Winspear
Winspear/Noisemother
I was bored and thought it wouldn't hurt to write up a tutorial on my view of programming realistic drums, to post here for anyone who may find it useful, so here you go!
_______________________________
Note;
This only covers the MIDI programming aspect - this will not teach you to use a drum program, how to mix drums, or how to write good drumbeats. This is just a collection of techniques I have picked up on editing the MIDI to sound as good as it can before entering a drum machine. The effectiveness of these techniques and the extent to which they should be used will depend on the sound that YOU are going for. If YOU want your drums to sound like a drum machine, then this is not for you!
_______________________________
For starters;
You want to makesure you have a good drum program with multiple samples for each drum. When a drummer is playing, each hit will sound very different depending where he hits the drums, for example in the middle or towards the edge. Using multisampling will make your drums much more realistic.
In addition, make sure you have your MIDI drum map set out in a way that works for you, with as many options for various hits as are available to you (for example, 'snare edge', 'snare drag' - as opposed to just 'snare').
Four limbs:
Check that your beats are playable. Remember that drummers have two legs and two arms (occasionally more). Even airdrum your parts if you want! Imagine moving to hit the cymbal on the far side of the kit after a huge roll on the toms. If you can't, remove some of the last tom hits or change the cymbal to something closer. Check that you havn't programmed your drums to hit the snare, tom, and cymbal at the same time. Remove one of them (or use your face). You also don't want to pedal your hi-hat whilst playing 87th notes at 736 BPM on the kicks. If your really going to get into detail, this is a good time to think about which hand would be used for each hit and move the notes to a seperate hit (snare left, snare right) if your drum program offers these options. If not, don't worry!
________________________________
Tempo:
Mapping tempo is a good place to start. Once you've got your beat written out in it's most basic form, there are a few things you can do with the tempo to give your drums a more 'live' feeling. Often, it is appropriate to have fixed tempo(s) throughout a song. However, I have developed a liking for having my virtual drummer 'record' without a click track! You generally DO NOT want the tempo to wander drastically, like that awful drummer who ends up making you play your guitar solo twice as fast infront of a jeering audience.
However, any human drummer will make some very slight adjustments to the tempo of a song while he plays (unless he is playing to a click track).
Listen through your song, go into the tempo map and begin to draw some lines!
Wandering;
-You can let the tempo constantly wander very slightly throughout each section (I generally restrict myself to no more than 2 BPM either side of the base tempo). Relate to the riffs while doing this, e.g. if you have a riff alternating between a steady beat and a blastbeat every 2 bars, use these slight tempo changes for emphasis and lift the blastbeat up by 1.5 BPM.
Fills;
-Drummers will often rush fast fills VERY slightly. We are not talking about the drummer who timewarps his fills to land into the next bar five years before he was born. These are the kind of tempo changes that you do not, and should not notice. For a 1 Bar tom fill, I will usually increase the tempo gradually across the bar 2-5 BPM. Thinking of it, you could even try slowing the fill down...
Sections;
-Even if you have a constant tempo throughout your song, a live drummer will tend to push the beat on the chorus and lay back for your clean interlude. Make these changes smooth and try to keep them within 3 BPM. This will emphasise the mood of the section without making a noticable change.
Gaps;
Remember goatse? Stretch your gaps! If your singer screams in your face over four beats of silence before the breakdown dropkicks you in the balls...make him scream longer!
You don't want the hit to feel like it comes in late, or even worse early. Just move it very slightly. To create this gap you will need to make DRASTIC tempo changes (possibly an increase up to 30 BPM depending on the length of the gap) as tempo changes across just one beat are unnoticable. Doing this via tempo rather than dragging the region will keep your clicktrack in time.
This whole section is basically dedicated to making a wandering click track. Depending on what you want from your drums, this step is probably the least important. There is nothing wrong with your drummer playing to a click track whatsoever. This could also serve a problem if you are programming your drums AFTER recording a riff to a clicktrack. I put drums down first.
If you spend a long time finding the perfect tempo push for a fill and end with a smile on your face, do expect to wake up the next day to listen back and wonder what on earth you were thinking when you made that. This seems to happen to me a lot...
__________________________________
Velocity:
In my opinion the most important factor for realism is velocity (0-127). Important all the time, especially on fills, you want to be tweaking the velocities until you don't even want to record this song anymore
In a straight beat with no fills, I consider cymbals to be the most important to randomise. Snare next, kick drums least important. My method is working section by section through the song perfecting the velocities.
Personally I do the following;
1) Highlight all hits in a section and set the velocity to 118. (This is my base velocity for a standard metal beat - not 127. I like to leave headroom for HITTING THE DRUMS REALLY HARD!!!
)
2) Highlight the kick drums and use Sonar to automatically randomise them by 4 in either direction (8)
3) Select the weaker foot and decrease them all by 7.
4) Listen through and check it still sounds solid. Check that no accent hits have been made too quiet. Manually tweak to suit.
5) Randomise cymbals by 10 in either direction (20) and check it sounds good. Adjust accordingly.
6) Randomise main snare hits by 5 either way (10). Guess what? Check it!
Fills;
I will spend a very long time adjusting velocity on fills - Imagine playing the fill. A long snare roll will naturally have it's accent points and more relaxed areas. I do this manually and use a large range of velocities, anything down to 80 for the main hits. As low as 40 for ghost hits (which will be explained below). You will probably find that you change fills drastically while tweaking them - moving some hits, deleting others, or perhaps rewriting the whole thing! The aim here is to make your fills do exactly what they are intended to do - hold interest and form a SMOOTH transition that does not stand out too much. Remember to take into account the dominant hand when adjusting velocity for fills, and follow the general rule of the faster you play, the more random it will be. This is also incredibly relevant for hi-hats. A fast hi-hat count is perhaps THE single most important thing to randomise for realism.
Ghost hits;
Depending on the drumbeat, there will sometimes be ghost hits - very gentle hits or even 'brushes' made between your main hits. Some styles will have considerably more than others (for example jazz). Imagine playing your beat - does your hand hang over the snare and naturally move with your cymbal hits and kicks? This will produce ghost notes. If you are playing the breakdown to Pantera's 'Domination', these are most innapropriate. Remember the five limbs rule - you wont be playing ghosts on your snare when that hand moves to play the crash.
I use a similar method as my velocity programming here - cymbals most important, then snare, then kicks. I don't even bother with doing these on kicks in a metal context. Imagine playing a moderate 4/4 beat and watch how your hand hangs over the cymbal. This definately depends on personal style, but I find I'd be playing the cymbal twice as fast as implied. Stick some VERY quiet ghost hits in between your cymbal hits. The velocity here should be very low - you don't want to hear the attack or for it to sound faster. It should just smooth over the sound of the overheads and take away the metronomic sound of the main hits.
For the snare drum, some drummers would not ghost much at all. It also depends incredibly on the beat. Imagine playing, and insert them if appropriate. You want them to be barely audible on the drum mix unless your actually imagining them being heard in the main mix. With the style I have created for my 'virtual drumming buddy', he plays A LOT of ghost hits and a fair amount of louder ghost hits. These are those funky little offbeat hits that you will hear in a song and actually take notice of.
Use plenty of these low velocity hits to realise your fills, especially the 'looser' sounding fills. Think about their placement and playability. Generally use incredibly random velocities for all of your ghost hits, especially the cymbals - just remember, these should not be noticable if they are doing their job properly!
_________________________________
Quantization (or lack thereof):
Your drum hits at this point will probably still be hugging the grid firmly. Real drummers don't do this - the vast majority of hits will be very slightly off grid. Once again, cymbals first. Except for your main accent hits, you can afford to be pretty free on cymbal placement. The ghost notes that you programmed can sit pretty much anywhere without ruining your beat.
I tend to keep my kick drums really tight because I find the whole beat can fall apart if the kicks are even slightly off - especially with fast double kick. Your main snare hits should sit fairly tight for the majority of the time, but allow some of them to wander. Again, the ghost notes on the snare can afford to be pretty randomly placed. You can de-quantize manually if you like, but I prefer to use an automatic de-quantize process set to very slightly random. Remember the key - you don't want to hear the difference in timing. Just know it's there and that's enough.
I'll then listen through and makesure my drummer doesn't suck, paying close attention to fills. While randomisation is important on the fills, I often need to tidy them up manually afterwards because it can make them sound very messy. I do however, use a large amount of TOTALLY randomly placed ghost notes on any looser sounding fills.
_______________________________
Overview
Once you get a grasp on all of these elements, you should find you begin adjusting them in any order on the fly as you write, going back and changing regularly things that you thought were finished.
If you ever thought that your drums didn't sound too good, and any of this is new to you - try it! It might be this which is the problem - not your mix or your sample library.
Remember that you don't want to notice any of the things that you have just spent a very long time doing. You should not notice a well programmed beat sounding natural - however you will notice a badly programmed beat sounding unnatural.
Taking into account all of the above, a well programmed MIDI file will sound halfway there already when fed into just about any drum program.
_______________________________
I hope this is of use to someone
_______________________________
Note;
This only covers the MIDI programming aspect - this will not teach you to use a drum program, how to mix drums, or how to write good drumbeats. This is just a collection of techniques I have picked up on editing the MIDI to sound as good as it can before entering a drum machine. The effectiveness of these techniques and the extent to which they should be used will depend on the sound that YOU are going for. If YOU want your drums to sound like a drum machine, then this is not for you!
_______________________________
For starters;
You want to makesure you have a good drum program with multiple samples for each drum. When a drummer is playing, each hit will sound very different depending where he hits the drums, for example in the middle or towards the edge. Using multisampling will make your drums much more realistic.
In addition, make sure you have your MIDI drum map set out in a way that works for you, with as many options for various hits as are available to you (for example, 'snare edge', 'snare drag' - as opposed to just 'snare').
Four limbs:
Check that your beats are playable. Remember that drummers have two legs and two arms (occasionally more). Even airdrum your parts if you want! Imagine moving to hit the cymbal on the far side of the kit after a huge roll on the toms. If you can't, remove some of the last tom hits or change the cymbal to something closer. Check that you havn't programmed your drums to hit the snare, tom, and cymbal at the same time. Remove one of them (or use your face). You also don't want to pedal your hi-hat whilst playing 87th notes at 736 BPM on the kicks. If your really going to get into detail, this is a good time to think about which hand would be used for each hit and move the notes to a seperate hit (snare left, snare right) if your drum program offers these options. If not, don't worry!
________________________________
Tempo:
Mapping tempo is a good place to start. Once you've got your beat written out in it's most basic form, there are a few things you can do with the tempo to give your drums a more 'live' feeling. Often, it is appropriate to have fixed tempo(s) throughout a song. However, I have developed a liking for having my virtual drummer 'record' without a click track! You generally DO NOT want the tempo to wander drastically, like that awful drummer who ends up making you play your guitar solo twice as fast infront of a jeering audience.
However, any human drummer will make some very slight adjustments to the tempo of a song while he plays (unless he is playing to a click track).
Listen through your song, go into the tempo map and begin to draw some lines!
Wandering;
-You can let the tempo constantly wander very slightly throughout each section (I generally restrict myself to no more than 2 BPM either side of the base tempo). Relate to the riffs while doing this, e.g. if you have a riff alternating between a steady beat and a blastbeat every 2 bars, use these slight tempo changes for emphasis and lift the blastbeat up by 1.5 BPM.
Fills;
-Drummers will often rush fast fills VERY slightly. We are not talking about the drummer who timewarps his fills to land into the next bar five years before he was born. These are the kind of tempo changes that you do not, and should not notice. For a 1 Bar tom fill, I will usually increase the tempo gradually across the bar 2-5 BPM. Thinking of it, you could even try slowing the fill down...
Sections;
-Even if you have a constant tempo throughout your song, a live drummer will tend to push the beat on the chorus and lay back for your clean interlude. Make these changes smooth and try to keep them within 3 BPM. This will emphasise the mood of the section without making a noticable change.
Gaps;
Remember goatse? Stretch your gaps! If your singer screams in your face over four beats of silence before the breakdown dropkicks you in the balls...make him scream longer!
You don't want the hit to feel like it comes in late, or even worse early. Just move it very slightly. To create this gap you will need to make DRASTIC tempo changes (possibly an increase up to 30 BPM depending on the length of the gap) as tempo changes across just one beat are unnoticable. Doing this via tempo rather than dragging the region will keep your clicktrack in time.
This whole section is basically dedicated to making a wandering click track. Depending on what you want from your drums, this step is probably the least important. There is nothing wrong with your drummer playing to a click track whatsoever. This could also serve a problem if you are programming your drums AFTER recording a riff to a clicktrack. I put drums down first.
If you spend a long time finding the perfect tempo push for a fill and end with a smile on your face, do expect to wake up the next day to listen back and wonder what on earth you were thinking when you made that. This seems to happen to me a lot...
__________________________________
Velocity:
In my opinion the most important factor for realism is velocity (0-127). Important all the time, especially on fills, you want to be tweaking the velocities until you don't even want to record this song anymore
In a straight beat with no fills, I consider cymbals to be the most important to randomise. Snare next, kick drums least important. My method is working section by section through the song perfecting the velocities.
Personally I do the following;
1) Highlight all hits in a section and set the velocity to 118. (This is my base velocity for a standard metal beat - not 127. I like to leave headroom for HITTING THE DRUMS REALLY HARD!!!
) 2) Highlight the kick drums and use Sonar to automatically randomise them by 4 in either direction (8)
3) Select the weaker foot and decrease them all by 7.
4) Listen through and check it still sounds solid. Check that no accent hits have been made too quiet. Manually tweak to suit.
5) Randomise cymbals by 10 in either direction (20) and check it sounds good. Adjust accordingly.
6) Randomise main snare hits by 5 either way (10). Guess what? Check it!
Fills;
I will spend a very long time adjusting velocity on fills - Imagine playing the fill. A long snare roll will naturally have it's accent points and more relaxed areas. I do this manually and use a large range of velocities, anything down to 80 for the main hits. As low as 40 for ghost hits (which will be explained below). You will probably find that you change fills drastically while tweaking them - moving some hits, deleting others, or perhaps rewriting the whole thing! The aim here is to make your fills do exactly what they are intended to do - hold interest and form a SMOOTH transition that does not stand out too much. Remember to take into account the dominant hand when adjusting velocity for fills, and follow the general rule of the faster you play, the more random it will be. This is also incredibly relevant for hi-hats. A fast hi-hat count is perhaps THE single most important thing to randomise for realism.
Ghost hits;
Depending on the drumbeat, there will sometimes be ghost hits - very gentle hits or even 'brushes' made between your main hits. Some styles will have considerably more than others (for example jazz). Imagine playing your beat - does your hand hang over the snare and naturally move with your cymbal hits and kicks? This will produce ghost notes. If you are playing the breakdown to Pantera's 'Domination', these are most innapropriate. Remember the five limbs rule - you wont be playing ghosts on your snare when that hand moves to play the crash.
I use a similar method as my velocity programming here - cymbals most important, then snare, then kicks. I don't even bother with doing these on kicks in a metal context. Imagine playing a moderate 4/4 beat and watch how your hand hangs over the cymbal. This definately depends on personal style, but I find I'd be playing the cymbal twice as fast as implied. Stick some VERY quiet ghost hits in between your cymbal hits. The velocity here should be very low - you don't want to hear the attack or for it to sound faster. It should just smooth over the sound of the overheads and take away the metronomic sound of the main hits.
For the snare drum, some drummers would not ghost much at all. It also depends incredibly on the beat. Imagine playing, and insert them if appropriate. You want them to be barely audible on the drum mix unless your actually imagining them being heard in the main mix. With the style I have created for my 'virtual drumming buddy', he plays A LOT of ghost hits and a fair amount of louder ghost hits. These are those funky little offbeat hits that you will hear in a song and actually take notice of.
Use plenty of these low velocity hits to realise your fills, especially the 'looser' sounding fills. Think about their placement and playability. Generally use incredibly random velocities for all of your ghost hits, especially the cymbals - just remember, these should not be noticable if they are doing their job properly!
_________________________________
Quantization (or lack thereof):
Your drum hits at this point will probably still be hugging the grid firmly. Real drummers don't do this - the vast majority of hits will be very slightly off grid. Once again, cymbals first. Except for your main accent hits, you can afford to be pretty free on cymbal placement. The ghost notes that you programmed can sit pretty much anywhere without ruining your beat.
I tend to keep my kick drums really tight because I find the whole beat can fall apart if the kicks are even slightly off - especially with fast double kick. Your main snare hits should sit fairly tight for the majority of the time, but allow some of them to wander. Again, the ghost notes on the snare can afford to be pretty randomly placed. You can de-quantize manually if you like, but I prefer to use an automatic de-quantize process set to very slightly random. Remember the key - you don't want to hear the difference in timing. Just know it's there and that's enough.
I'll then listen through and makesure my drummer doesn't suck, paying close attention to fills. While randomisation is important on the fills, I often need to tidy them up manually afterwards because it can make them sound very messy. I do however, use a large amount of TOTALLY randomly placed ghost notes on any looser sounding fills.
_______________________________
Overview
Once you get a grasp on all of these elements, you should find you begin adjusting them in any order on the fly as you write, going back and changing regularly things that you thought were finished.
If you ever thought that your drums didn't sound too good, and any of this is new to you - try it! It might be this which is the problem - not your mix or your sample library.
Remember that you don't want to notice any of the things that you have just spent a very long time doing. You should not notice a well programmed beat sounding natural - however you will notice a badly programmed beat sounding unnatural.
Taking into account all of the above, a well programmed MIDI file will sound halfway there already when fed into just about any drum program.
_______________________________
I hope this is of use to someone
The closest I've got to blastbeats would be 8th notes at about 160 BPM. 
