Many musicians who make music with a computer make there drum tracks using software and recorded samples of drums, but all to often they find that their drums just don’t seem to sound like a real drummer could be playing them. These are my tips for getting a drum track to sound more realistic and hopefully they will help some of you to create some amazing drum tracks which will improve the whole feeling in your music.

Firstly we need to realise that a real drummer is not a computer, a real drummer doesn’t hit every drum with exactly the same force every time he hits it and neither does he hit it on the same millisecond of a bar of music every time. So the main aim is to basically make your drum track less perfect.

If you are using the mouse to input notes on the screen you may find that by switching to a MIDI input device you can use it to play each part of your drum track in and it will start to sound more human (Making sure you don’t set it to quantize your notes too harshly). You will find that you will hit each drum with a slightly different force and at a slightly different time, if you make any big mistakes or any notes that just sound off you can always retake or editing using the mouse. If you don’t want to use a MIDI input device you can use these two methods of editing individual drum hits to effectively do exactly the same thing.

• Change each drum hits volume slightly (Changing the force that the drum is hit)
• Change the time a drum hit is hit back or forward very slightly by small amounts

With both of these don’t do it too excessively, we are just looking for a very slight variation. These are the two basic differences between a human player and a computer drum track. This should improve the feel, try experimenting with it, sometimes just changing these two aspects can really change the feel and groove of a rhythm. (Very good experienced drummers will change these two aspects in their drumming on purpose)

There is another thing we can change which is the tone of the drum hit. As a drummer varies the force with which he hits a drum, the tone of the sound produced changes. On most drum machines such as the Redrum in Propellerheads Reason there is a tone feature, by varying this slightly with each drum hit (especially on the snare drum) we can give it more of a human feel. Try making the tone reduce when the volume reduces gives a nice effect.

We can take this further now by making our drums act like real drums. If you use snare rolls a lot, this is a nice way of making them sound much better. Drummers hit drums slightly differently with each hand. So set up two keys on your MIDI input device with the same snare sample on, but vary one ever so slightly in tone, pitch, volume or whatever other properties you want to experiment with and then play the snare hits one after the other creating a snare roll. This drastically improves the sound of snare rolls. You could even have three or four variations of the same hit and change between them.

With the Hi Hat,we often hear a drummer hit the Hi Hat with it open and then quickly close it. This cuts the sound off. So with your Hi Hat you will want to make it so when a Hi Hat closed sample plays it stops the open Hi Hat sample. Some drum machines have this feature built in, so use it effectively. If it isn’t built in yours try varying a Open Hi Hat sounds length according to your track so when the close plays the length cuts off the sound.

This next way is the Ultimate way of getting that real drummer sound, but it is not always practical with samples. If you are recording your own drum samples make sure that you record differing volumes of each drum. Some software allows us to change the sample used depending on the volume of the note. So for example when a MIDI volume message says a note is played at a loudness of 100 to 127 it will play sample 1 (A full whack drum hit), if the MIDI volume message is below say 100 it will play sample 2 (a softer recorded drum hit). We can line these up with as many samples as we wanted (if we have them) and that would create an extremely realistic sounding kit. Often though this is not practical for many people as many drum hits are electronically produce or the hit we want to use only has one recorded sample.

Hopefully this has taught you some of the ways in which you can make your sound less computer sounding and more realistic. These methods certainly improved the realism of my tracks and hopefully it will your too.

Tutorial Written by Edward Cufaude for Rhythm Creation.