A drum part tells you more about a production than any other part. Programmed badly, it gives the game away in one bar. Programmed well, nobody can tell - or cares.
Choosing the instrument
Not all drum instruments are built for realism.
- Sampled acoustic kits - Native Instruments' Abbey Road series, Superior Drummer, Addictive Drums, EZdrummer, and your DAW's own kits - record every drum at many velocities, often from several microphones, with round robins so repeated hits vary. These are what you need for a convincing acoustic part.
- Drum samplers - Ableton's Drum Rack, Logic's Drum Machine Designer, Battery, any MPC-style pad sampler - load one-shots onto pads. Ideal for electronic and hip-hop drums, and for layering.
- Drum machines - real or emulated 808s, 909s and LinnDrums. Their character is that they do not sound like a drummer.
For acoustic realism, the library matters more than any trick. A cheap kit with one velocity layer will sound mechanical no matter how carefully you program it.
Think like a drummer
A drummer has two hands and two feet, and that is the most useful constraint you can program with.
- The right hand usually plays the hi-hat or ride. The left hand plays the snare. A drummer cannot hit the hi-hat, snare and a tom all at the same instant with only two hands - so if your part does, it will sound programmed.
- A fill takes the hands away from the hi-hat. Stop the hat when the fill starts.
- Crashes usually land with a kick on the first beat of a new section, and the hi-hat drops out on that beat because the right hand is on the crash.
- Open hi-hats are closed by the foot - the open sound ends when the next closed hat or pedal hat plays.
The patterns to know
Every producer should be able to program these from memory.
- Basic rock beat - 8th-note hi-hat, kick on 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4.
- Four-on-the-floor - kick on every beat, snare or clap on 2 and 4, open hat on every off-beat. The foundation of disco, house and techno.
- The half-time feel - snare on beat 3 only, so the groove feels half as fast as the tempo.
- Funky Drummer - Clyde Stubblefield's break on James Brown's 1970 record, one of the most sampled drum patterns ever: syncopated kick, ghost notes on the snare, and an open hat that lifts the whole bar.
- The Purdie shuffle - Bernard Purdie's triplet-based half-time shuffle, heard on Steely Dan's "Babylon Sisters": ghost notes filling the gaps of a triplet grid.
- Two-step and breakbeat patterns, where the kick avoids the obvious downbeats.
Funklet transcribes classic funk and soul drum patterns into a grid you can read straight into a piano roll. It is the fastest way to learn what great drummers actually played.
Programming methods
- Drawing in the piano roll is precise and quick for simple parts. The weakness: it encourages perfectly quantised, fixed-velocity parts. Fix that afterwards, deliberately.
- Step sequencing suits electronic drums and repetitive patterns.
- Playing it in on a keyboard or pads gives you natural timing and velocity from the start.
- Finger drumming on pads - the MPC tradition - is playing it in with a drummer's mindset. Map your kit so that the hands can reach what a drummer's hands reach: kick and snare under your strongest fingers, hats next to them, toms and cymbals around the edge. Practise a simple beat until it is steady, then record.
Most professionals combine methods: play the part in, then edit the mistakes rather than the feel.
Velocity is the realism
Real drummers never hit two notes identically.
- Ghost notes - very quiet snare hits between the backbeats - are the signature of funk and soul. Program them at low velocity, roughly a third of the backbeat.
- Accents on the hi-hat: in an 8th-note pattern, the on-beats are usually louder than the off-beats.
- Backbeats are the loudest notes in the bar. Keep them consistent but not identical - vary by a few points.
- Use the velocity layers: a good library sounds different at velocity 40 and 120, not just quieter.
Humanising timing
Quantise, then loosen.
- Quantise strength below 100% pulls notes towards the grid without locking them to it.
- Swing delays every second subdivision. A small amount on the hi-hats makes a straight groove breathe.
- Push and pull. Moving the snare a few milliseconds late makes the groove sit back; moving the hats slightly early makes it drive. Experiment by ear.
- Randomise sparingly. Random timing spread across every note sounds sloppy, not human. Humans are consistent in their inconsistency.
Layering
Layering combines two or more sounds into one hit - a sampled acoustic snare with an electronic clap, or a real kick with a sub-heavy 808 kick underneath.
- Choose layers that do different jobs: one for the body, one for the attack, one for the low end.
- Check the phase. Two kicks that start at slightly different points can cancel each other's low end. Align the transients and flip polarity if the combination sounds thinner than either alone.
- Group the layers to one bus and process them together, so they behave as one drum.
Fills and variations
A loop that repeats unchanged for three minutes is a loop, not a part.
- Mark the end of every four or eight bars with a small change - an extra kick, an open hat, a snare flam.
- Save the real fills for section changes. A fill says "something is about to happen".
- Keep fills simple. Most great fills are one beat or two, not a full bar of toms.
- Vary the groove between sections - a tighter hat in the verse, a ride in the chorus, a half-time bridge.
Do this now
- Program the Funky Drummer pattern from Funklet into a sampled acoustic kit, at fixed velocity and fully quantised.
- Now add ghost notes at low velocity, accent the hi-hat on-beats, and set quantise to around 80%.
- Add a one-beat fill every eight bars and a crash on the downbeat after it, with the hi-hat removed on that beat.
- Compare the first version with the last. Then check: could one drummer with two hands play it?