Your MIDI Drums Sound FAKE and I know why
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- Опубліковано 7 кві 2023
- Programming realistic-sounding drums in the DAW is crazy difficult! I take a look at the challenges and offer tips and techniques to give your MIDI drums a human touch.
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a huge help that I only started doing recently is programming the drums from your favorite songs. as not a drummer, it shows what kick and snare patterns and fills you like. a great learning experience. (same goes for bass and guitars and vocal harmonies 🙂)
good idea!
Along the same lines...if you've ever seen a drummer with a drum pad (like, in high school), learning the patterns of hitting the pad are useful as well. Drum rudiments like paradiddles, etc.
Thanks for sharing! Will be doing this now 😅
I did this and it helped me hone in on rhythm so much more overall. I highly recommend trying it out.
Another useful tip that is not mentioned in this video. A lot of people record 2 bar and 4 bar loop and use that in the entire chorus or verse of the song. Try to record at least 8 or 16 bars of drum before you can use it as a loop. The longer your manual recording the liveley it sounds because it will have varriations in velocity and timing. This tip is not only for drums it applies to bass lines or any track. For example, It is tempting to copy paste a bass line of the chorus whenever the chorus repeats. However, to achieve natural feel, it is always a good idea to record something multiple times even if the exact same thing is supposed to repeat in the song.
whatever you do, don't just slap a default reverb on after the drums! It is guaranteed to make it sound crappy. Use a realistic convolution reverb with very mild tails (.3 to 1 sec). Kill the reverb on everything below 200hz. And only mix in a tiny bit of reverb to add a sense of space. Feel the space, don't hear the reverb!
Or use a virtual kit with room mics included in the samples and just mix the room sounds in. My go-to drum sampler is the Steven Slate Drum sampler and it includes two room mics in it's standard mix, and 9 times out of 10 you just slap the plugin on your midi track and it sounds great. You're absolutely right though, the right reverb on the drums really brings the track to life, but too much tends to make a mess.
Wow, actual information that helps. Why don't you have a show dude? Where have you been thank you
Yeah, I know a homeburger. Get your own show dude, help us help us select the drummer's man. That was good advice dude
using a longer plate reverb (with or without a gate afterwards) on snare or toms is still common in rock and metal
I had a drummer friend who built a kit on my DR660 in the nineties. He added grace notes and other subtleties (like you demonstrated) that forever spoiled me but also made me confront my rather lame idea of drumming. I quit trying to simulate drumming myself.
I don't produce on a professional level, but my techniques for more human sounding drums are to have some elements not quantized, and almost always to record some live percussion to add an organic feel to the beat - whether tambourine, maracas, djembe or whatever. Some great tips in this video too. Playing with sampled high hats is always fun, haha
To get rid of that "a bunch of separate samples" sound, I would bring the panning in a bit tighter. Also, maybe try to emulate some mic bleed: add a parallel bus, passing lows and highs, and mess around with the dynamics until it sits well.
this concept is quite possibly the most important thing to learn for production. Listening to drummers helps me so much with this.
To get nice sounding drum rolls for jazz or jungle/drum and bass I use 16/4 arpeggiators on the input, set the swing of the arp to 30% and play it in with 16th notes.
Another good thing I’ve found is once you’ve written your drums in MIDI, bounce them individually to audio, find a song that you like the drum pattern of, and flex/warp the transients to match to your reference track - basically groove robbing, you get the natural swing but from someone that’s a professional drummer so it has a nice feel to it.
Jungle/drumfunk producer here as well. Nice to see
One thing I wish drum libraries like superior drummer would do is add rudiments to their samples. There are sometimes that I roll a slight roll for a certain groove or a double paradiddle fills or a double stroke rolls to make a triple groove.
Great advice! I’ve been working with clicks and tracks for a very long time. Here’s something I like to do on ballads. While first-call pro drummers all have exquisite tempo, they often play with the song in very subtle ways. It’s not enough to simply keep straight time, although many if not most songs these days are strictly quantized. OK, so a ballad at 72 bpm in the verses. Change to 73 in the chorus. Then back to 72 in the verse. On last chorus- out, keep at 73 all the way out. Except for a very few freakishly talented (cursed) people, we humans cannot tell the difference in +1 bpm. However, our brains interpret it as something we musicians refer to as “lift”, or “edge”. This works really nicely for click tracks you’re playing live with. Fact: in verses you’re playing more simply, or the arrangement is more sparse. Chorus, now maybe you’re playing AND singing. Your instrument part is more involved, more rhythmic and your pulse is slightly higher. This is a natural thing when humans physically make music. Try it. It adds that little human feel you’ve been missing.
I need to try that!
@@JonMeyer Depends on the song and the arrangement,but sometimes you get away with, say, V72, PC73 and CH74. Then just back it down. Have fun! I’m subscribing 👍🏼
@@musicboy2003 excuse me what does "V72, PC73 and CH74" mean ?
@@zakguitar2359 hey, it’s just shorthand for Verse, PreChorus and Chorus along with the beats per minute.
@@musicboy2003ooooh thanks for clarifying
Yeah, loving the sound of this library. Looking forward to getting my head out of vocal editing and picking this up next week.
Cracking video Jon. Rarely seen drum programming so succinctly and clearly explained before.
Wow, this is actually something I was looking for to take my drums to the next level. I would listen to old songs and wonder how can I get my MIDI drums to sound as real as possible. Great video man!
Hey man thanks so much! Drum programming is my favorite part of writing, and I'll spend a day just doing that. Some really great advice here, from the 'one hand' technique to just being more mindful of the physical instrument. Loving the library!
Fantastic information! I know I'll be watching this many times with the daw open (and your library loaded). Thanks again, cheers!
Love this video and all of your tips! Also this was filmed beautifully as well!
You’re a natural, thank you for the breakdown and info. Watching your videos always helps recalibrate my internal creative systems!
My goal as a producer/songwriter now is to demo out songs and make them shoppable. Having these types of tips for programming drums in my back pocket will be incredible. As a multi-instrumentalist who started on drums, I'm familiar with all of these on a REAL kit, but sometimes couldn't quantify it with words and you've put words to some of the 'feel' I've been able to play in with a mic'd up kit.
Great video as always Jon.. As a drummer, I tend to play in my beats live, whenever I can. You are so right about the linear aspect of most drumming pattens as all four limbs hitting at the same time would most likely only sound meh! I find I get better results if I have a maximum of two hits together when programming with midi or finger drumming. Hope you and yours have a great Easter.🥚
Great segment, Jon. Super relatable!
Thanks for the great informational and instructional video. Getting a set of MIDI percussion tracks not only to sound right but to FEEL right can be a daunting challenge even for someone with a pretty good sense of touch, rhythm, dynamics, and pitch. Your suggestions here are so damn USEFUL! Thank you.
This was a really good video. It's a good summary of all the things I've learned from programming my drums for over 20 years. When I started learning, the sample libraries at the time were terrible. One sample per drum. Changing velocity just made the sample louder or quieter, but always the same sample. On top of that, I started by clicking each note into the DAW with my mouse. All my old tracks from back then sound so artificial. At some point I learned exactly what you talk about with capturing as much of a performance as possible. I also split up recording the kick/snare/toms, then come back and do hi-hat/ride/crash. Always being careful to not create a 3 or 4 armed drummer.
Most importantly, if I'm recording a song that I intend to be released on streaming platforms as a serious piece of work, I try to limit the amount of copy/paste. I re-perform the drumming for each section of the song. If my ear picks up the repetition and I get bored, my listeners will pick that up as well (albeit on a more subconscious level). I work really hard to make my drums sound like I sat behind a kit and actually played them.
Thank you so much, these are excellent tips! The video popped up at just the right time for me too, as I wrote a song and need it to sound "performed" rather than programmed. :)
Really helpful... I really appreciate cuz it has really clear off some little doubts . I used to have same perception how I think about this exercise but got confused because no school of thought gave me such orientation . This has confirmed my philosophy
Great content man. Subscribed!
Great video. Very informative. Nice.
I've been programming drums for 23 years and playing them for about 31. Playing the real thing absolutely informs how I program them. For a non drummer to approach it, is like how I felt approaching some of the large and complex 8Dio String libraries. I can see that I clearly have everything I need to make a realistic sounding string pattern, but my lack of knowledge on what physically happens when someone plays the instrument, makes it more than just a programming barrier. It's easy to stare at a sea of articulations to choose from and question whether you are piecing together everything in a way that would pass the straight face test to a player of the respective instrument.
Drum and bass producers like Paradox are a rare exception. Non drummers that break the 4 limb rule, but still using old crusty funk breaks to program realistic sounding drums that bang very hard on a good system.
Good tips on the subject! I'd like to add the importance of rim sounds for snare at least in rock/metal/etc music. Also reverb is an important tool for making the drums sound like they are in the same room
thanks for your experience insight a lot of what you said i already unintentionally did happy mistakes or beauty in mperfections
Very informative, thank you! 👍
Great video, I wish I'd seen something like this when I first started programming drums
Thanks, Jim!
very nice method ! thanks for sharing
I haven’t watched completely yet but just touching on this topic is going to help! 🙏🏾😌
I learned all of this on my own. It took ages. Good advice.
I used to have a Boss Dr. Rhythm, which while limited, did have a few nice features. It had two different velocities, which I used to vary the emphasis of drums, and it had an output that I could plug into an analog synth to trigger the synth. That was nice. But some of the best drum patterns were created by low batteries generating some random drum patterns. Doing midi drums when I got a General Midi keyboard was a different experience. I had multiple drum sets to use, and with a midi sequencer, I could vary all sorts of effects on the sounds. It was also fun to either take a melodic midi part and set it to the drum channel, or alternatively change the drum track to a melodic track. You could get some interesting sounds and effects that way.
"You need to know what you're trying to make" -- I think you hit the nail on the head there Jon. I think the projects I get most frustrated with are the ones that I don't know what I'm trying to make.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Jah Love
This was so interesting. I don`t (yet) have the ambition of programming my drums. Been watching a lot of mixing / mastering videos lately. And even still learning guitar. But you really explained this well and captured my attention so I subscribed 😊!
Thank you and welcome!
Jon, this was awesome! I definitely have spent HOURS to try making drums sound realistic.
I have a bit of an advice request for you and any viewers that’s unrelated to drum programming. I’ve been saving for a while to get my first pair of studio monitors. However, with Apple Music’s announcement, about atmos and atmos systems being far more common in theatres/ home theatres, I’m wondering if I should just make the jump to an atmos rig. Do you think I should get a great pair of monitors like Focal Trio 6s, or an atmos system of “lesser” monitors like iLiud speakers?
Thank you Sir
Keep 'em coming
I needed this, I’m using a Roland MV-1 and on Occasion and MPC One or the MPC 2 Daw and creating drums that sound great are difficult.
Getting behind the kit for yourself is extremely helpful. It can also inform you of what feels good to play as well. Personally, I lean towards generous cymbal washes before coming in with a fat tom groove before introducing the kick and snare from first chorus into Verse 2.
Excellent video. You clearly addressed many of the pitfalls that rest between the idea of our realistic sound vs what we sometimes end up with, via midi replications. It's kind of weird. As a player in live bands for many years, and eventually a full-time music producer, I have always aimed at reproducing the "live" energy, flare and feel of the physical player. So much so, that I would (and often still do) think of the specific player, and try to emulate their style, but the chasm between the performance and the inherent limitations of the digital medium get you only so close. Thru trial and error, I've discovered so many of these suggestions to be key in "humanizing" the midi drummer, and surpassing most of those limitations. Great work. Clearly, you are a drummer, as only a drummer would consider the value of these nuances. Kudos.
Fantastic!
Good tutorial for the finer points of building rhythm tracks musically
A useful reminder. Thanks!
Tons of tips in here. Nice to hear that some of the things I was thinking as the way go are hints that you use yourself, having created vsti .I have a Sonor 4 piece jazz kit in my studio but I did just get a linnstrument which allows for realistic jazz style drumming, which is what I am exploring the set up on now and why I stopped by. and I also use my MPC live with time control set to off.
I’ve had my eye on a Linnstrument for years! Maybe one day.
A season drummer gave me advice. He said, "Just remember, a drummer only has two hands and two feet. We are not an octopus."
I've taken that advice with me ever since. I can spot programmed drums a mile away sometimes because folks program a tom, snare shot and ride all on the same measure.
5:32 this is true knowledge i wrote songs in a drumbrute original’s original sounds for a couple years to see that yea there is only so much i could get out of it and realizing its theme in the end.
Thisis amazing. from the content to the the presentation and your personality too. This video is soul food for me. SUB'd and Like'd. Two thumbs waaaay way up!
Thank you, Josh. Very kind, encouraging words.
I find mixing midi drums with real percussion helps a great deal. I keep a snare and brushes mic'd up near my desk and I often add this to tracks to give it a more human feel. BTW, I am having to upgrade to Catalina in order to install Kontakt 7 in order to install your soft drums ... but I know it's going to be worth it. Thanks Jon.
Great thing to do!
@@musicboy2003 real tambourine and shakers help too. Especially if you play them a bit lazy.
Thank you so much for this video man! Greetings from Argentina
Been doing similar things for years. Very well presented.
Thank you
Great advice 👍 thanks
Finally. This is a must see video for a lot of youtube guitarists. I always added some sloppiness to volume and quantization to every note, and mimic patterns with air drumming. Now with electronic kit it is much easier. Also, I prefer dialing up tape saturation. It mushes the sound together, but dial back on hihat/cymbals.
pretty good. I do consider myself to be fairly good at drum programming, and making my drums sound like a human, but I do struggle with the hihats. I should have thought of it myself, but I think performing them in future will be a useful innovation for me.
This is awesome im glad I found and subscribed
As a guitarist I found this video super useful, thank you Jon! Hoping this will bring a bit of life to my demos. Great content
What an incredible video. All of this is exactly how I've been doing drum programming since I started doing midi drums...and I'll never forget the time the CEO of the music house I was writing for said a track of mine has the most realistic sounding drum part he's ever heard. That felt good. So: I can corroborate, this advice Jon is giving is dead-on. Program like 1 drummer with with 2 hands and 2 feet. EDIT: I'm like real tempted to buy this Soft Drums library because it was programmed by a guy who has this exacting and realistic philosophy of drum programming...tells me the library's prolly gonna be a damn detailed and usable library! Jon you're selling me man!
That’s very kind. Thank you so much.
The machine gun effect - especially on snare - does not occur when a drum machine has got only one sample for the respective drum. It occurs on machines that stop playing the first sample when they start playing the next. Modern drum machines and Kontakt instruments layer dozens of samples on top of each other without cutting any of them short, which is how they achieve a far more realistic drum roll sound.
I use drum samples from a variety of hardware sample players, & I've found extra realism by patcching some randomness into the timbre of the samples, mainly volume & brightness, but also a small amount of *pan* modulation on top of the static positioning, so that there's an imitation of sticks landing in different places on the snare & toms especially. adds a bit of movement.
but yeah- remember the four limbs limit, & make every beat work for the music.
Thank You Very Much Sir!
🙂🙏
Let me know if this goes on sale again.
Really good tutorial! I write drums almost the same way as you! Real live playing, quantizing at a 50% or less, and I tend to write fills directly in Pro Tools because I’m no finger drummer haha
@@ghost_mall Yes!! I've done that a couple times too, really useful!
Great instruction!
Very good. Thanks.
Good info thanks.
4:45 is solid gold. Worth the price of admission right there.
Dynamics are helpful, accenting the 1 and the &, in a 16th note hi hat pattern, ghost notes on the snare, humanise the pattern by moving things slightly ahead or behind the beat. Realistic drum programming is a specialist thing and takes s lot of concentration.
Bro have you made a video about your lighting set up? It’s gorgeous
How I light my music studio for UA-cam
ua-cam.com/video/UuopgGa2z8U/v-deo.html
brilliant video
thank you, take care, keep sharing
Love those mini vans.
Hi Jon, great video!!
I have already invested in a Yamaha DTX6 electric drum set which can output midi and audio. I am wondering from your perspective if I have possibly made a mistake as I could have just purchased a smaller/cheaper midi pad, or do you think a full electric drum set is the way to go if budget and space allow? 👍
I wish that I had this advice years ago. It just makes sense now!
Coming to drums from a keys/guitar/bass perspective makes is hard to keep things simple, like the basic principle that you can't have more than 4 sounds at once. Duh.
You got killer information that I honestly have been sharing since the 90’s… unfortunately this video had way to many video ads interrupting the lesson that it was distracting from the lesson you were trying to teach… good job however with being precise with the information
If your arm is conditioned enough you can totally play 16th notes on the snare. It's often used as the "leading" hand of a blast beat but you can use it to great effect to lead train beats too.
Quality content. Production value 💯
-some drummer
Thank you Some Drummer
No bleed between the instruments of the drums in the mix always is a dry sound I try with my e kit to essentially layer reverb to give it all space and panning as well there’s a lot of good ways to make them sound amazing but the biggest thing is dynamics
Toontrack’s EZ Drummer 2 and/or EZ Drummer 3. Problem solved! Best drummer I’ve ever hired, and that was 10+ years ago!!. Never talks back or shows up hungover, and he’ll never steal your girl or your money!!
The same idea goes for midi e-drum kits because it's like playing with boxing gloves on, unlike actual drum kits you have to play MIDI kits with more expression.
love your advice
“You have to know what you’re going for.”
You could do videos that only say that and never run out of material.
Thanks 👍
1:34 okay, that's not always true, especially if it's based on chopped breakbeats. Even some drum machines have nudge, humanize, or even unquantized recording of finger drumming. But almost all house, techno, trance, edm etc is indeed locked to a 4/4 grid.
For my demos, I program the drums. However, for a final recording where you want your drums to sound acoustic, record with an actual set
Ditto. It seems like so much extra work to program drums to sound real. I’ll just okay them.
@ghost mall don’t get me wrong, this is awesome advice and very helpful for all non-drummers. For me, I’ve been playing drums for 20 years, and it’s just less work than programming midi drums.
Even with that said, i’ll add some midi percussion and other stuff, and this is great advice.
@ghost mall I’m talking about a final recording that you release on an album tied to a record label. I don’t record with acoustic drums for the reasons you just listed, but I will if I decide to release the songs to the public. I’d prefer recording with an acoustic set because it sounds more human, it’s fun to play, and the kind of fills I want can’t be programmed easily. Personally, I prefer playing the instruments over a computer doing the work.
@ghost mall if you have the money and resources, I’d highly recommend using a real drummer with unique style over software
@ghost mallyeah, it’s all about what you can do yourself vs what you need to “outsource” like you said.
I still like the imperfections in music and don’t auto lock my drums to the grid or auto tune my lead vocals. I’ll move a sloppy kick or snare and some minor copy paste but i’ll punch or te-record most of the time.
Many good tips, but I don’t agree with hitting the snare and bass drum on the grid as a rule of thumb, it can be a good start, but most good beats has som tension created by the displacement of either the snare or bass drum or both according to the grid, very often the snare is slightly behind.
So this is why so many drummers go off to make awesome home recordings.
very helpful
Trigger randomiser helps with avoiding repetition, you can write the basic structure of a fill or beat and let the randomiser do it's thing, it also helps to make sound more 'human'
what parameter have the greatest impact when a synth produced sounds for reproduced real Instrument and must be used inteligent ...means f.e. a volume push often isnnot the right choice to emulate the behavior of Instruments so its the real deal when it come to synhesis ..
hope you can bring up some light to that topic ,...what Instruments class and what sound physics happenanf do what when you play harder ,louder ...what is usefull simulate emulate on a synth and on fx devices..?
what is the eight choice for automation when using Synth and sounds that behave like a famous different Art of real Instruments even the sound not perfwct equal..from Perc..to strings...to resonat Instruments...
what Sound fx devices and automation helps to simulate some real World
behavior....
great explaining thx....like always big thx...
For some reason Ableton hasn't got a rhythmic randomiser so I have to make do with the trigger randomiser
I generally program linear drum grooves, only using two sounds together when absolutely necessary.
this is why I decided to go ahead and learn how to play drums
thanks!!
Have you ever tried Jamstix by rayzoon? Love, love, love this plugin. It does everything I need form a virtual drummer and it can be combined with vrtually every drum-library available. I am in no way associated with the company and I sincerely think it is one of the most overlooked drum-plugins on the market.
Nice Le Studio shirt
Great vid
I don't care to sound like a real drummer but this video is still very helpful. Thanks
The best thing to do is to learn to play basic drums to understand ‘feel’. If not that, then at least watch videos of drummers, the patterns and techniques they use.
One important thing is to remember that the hi hat is always locked, the snare plays a little behind (in the pocket) and bass drum can play a little behind as well and also right on the beat. The hi hat is always locked on imo.