How to Programme Blast Beats with MIDI - PART 1 | Brickwall Sounds

hi guys my name is charlie and this video is going to be the first of a two-parter covering how to program blast beats so blast beats are very common in more extreme forms of metal and there are four main types so the traditional blast the hammer blast the bomb blast and the gravity blast today i'm going to go over how i program the traditional and the hammer blasts and next time i'll be covering the bomb and gravity blasts first off i'm using gekko drums invasion which is by far my favorite drum pack for death metal so to get started we're just going to click and drag there press shift option 3 to render some blank midi and then double click it so that we can go in and we're just going to now program a traditional blast beat so a traditional blast beat is alternating with the kick and snare every 16th note the tempo here i've got is 230 bpm which is quick i'll just do this quickly and we'll see what it sounds like you can either do that multiple times or you can save some time by pressing alt and clicking and dragging like that so now we just have the kicks and then select all the kicks hold alt go up and to the right and now we have a blast beat simple as that so of course robotic as hell because the snare is being hit inhumanly hard for that kind of tempo what we're going to do for now just to help our ears select the snares bring them down much less distracting although by no means humanized so with traditional blasts there generally speaking the right hand is going to be on either the right or hi-hat for now we're going to do it on the hi-hat so we're going to open it with a crash symbol on the left because that's fairly close to the hi-hat and then again every hit with the kick we're gonna be putting a hi-hat so that is a very basic traditional blast beat so there are a few things that we can do to make this sound more realistic um with the hi-hat what we're going to do is we're going to mix in some different articulations so there that's just an open hi-hat there that's another open hi-hat but it is open wider so what we're going to do is we're going to move every other hit to a wider hi-hat and we'll just have a listen so there that probably just sounds like a mush of hi-hat noise and you can't really tell partly that's because of the tempo partly that's because of you know everything is still at one two seven but this makes it easier for us to vary every other hit on the hi-hat so we're gonna open up the humanizing menu with option zero select every note because these are all sixteenth notes and we're gonna randomize by let's just leave it at 25 for now and see what it sounds like okay fairly happy with that can we go further we can in fact i'm going to move a couple of these notes because the important thing with a blast beat any kind of blast beat is that it is consistent you don't want there to be large gaps the idea is that it's just a flowing wash of percussion we don't want any big gaps anywhere in this now we're going to select the kicks go to velocity so this drummer here is going to be playing this with one foot which is quick to play this with one foot but what we're going to do is we're going to bring down every other hit by about 10. okay now the snares so i find with traditional blasts um with this particular pack i want the snares to be somewhere between a velocity of about 50 and 60. so we can either drag those down or we can do this set this set all to 55 a minimum of 50 and a maximum of 60 go that sounds about right to me now we're just going to pull down the symbols [Music] remember when i put these up here this means that what we can do is grab all of the off beats and bring them down those are still sounding a little bit too loud okay next up we have the hammer blast which is one of my favorite blast beats so this one is slower but not really much less aggressive so a hammer blast is at this tempo is gonna be eighth notes on the kick like this which is the same as the traditional blast but the difference is that instead of the snare being there the snare is here at the same time as the kick which sounds very very very aggressive so what we're going to do now is we can just have straight hi-hats like this but i'm not going to do that one of the things i love about the hammer blast is that there's a lot that you can do with um adding different flavors when you're when you're programming to make it sound different depending on the riff that's going over the top so we're going to have this repeating in a pattern of three so it's going to be going up so we're going to accent that with symbols first of all and then we're going to go into humanizing the snare to accent that even further so we're gonna have crash right crash left crash right crash left and then two china's to end it so have a listen now we're gonna loosen them up so even though these are eighth notes not 16th notes i'm going to keep the quantizing grid at 16th because if i change it to eighth notes and keep it anywhere near 50 this is going to happen which is yeah not i mean that's yeah let's leave that there so 16th notes randomizing 50 hit go so that's a bit too much it may have worked on the traditional blast but it's a bit too much for the hammer blast so i'm going to change this to 30. with programmed hammer blasts it's very important to make sure you get that flam in you do not want these hits to be happening at exactly the same time because no drummer can possibly play these two hits at exactly the same time only a robot or a computer can do that so how far you go is really up to you and of course depending on the tempo and the song but i'm happy with that where it is for now so i find with hammer blasts i generally want them between about 78 and 85 on this particular pack again if you're using a different drum library then these numbers mean nothing so i'm going to select them so 78.85 let's set this to 82 select snares and go and we'll see what that sounds like so there he's not hitting them particularly hard and because of the tempo we could actually bring this up if this was faster than this might be about right but also i want the accent every third note so i'm going to select every third note by holding shift and drag them up a bit so even though these are accents we don't want them to be as hard as it might be throughout the rest of the song where he's actually whacking the snare really hard so up here is gonna sound not right i mean that actually sounds alright but it does not sound human so we're gonna pull this down and put it right about there and then i'm actually going to lower the offbeat even more just to make that accent that much more clear and the last thing is just the symbols where the velocity is slightly less important but let's just have a listen yeah those could do with coming up a little bit anyway that brings us to the end of part one of this video i hope you found it useful and informative let us know what you think in the comments and be sure to check out the brick wall sounds website facebook and instagram and we'll see you in part two

Channel: Brickwall Sounds

Views: 3,894

Keywords: drum, beats, midi, program, programme, gravity blast, bomb blast, blastbeat, traditional blast, euro blast, hammer blast, push-pull blast, heel-toe blast, freehand blast, brick wall sound, brick wall sounds, brickwallsounds

Id: sRIdRFzkFdk

Length: 7min 35sec (455 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021