- We're gonna talk about some ways to create
more realistic drum patterns.
Sometimes when you're programming drums
in electronic music, they can sound very robotic.
They're exactly on the grid
and human beings don't play that way.
There's natural changes in tempo
and how hard they're striking the drums.
So we're gonna try to mimic that to make our
electronically programmed drums
sound a little more realistic.
So let's start by building our beat.
I've got a 808 kit here,
and I'm just gonna throw down some kick drums.
And I've got a snare.
And then we'll put in our high hat pattern.
And let's take a look at the midi clip.
It's a nice sounding beat, but it is very static
and perfect to the grid if you were to look,
everything is falling exactly where it's supposed to be.
In a way that's kind of unnatural.
So what I'm gonna do first,
is I'm gonna look at velocity.
And velocity is how hard the particular drums are hit.
And right now we can see our velocity down here
for our high hats, which is all exactly the same.
So in thinking about how a real drummer might play,
they sort of accent the downbeats,
so what I'm gonna do, is select all the upbeats,
by clicking one and holding shift,
and just going around and selecting them.
And now I can grab their velocity and lower those.
And you can hear as I go really low, those upbeat high hats
are almost barely audible.
And we can even accent them more by raising the velocity.
I'm gonna bring them down a bit.
Maybe somethin' like that
so we'd have just a little bit of change
in the way they are struck.
The next thing we can look at,
is nudge, or moving our notes around.
I'm gonna add in some claps here.
Right on the snare drums.
And right now, the snares and the claps are hitting
at exactly the same time.
So I'm gonna go into the claps, select those,
just gonna slide em' over, just a little bit
to make em' just a little bit late.
So now, there's a little bit of timing difference
going on between the claps.
And that'll help make those sound a little more realistic.
The next thing we can look at,
is I'm gonna add a filter to this track.
I'm gonna pause the tape here.
So I'm gonna drop our filter onto our track here.
And I'm gonna put it right on the high hats.
So I'm gonna select the high hats, go inside my drum rack
and put it right at the end there.
And I'm gonna select the frequency.
If we think about the way a cymbal is hit with a drumstick,
the harder you hit it, the brighter it's sound is.
When a drummer's hitting a cymbal slightly less hard,
it's gonna be a little more dull
and we're gonna mimic that with our filter.
So I'm gonna just select the frequency knob here,
for our auto filter and go inside our midi clip.
And select Envelopes.
And because my frequency was the last thing I touched,
it's also the thing that will be
selected inside our midi clip.
And I'm gonna go into our Pencil tool,
and just go to those alternating upbeat high hats,
and just change the filtering on each one
of these high hats.
And if you notice, when we listen to the high hats soloed,
we have the sound as if one is being hit hard
and the next one is being hit softer.
And in the context of the beat,
we get that nice velocity change and that nice,
different sound in the different cymbal hits.
Finally, the last thing we could do,
to make our drums sound more realistic,
is to change our pattern over time.
A real drummer's not going to play the same exact thing
over and over and over again.
That will give away your sound as being a loop,
so what we're gonna do, is create some variations.
I'm gonna click this double loop button,
which doubles the length of our loop,
inside of Live, so now instead of a two bar loop,
we're working with a four bar loop.
And I'm just gonna do a couple, subtle things here.
I'm gonna go inside our third bar
and maybe just put an extra high hat in right there.
I'm also gonna put another kick here
and maybe we'll do another kick right about here.
Then as we play this,
there's our first two bars,
you get that little high hat change,
and some extra kick drums.
Subtle things like that will really help
make your beats sound realistic,
like a real drummer's playing them.
And you could take this even further,
and duplicate the loop again,
and add in some more sounds later on,
as you wish.
And now, on the last four bars,
we're gonna get somethin' different
than the first four bars.
So those are some ways you can make your drums
sounds and your beats sound a little more realistic
and less robotic and computer- loop sounding.