How To Program REALISTIC MIDI Drums in 6 STEPS!!!!

greetings everyone levi keller here and today we're looking at six steps to programming realistic sounding drums with midi if you like what you learn in this video then you might be interested in my full music production course called don't suck at recording in the course you will learn production recording mixing and mastering techniques to help you get the music inside your head to come out of the speakers and if you enjoy this video please consider giving it a like and subscribing to my channel so i can continue to serve you with valuable free content all right let's get to the lesson here are my top six tips for programming realistic drums the first half are kind of overall philosophical things when it comes to programming drums if you will the second half are specific technical things you can implement when programming so let's get into it the number one thing we have to do when programming drum parts that a real drummer would play is to actually program things that a real drummer would play it can't be too difficult for a human you can easily program things that are too difficult for a real human to play so just make sure that you're staying in the realm of what is actually possible for example don't have more things played than what two hands and two feet could play i can't play three toms at once or three symbols at once i could really only play two toms at a time in real life so that's what i'd want to stick to when programming same thing with cymbals or any other part of the drum kit you just want to make sure that it's something that a real human could achieve one thing that i like to do sometimes is literally play air drums along with my tracks to make sure that it would feel right to play my parts in real life this actually really helps me out so i highly recommend giving it a try the second thing on our list is to be familiar with the drum parts that are common in the style that you're working on we need to know kick patterns snare patterns use of toms and symbols how does all that fit within our genre and how can we recreate that with midi so we just need to be paying attention to drum patterns that are in the songs we're listening to the more familiar we are with drum parts in our genre the more natural it will be to come up with our own when we're writing our own music and that brings me to the third point we need to use reference tracks to borrow and steal some ideas i can't tell you how many mike pernoy fills i've stolen just listen closely and try to copy the drum parts you like things that you're hearing in your favorite songs and stuff like that and then we can tweak these to fit them within our own music try taking one of your favorite tracks and recreating the drum part in your software that will teach you a lot so now to actually get the drum parts onto paper so to speak or into our daw let's take a look at some actual applicable techniques that you can apply this brings us to our fourth thing we could use midi loops or midi grooves that are pre-made files and we can use these as the actual parts in our songs or even better we can use them as inspiration and we can tweak them to fit our music even if we're only using like pre-made fills or something like that those are actually kind of hard to know when programming drums this can be a really big inspiration point at the least most specific drum software like superior drummer and even many diws come with great midi packs with loops and grooves that you can utilize in your songs and you can always buy specific stylistic ones from many different companies out there pre-made loops and grooves can be a great launching point for your songs so don't neglect them let's take a look at how we can do that here in cubase if i go to superior drummer and i go over to the grooves tab we can actually see there are literally hundreds of loops here and all i have to do is grab one and drag it into my software and there it populates as midi and we can edit these in whatever way we want so we can we can move them around change velocities the same types of things we can do with the part that we programmed ourselves this is just normal midi so anything you can do with midi you can do with these it's the fifth thing on our list to achieve realistic sounding drum parts is we're going to need to get specific with our velocities this is how hard the midi is actually playing the sample library so knowing the velocities that you're going to need to use to get the right sound out of the drum kit is going to be very important usually the higher the velocities the more intense the sound will be every sample library is a little bit different depending on how they actually create that library so just play around to see what works best and maybe do a little reading on it another important thing to remember with velocities is that you don't want everything to always be the same velocity so let's jump into cubase and i will show you what i mean so if we want a realistic performance we need to first think about a real drummer playing a hi-hat for example every hit of that hi-hat is not going to be exactly the same intensity there's going to be a little bit of variation there so we need to replicate that type of thing in our software so let's take a look at this drum part that i have here and first i'll start off with the snare drum i actually kind of break my own rule at this and i like to have the snares most of the time at the highest velocity possible when using superior drummer 3. and this kind of works for me personally just in the type of drum sound that i go for i like a very consistent and heavy hitting snare sound not to say that i couldn't do some variation here and there for different purposes like a fill or something like that i most definitely would and if i was working on something that was a little softer i would definitely be having some more flow to these snare velocities but for me in this i actually like to bring them all the way up to 127. uh the scale of velocities in midi is 0 to 127 by the way so like i said i like to bring these up to 127 so i'll bring it all the way down and then i'll just drag it up and you can hear it sort of adjust as it goes [Music] so for this library anything from about 100 to 127 would be a pretty heavy hitting snare sound so let's move to kick drum this is where things start to get a little bit interesting so i want to look at this example here this velocity is 107. i usually like to be around 107 to 110 something like that pretty consistent with the kicks but what i like to do if i have two kicks in a row like this i actually like to have the first one a little bit softer than the second because that's what i would do in real life if i was going to play two kicks in a row like boom boom i would go like i just did the first one be just a tiny bit softer boom boom so let's take a listen to this first of the whole song so we can get an idea and then i'll play it so loud [Music] okay so you get the idea of that song so let's solo this and check out these drums so [Music] so what i do if i'm just plugging my kick drum i'll just do it down here and those are all the same velocity and what i do is i just go through and these like i said i like to be around 107. so i'll just put those to 107 109 something like that and then these ones that play closely i'll just bring this one down a little tiny bit it doesn't have to be a whole lot just to give a little variation and so that's what i do for the entire part and it's a little bit tedious but it's really worth it so just for an example of what i wouldn't do and what i did when i was first starting out we have the same drum part here but all the kick velocities are exactly the same they're all at 107 so let's take a listen to this versus [Music] there's just a slight variation in kick sound there and that gives it a much more human feel same thing with the hi-hats so over here we have all of our hi-hats the exact same velocity they're at 110. [Music] what i've done over here is i've just slightly varied the velocity of every other one so if i was actually playing this drum part i would go so every other one would be just a little bit softer here we have our symbol playing first and then our second hit but then on the third it would be up down up down up and this is just a slight variation like i said before so i just go through select every other one and just bring that velocity down just a little bit so you have sort of this staggered type of feel [Music] and the same thing for toms so if i was playing this tom fill at the end i would play ticket so the first one would be a lot heavier than the second ones so let's take a listen to this you can just hear that variation in it if it was all the same it'd sound like this nobody plays drums like that you want some more finesse and some feel that's kind of what this is this is a very like feel based thing i might even raise these up just a little bit [Music] just give it that variation when it comes to symbols for velocity i just use whatever makes sense at the time if i wanted to be a little softer i go a little softer if i wanted to be a little heavier of a hit then i make it a little heavier of a hit that's basically what i go about doing with all the velocities of my drum track and if you do it to one section then you can copy and paste that section over so you don't have to do this to literally every drum hit but i tend to actually do it pretty much by hand for the entire thing it really is something that takes a little bit of time but it's totally worth it there are some functions within daws now that will do this type of thing for you called like humanize functions or quantizing velocities to be more randomized and while those are okay with the velocities i tend to gravitate more towards doing it by hand because then i can be very specific with the feel of things so that tends to be what works best for me but feel free to experiment with all kinds of the options that your daw provides and that brings me to step number six which is editing timing and just like velocity editing we want our timing to be a little bit flowing in some aspects so let's take a look at how i do that so we'll start out with snare because this one's pretty easy i actually like the snares to be directly on the hit i don't ever really change that unless it's a stylistic thing where i want it to be a little bit behind the beat or something but that is once again very much a stylistic thing and for most of my stuff i like the snare to be right on the beat so i don't really ever mess with that with the kick i also try to keep it pretty much right on the beat what i might do is in the same way that i kind of messed with the velocities for the kick hits that were a little bit closer to each other i might tweak that just a little bit to have the second one be just a hair behind so if we take off our snap we don't want to snap it we want to be very flowing we can just slide it back just a hair [Music] so these first three ones here i've done that too let's see how that sounds and then these second ones i have not done that too so we can kind of compare [Music] and honestly both sound good to me but you can tell there's just a little bit of a slightly more human feel to the first ones so i would probably go in and just in spots like that where you have two repeating just naturally a drummer would probably be a little bit late on that second one just a little tiny bit so we can see it's just a little tiny bit but it really gives a nice feel to things and that's part of the good feel that a human drummer will bring to things so that's what we're trying to replicate here with high hats what i like to do is get a little bit fancy so as we can see my hi-hats are not exactly on the grid things are just a little bit off here and there and you could do this by hand but actually one thing that tends to work pretty well is i mentioned that humanized type of function so what tends to work well is if i highlight these hi-hats we'll zoom in a little bit and then i can go over to my quantize menu and this is in every diw it has this in cubase it lives right here but what we can do is just go to randomize and i'll just put it at two and we want to make sure that we are on our timing grid for 16th notes for the high outs because that's what we're playing so so if you were only playing eighth notes on the hi-hats you'd want to set this to eighth notes like that but we're doing 16th and then we go to our randomize put it at two and if we hit the letter q we can see that we can just sort of randomize just a little bit those hi-hat hits and that's going to bring a little bit more of a human feel to things as well so just listen to the hi-hats and how they just have this barely just this little bit of inconsistency that definitely feels more [Music] human and i would never listen to that and say that's off the beat it sounds totally on the beat but it sounds more natural and more human if we listen to this other one over here where all of the hi-hats are exactly the same velocity and exactly on the grid actually these aren't on the grid i must have done this before so we will put this to zero for these so now these are actually on the grid let's hear how that sounds [Music] it just sounds very even not necessarily bad but just not really flowing and human if we listen to this then that sounds a lot more human in the hi-hats it has to do with the velocity and the timing and it's not big changes these are little tiny finesse type of things just little movement a little bit of flowingness just to bring a more human element so the last thing we'll touch on is the timing and the fills much like the velocities we're going to mess with this a little bit and just make it feel a little bit more natural so what i might do for a fill like this we can see that i just let it be a little bit lazy especially on this last one kind of dragging into the next section we just let it be a little bit lazy and a little bit off time especially going into that next section like i said this one's just a little bit behind and this one's just a little bit more behind so you're just going to get that little bit of flow [Music] just a little bit behind on timing and that feels really nice compared to this one which is exactly the same on timing and velocity [Music] bring those velocities down just a little bit [Music] go over to our other one which we've edited that just feels so much more natural and for symbols with the timing i don't ever really change that unless there's something specific that i need to be off the grid for then i'll definitely move it but it doesn't really make a big difference in the feel to mess with that so much because it's not a super like transient type of instrument it's more of a washy type of sound anyway so i just leave them pretty much on the grid so let's hear this in the arrangement one last time first i'll play the unedited one and then i'll play the edited one [Music] now we have the edited [Music] [Music] all right so those are my six tips for programming realistic sounding drums i wish someone would have told me that so that's why i'm sharing it with you if you have any more questions on programming drums just let me know and i'll see in the next lesson

Channel: Levi Keller

Views: 6,023

Keywords: Drums, How to program drums, Guitar, Music, metal, Superior drummer 3, Cubase, Logic Pro X, Music production, Recording, How to record my own music, Don’t Suck At Recording, Levi Keller, Ableton Live, Pro Tools, superior drummer, superior drummer 3, get good drums, getgooddrums, music production

Id: XSeFPGiPWMk

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 28 2020