Non-drummer looking for drum beats and fills to use in recordings.

[Solodini]

Seconded advice on focusing on velocities. Gotta be realistic with them: strong on 1 and 3 (5, 7) , a bit weaker on 2 and 4 (6, 8), and progressively weaker on off beats. Do it by hand for some natural variation. You can copy the beat and modify the velocities slightly, even just by grabbing and dragging around a bit in the same general area of velocity. You can also turn off the grid and slightly move hits around to humanise the timing a little.

 

[Drew]

Seconded advice on focusing on velocities. Gotta be realistic with them: strong on 1 and 3 (5, 7) , a bit weaker on 2 and 4 (6, 8), and progressively weaker on off beats. Do it by hand for some natural variation. You can copy the beat and modify the velocities slightly, even just by grabbing and dragging around a bit in the same general area of velocity. You can also turn off the grid and slightly move hits around to humanise the timing a little.

Also, if yu've ever had the chance to get behind a drumkit, spending some time thinking about how hard a drummer realistically COULD play a series of beats, and about things like dominant vs non dominant hands, is kind of helpful too.

Big +1 for turning off snap to grid while working on fills. I still program them on the grid, and work on velocities on the grid, but I've been experimenting with as a last step turning off snap to grid and manually humanizing fills, things like crash hits (they never hit all at the same time, if you're doing two), and then adding ghost note snare or hi-hat hits freehand, and it really does seem to help.

 

[CovertSovietBear]

If what I'm programming can't be played by a real drummer, the pattern doesn't stay in the song.

"Rings of Saturn has entered the chat"

 

[bostjan]

 

[Jeremy Keiper]

Yeah I’m going to get EZdrummer 2 and I have Drum Session on iOS that’s pretty good for iPhone and iPad.

 

[Lopp]

+1 to all the votes for EZDrummer/Superior Drummer.

Thanks for the advice @Nicki; probably I will learn more if I start with a simple approach as starting with kick and then building on top of that. I noticed that the canned patters really don't "fit" with the riffs...they don't bring the feel I was expecting. That's why a real drummer is so important and maybe why I should learn a bit more about drums to build something a bit nicer But to be honest my riffs and stuff are just rubbish at this point so I will focus on having at least some good ones before I replace the canned patters. Still my focus is the guitar haha

The biggest thing I like about EZDrummer is how not only can you tweak their patterns to change drum hits, but also how it will search for the most relevant patterns in their library based on a basic pattern you provide. For example, if you know you want your kick and snare in certain spots, EZDrummer will search either your local library or the whole store to find the most relevant patterns. That way you are not stuck to pre-recorded loops that might not perfectly match your riffs.