How to HUMANIZE a MIDI DRUM GROOVE in CUBASE

today I'm going to show you how to humanize a MIDI drum groove in Cubase so your drums can go from this to this [Music] it was going on a Chris here from mixdown online now if you're new here on the channel feel free to subscribe to the channel and to click the notification bells so you don't miss anything alright so now let's jump in Cubase and listen to this simple drum groove that I just just laid down alright simple groove but now it sounds very robotic and we're gonna fix that we're gonna add a bit more human feel to that simple groove first what I need to think of is how a drummer would play those drums we're talking about the hi-hat the kick and the snare I am a drummer so it's a bit easier for me first what we need to focus on is the velocity of the hits drummers are not robots so they're not gonna play all the hits at equal velocity so we need to just tweak that around so it sounds more natural I'm gonna start with the hi-hat this is my hi-hat notes there's a few different ways I can change those notes and just work on the velocity I can you know simply go on MIDI and down to the logical presets and there's a command here that randoms the notes between 60 and 100 velocity value that is something that I can do so I select my notes that I want to apply this command and there you go now I have some different random velocity values for those selected notes I'm just gonna have a quick listen so this is a very simple and fast way to do so you can also go and select those notes again go on MIDI and use the logical editor but this is something more advanced and I'm gonna actually do a video on that in the future so there's a bunch of stuff you can do with MIDI notes using the logical editor but again advanced feature very useful but by just using the logical presets it's still part of the logical editor but they have presets already set up for you to use listen this is what that for this one just use the random velocity 60 to 100 that works okay now I'm gonna go back one step bring that back to equal value at 100 and I'm gonna do this manually just add a bit of a funky groove to it so what I'm gonna do here is to select the first hit and all the other hits now I'm only doing this on one very short event if I had to do the same the same thing on an entire song I would use the logical editor to do so and program that type of command and again I'm going to show that to you later on on another video so for now I'm gonna you know select those notes and bring those down and I'm gonna listen to what that sounds like alright so it's a bit funkier this way I like it I'm gonna keep it this way for now now I'm gonna look at the snare and I'm gonna keep the hits that are playing on two and four and bring down everything else so let me select those and bring those down let's listen to what that sounds like okay cool you know I wanted them to sound like ghost notes instead of heart hits and right now I'm getting somewhere now the kick drum now we know the kick velocity usually with this type of groove is gonna stay the same in general you know it's gonna be close to be the same anyway so I'm again I'm not gonna change anything except the last bass drum hit right here okay so let me just loop that section I'm gonna bring that down and listen to the entire groove in loop I have my starting point as far as velocity goes I'm probably gonna tweet that around later on and now I have to work on the timing the position of those notes cuz in reality again a drummer is not a robot so it's impossible for a drummer to be like 100% on the grid so we want to add that human factor to that groove and just make sure that all the notes are not quantized to grid and to do so there's a very cool feature here in Cubase I'm just gonna make sure my MIDI track is selected and I'm gonna click on MIDI modifiers on the left zone and what I'm gonna do here will be applied to the entire track not only one selected event and I'm gonna go on random and I'm gonna click on position and then I'm gonna work and tweak the values now zero is that like 100% on the grid and I just want to randomize the position of all the notes on my on my MIDI track so I'm gonna bring the maximum to lino let's go crazy and overdo it bring that 255 bring that down to 35 you're not gonna see any changes and the MIDI editor but you will hear the difference [Music] okay now that doesn't make any sense so we have to tweak that up okay let's bring that down to 15 I think that was my sweet spot and that 2-5 like for me I love to have a drum groove that is a bit more laid-back than to rush you know I think it grooves a bit better that's why I added a bit more value to the maximum than the minimum so let's listen to what that sounds like [Music] that's not too bad okay let's bring that down to minus two and then you know 12 I guess so let's then apply what this modifier did directly on our MIDI track so I'm gonna select MIDI go down to freeze MIDI modifiers now my MIDI modifier command was applied directly to my MIDI track so as you can see if i zoom in you'll see that the notes are not quantized to grid but they have that different position right now which adds to the groove so then what I'm gonna do here is going to tweak a few things with the snare and fine tune the velocity okay first of all I'm gonna work on the hats bring that down this one let me now to do what I'm doing right now I just click on command or ctrl and shift and then you're gonna see a small speaker that means that you can adjust the velocity of a single MIDI notes alright so let's try this and this like this I'm just gonna add a bit it's gonna add a bit more groove cool and maybe this one a bit lower alright so now let's do the same with the ghost notes [Music] okay that's not too bad bring that up you know kind of randomly changing the values okay now I'm gonna add something up here okay I'm gonna copy this one over right here and bring that velocity way down and listen to what that sounds like nice okay now in this case though I'm gonna bring that one down this one is already up alright do the same here bring it down cool groovy one last thing that I'm gonna do here just a quick drumroll alright I'm gonna cut this one in two and I'm gonna make sure my snap to grid is not active alright so again I'm gonna just tweak that up and bring the velocity lower maybe just want a higher I don't know let's check this out okay a bit higher here cool so I think that's pretty good so let's listen to it before and after so that was before and that's after [Music] now something that you can also do if you want to improve your skills as a MIDI programmer and study what can be done on humanizing a drum groove you can load a VST instrument like groove agent se let me just drag this instrument in my session I'm gonna load the drum kit and if we look here on pattern that will give us several different types of patterns included for this this drum kit I'm just going to listen to one of them [Music] all right so let's take this one perfect so that sounds pretty good I'm just gonna click on the MIDI event so I can see the notes in the MIDI editor so let's have a quick listen so that's pretty cool so now it gives you an idea on what can be done if you want to dig deeper into this like the velocity values they applied on this groove and also the spacing between the nodes you know the position of the notes as you can tell it's not 100% quantized now so the human factor is applied on this groove so this is a very good way to dig deeper to learn more about MIDI comping and how you can humanize your drum grooves and get better at it so that's pretty cool so this gives you an idea on how to humanize your MIDI drum parts in Cubase I hope that was helpful if so feel free to like and to share this video and if you have any questions or comments you can leave everything down below alright my friends I'm gonna wish you a nice day and see you next time bye [Music]

Channel: Chris Selim - Mixdown Online

Views: 31,245

Keywords: chris selim, cubase, cubase 9, cubase pro, home studio mixing, mixdown, MIDI DRUM GROOVE, MIDI DRUM GROOVE in CUBASE, HUMANIZE a MIDI DRUM GROOVE, Humanize Drums

Id: _n8aQM8eHas

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 27 2019