Realistic MIDI drum patterns.

[Maars]

Hi All,

Does anyone have any tips or tricks that they could share in regards to making midi drums sound more realistic?

I don't have the dosh, mics or room to record a real drummer so I have to fall back on my less than expert MIDI programming skills.

I'm building my beats using Xpand! but despite using feel injectors the beats still come up sounding sterile and "like midi".

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to either create better feels and improve the qulaity of the sounds.

Boom! is a great midi instrument but I'm not looking to go down the hip hop route, i'm more looking at singer songwriter styles. Something that allows me to break away from simple voice and acoutic guitar without sounding tacky.

Sorry about the long post.

Thanks for any assistance.

Maars

[albee1952]

I use ezdrummer and it has tons of midi loops that are all played by a real drummer. Superior Drummer 2.0 also has its own batch of midi files and you can build a song by dragging these loops onto an instrument track while in grid mode. Once you have the basis of your song built in midi, you can edit the midi to your heart's content to make the final performance unique to the song. Other things to try would be experimenting with selecting say all the hi-hat notes and nudging them later by several samples to change the feel of the drums. (or maybe do the same to the snare hits or even manually move random notes slightly off the grid). One key to a good midi drum track is to think like a drummer(which comes easier to some than it does to others). Basically what I mean is to pay attention to whether something would not or could not be played in reality. Start simple and get fancier as you develop your skills.

[miek07]

Originally Posted by Maars

Hi All,

Does anyone have any tips or tricks that they could share in regards to making midi drums sound more realistic?

I don't have the dosh, mics or room to record a real drummer so I have to fall back on my less than expert MIDI programming skills.

I'm building my beats using Xpand! but despite using feel injectors the beats still come up sounding sterile and "like midi".

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to either create better feels and improve the qulaity of the sounds.

Boom! is a great midi instrument but I'm not looking to go down the hip hop route, i'm more looking at singer songwriter styles. Something that allows me to break away from simple voice and acoutic guitar without sounding tacky.

Sorry about the long post.

Thanks for any assistance.

Maars

One thing you can do is what I like to call call 'Grid Slip'

You can create a flamming effect (when you hit share or tom head hard) by slipping a copy of the same snare or tom drum note 10to40ticks before it hits. Sort of a doubling effect.

Consider the traditional format of the dynamics of 1 2 3 4..

1 is STRONGER v110
2 is WEAKER v70
3 is STRONG v 100
4 is WEAK v80

You can apply this to any sequence of 1234 like Beat 1 Beat 2 Beat 3 Beat 4 or even 8/16th notes

Snares even follow the 1234 format, but starts on beat 2. so
Beat 2 Stronger v110 (flam)
Beat 4 Weaker v90
Beat 2 Stong v105 (flam)
Beat 4 Weak v05

Ghost notes usually have weak or weaker dynamic type and usualy falls on off-beats

So Kick Ghost Notes could follow like
Beat 1 STRONG v110
offBeat 1.5 weaker v70
Beat 2 x(sd hit)
offBeat 2.5 lag weaker v70
Beat 3 rush Strong beat
Beat 3.5 weaker v70
Beat 4 x(sd hit)
beat 4.5 weaker v70
beat 4.5 lag weak v80 (antisipation beat)

Antisipation Beats fall under the 4th beat, you can input a mini sd roll in 16th/32 notes on beat 4. Antisipation beats usually follow EVEN bars. Fills on EVEN multiples of 4.

Rushing or Lagging your Snare hits alters pecieved groove, as well as placement of kickdrum vs bass. If your bass is Slappy or has a purcussive quality to it, try rushing you kicks by 20 ticks or so, the effect is similar to flamming but with the attack portions of your kick drum and the attack portion of your bass track.

Rushing Snares by a few clicks gives a groove sence of antisipation and lagging them a few clicks gives a groove sence of closure, exactly on the beat is well, robotic.

Hi hats also typically has some sort of swing flavor to them. Hats on Beats should stay on the beat and the offbeat hh hits should have softer dynamics. You can rush or lag the offbeats on hh hits to give a sence of groove/swing.

I would so suggest mapping your midi controller to triger drum parts and just two finger the basics

Bass on C3 Snare on D3 for example, just tap in the Basic beat and introduce flamming, ghost notes, while your looping that section. Do the same with HH for example F#3G#3A#3 where F#is closed and A# is Open. You can work with rolls yb slowing down your BPM while midi rec and placing your hand in a horizontal position so that four fingers can rapidly 'roll' one note, such as a snare drum.

Practice for a while and before you know it you can rock key drums.

Oh yea, create different midi tracks going to the same midi channel for differnt drum parts like a kck track a sd clap track a hh track a toms track and a cym track for easier editing of dynamic and velocity curves.

michae
myspace.com/miekwavesoundlab

[Maars]

Thanks Albee1952 and Miek07.

Albee - EZdrummer sounds great however it is only 16bit, can I still use it in a 24 bit session? Or would I only be able to use it in session created as 16 bit?

Maars

[spkguitar]

groovemonkee.com



~

[albee1952]

Originally Posted by Maars

Thanks Albee1952 and Miek07.

Albee - EZdrummer sounds great however it is only 16bit, can I still use it in a 24 bit session? Or would I only be able to use it in session created as 16 bit?

Maars

Almost all my sessions are 24 bit and ezdrummer works with no problems at all. These days I usually don't use the loops and prefer to play the parts in on a Roland drum kit or tap them in using an M-Audio Trigger Finger. I have presets saved in ezdrummer so I can load a simple stereo version for programming and then split it out to several tracks for mixing(my template sessions already have the extra aux tracks created and labeled).