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jpfeifer
January 14th, 2006, 05:12 PM
Hi Everyone, (long posting, sorry) ...

I wanted to pass along some tips (or options) for handling Drum tracks for your home recording projects. In my opinion, Drum tracks are still the hardest piece to home recording, unless you have a live drummer and all the necessary mic's and processing you need to get the sounds you want.

First, you need to decide on a way get your drum sounds. Each of the options has its pro's and con's. I'll try to summarize them here.

Option 1) Use a standalone Drum Machine:
The benefit to this is being able to program your own patterns and selecting from a variety of drum kits. The drawback is typically in the quality of the drum sounds themselves, or in the ease of programming. And with a standalone module, you might not be able to upload new sounds to it.

Option 2) Use a Drum sampler (plug-in) module for your PC recording package. This option is similar to using a stand-alone Drum Machine. The difference is that you will use your PC Recording software to program the drum patterns and these drum modules typically have a large variety of Drum sounds to select from, in addition to being able to upload new sound libraries into them. The quality of drum samples for these modules tends to be very high. The main drawback to these is in the time it takes to program your own drum patterns. Flexibility is very high, but it can be time consuming to program everything just the way that you want it. I use a drum plugin module called "dr008" made by a company caled fxpansion. Here is a link to their site http://www.fxpansion.com/

Option 3) Use a Drum Loop CD with your PC Recording software to assemble the drum patterns into your track. There are a wide variety of "Acid-ized" Drum Loop CD's on the market that allow you to essentially drop in pre-recorded audio Loops into your Drum track and assemble your drum track from start to finish. The main benefits to this method of doing drums is that it saves a huge amount of time and the quality is typically very high. You can assemble a Drum track that sounds like a real drummer (because it is) and you don't have to program each pattern yourself. You're essentially selecting the pre-recorded patterns from the CD and dropping them into your song in the order that you want. I used this method to do the drums in the Pfat Cat Shuffle song. It's actually Mick Fleetwood's Drum loop CD that I used. The main drawback to this method of doing drums is that your drum style is limited to whatever is on your Drum loop CD's. These CD's are about $40 each so it can get very expensive to have a large amount of Drum loop CD's covering every style that you want. Also, you might have a song where the groove that you need that is not covered on any of your Drum Loop CDs.

My suggestion is to use both method 1 and 2 together unless you already have a standalone Drum Machine. Sometimes you need the flexibility of creating your own drum grooves with a sampler, but you can usually augment your own sounds with some Drum Loop CD's. I find myself using Drum Loop CDs for things like percussion grooves, hip hop and electronic beats, or hard-to-program grooves like Blues shuffles, swing, etc. Then I use my drum sampler for the more standard stuff that I need to customize such as basic acoustic drum parts, cymbal hits, etc.

After you have your drum sounds selected the next step is to setup your basic groove for the song. The best way to give your songs a more realistic feel is to vary the drum track in the same way that a real drummer would do it. Here are some tips for doing this:

- Select a groove that will loop for most of the tune

- Make a copy of this main groove and vary it slightly so that you can go betwen groove1 for the first part of the song and groove2 for another part of the song. Maybe groove2 is only adding a different snare sound, ride cymbal, etc. but has a different amount of energy than groove1. It's good to start your tune with lower energy and build it up later in the chorus section or at the end of the tune. Maybe groove1 is your standard groove and groove2 is your higher-energy version that you use only in the chorus section.

- Find areas in your song where there are natural breaks and create versions of your groove that will act as fills. Fills can be something as simple as a double hit on the snare at beat 4 instead of the normal single hit. For every fill you will want to follow it with a cymbal hit at the beggining of the next measure. You can do this by copying your groove and just adding a crash cymbal to the first beat.

- Now, take your drum track and put in your fill measures in the places where a drummer usually does a fill. Typically this will be at the end of 4 or 8 bar sequences. Put your fill measure in bar 8 and your cymbal-hit measure in bar 9. Now it should sound like a drummer who is playing along in a groove, does a short fill, with a cymbal hit then keeps grooving.

Lastly, here is one way to make midi programmed drums sound more realistic.
The most common reason that drum machines sound fake is that they high-hat hits sound like a robot is playing the drums (every high hat hit has the same tone and volume with no variation) . Real drummers accent the high hat hits with different volume, different amount of sizzle, and even where they hit it on the high hat. If you are composing a drum groove that has a regular pattern on the high-hat, don't use the same high hat sound for each hit to the high hat. Let's say you are doing a 16-note pattern on the high hat. Create your pattern by using two separate high hat sounds and alternating each hit between the 2 sounds. Make one of these sounds lower volume than the other. Also, try to throw in some different high hat sounds like closed, half open, and open. This will make is less machine-like.

I hope these tips help, -- Jim

Spudman
January 14th, 2006, 08:20 PM
Jim
Thanks. That covers a lot of ground. Plenty of good ideas. Much appreciated.

Robert
January 22nd, 2006, 09:42 PM
Great post Jim! Thanks for sharing your knowledge in this area. I agree with you, drums is a pain to do fast and quick for us guitar players. I'd like to mention a VST plugin called "Groove Agent", which is easy to get started on. It lets you drag sliders and press buttons in realtime as it records, and the sounds are quite good. See http://www.bornemark.se/ga/ for more information.