The bedrock of almost all good underground music is the drums. From hip hop to jungle, garage to house, a solid and interesting drum track is one thing that you simply can't do without. But it's also something that a lot of people skimp on - simply programming a straightforward drum track and hoping it will be enough. But by picking up a few crucial basics, you can learn how to program beats that are more interesting and realistic, and will make your tracks funkier, more fluid, and more fun.Now, we understand that most readers of this blog will be concerning themselves with dance music, in which so many elements of the drums are inherently unrealistic - for instance the layering up of breaks in Drum & Bass, super-heavy compression and so on. But still, these tracks will have a main set of 'hits' for the kick, snare and fills, and it's these which need to be programmed cleverly.
So, the first thing is to think like a drummer. The best way is, of course, to have some lessons - as this will give you a whole new set of ideas on rhythms and fills. But this isn't practical for everyone. The obvious consideration is that a drummer has, clearly, only two arms and two legs - and thus can't hit three drums at once. Instead, try to imagine how the drummer would sit in front of their kit, and when playing a fill or a roll, which hand would hit each drum.
Next, a real drummer can't hit the drums exactly the same way every time, so take a look at the velocity of your notes. Most sequencers will have some kind of a 'humanise' function in their MIDI capability, which will subtly tweak the velocity and quantisation of each note, and make it sound less machine-like. This is handy, but in addition to overall randomness, a real drummer will have certain other quirks. For a start, they will favour one particular hand, and that often leads to hitting the drums slightly harder with that hand, as well as starting a fill or a roll with that hand too. So on a 16ths pattern; for instance on hi-hats, the first, third, fifth (etc) hits will be very subtly louder. They're also likely to be more rigidly in time; sometimes the alternating hits (i.e. 2, 4, 6...) may be very slightly late. With both of these tweaks, they should be subtle enough that you can barely hear the difference; however the ear will pick up on the variety and natural sound.
Shuffle is another option to take things off the strict quantisation grid. Putting a shuffle quantise across your whole drum part can often sound a little extreme, but applying it to just the hi-hats or background percussion can add a sense of groove without overpowering the overall rhythm.It's also a good idea to have a selection of drum hits available to you - in practise, hitting a drum with different levels of strength will create different sounds, not just different volumes. So a good set of kit samples is essential, and will usually come included with a good sample pack. Or, you can sample a real loop - but when chopping it, make sure to be aware of the rules above: although the drummer will have played naturally, you can't have the same hit twice in succession for instance, as it will immediately sound strange and unnatural. An expensive alternative would be a modern drum library like BFD or Addictive Drums. These plugins have gigabytes of multi-sampled drums and enormous variety; frankly they would possibly be overkill for a lot of dance music producers, but do give you a lot of scope for programming real-sounding drums.
Something else to be borne in mind is the production of your drums - you should remember that a real drum kit occupies a real space. As such, all the drums are in slightly different places, and you could consider moving the hi-hat slightly off to one side, with the toms and ride cymbal off to the other side - in a similar fashion to the way drum kits are normally set up. Reverb too - a drum kit can't exist in a vacuum, so a gentle room reverb, in combination with pan, will give a real sense of listening to an actual drum set-up.
Programming drums, then, is something that you can go very deep into - and this author would recommend that in addition to following the tips above, you get involved with a whole lot of trial and error; nudging hits early or late, skipping them altogether, and so on, to give maximum variety to your beats. And don't think that there's no point in doing this, when you're just going to compress the life out of the drums later - those subtle variations will still ring through loud and clear once you've put everything through the mixdown wringer. So solve your drum woes by rolling up those sleeves and getting busy with the programming - you'll be amazed how much difference it can make!
