music] i imagine the rotor toms will probably do something similar with those [Music] so taking away the fundamental the actual kind of note that's in there i'll do the same with [Music] it's probably a little bit of something at the very bottom there and the same with scrap and what we might do is just eq out a bit of the fun here [Music] so i'm just going to put just a gentle bit of um like mastering compression on that just just takes off the the hot stuff and then again just sort out the the eq so that there's not too much waffly bottom end under where we can hear and then finally a little bit of limiting but nothing too heavy and i guess with that last note of of mixing is a library like this it really has been mixed for you and if you're uncertain just well just don't go there so this is programming day one and this should really take a day to do i'm thinking of turning this into a contextual track with albion solstice might be quite fun so if you want to check that out and indeed hammers click on the links in the video description down below if you have any questions please put them in the comments i do read them and do answer them when the questions are good so thanks for watching to the end as always do subscribe if you haven't done already and just remember don't fear the things you haven't done what's stopping you from doing them is fear itself not your ability see you next time [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Spitfire Audio

Views: 17,555

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Id: YKDVc4STrr4

Length: 22min 36sec (1356 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 29 2021