Pushing or pulling drum tracks to increase or reduce urgency

1 Here’s a live MIDI drum part triggering Toontrack EZdrummer 2. No quantise has been applied, so the whole thing has the human timing of a real player, but it sits pretty tightly with the bassline and percussion. We can transform the feel of the whole track by shifting the drums backwards or forwards in time…

2 Doing this in Ableton Live is a simple matter of adjusting the Track Delay setting at the bottom of the channel strip (activate the D button at the far right if you can’t see it). Increasing it delays the drums in relation to the rest of the project – set it to 20 to pull them back by 20ms, giving the track a slightly lazier feel.

3 Pushing the timing in the other direction makes the drums feels more pacy and driving. To make a noticeable difference in this case, though, the shift needs to be a bit larger, and -25ms has the desired effect. Notice the fairly significant timing difference between the drums and the congas now.

4 Pushing or pulling the drums as a whole has a profound and sometimes quite destabilising effect on the rhythmic shape of a track, so for less heavy-handed results, consider just shifting a single element. Here’s my track again, with the hi-hats pushed forwards. Get your ears around it in the accompanying video.

5 This stuff isn’t limited to realistic acoustic drum kit tracks. Here’s the same bassline and conga part underpinned by an electronic drum track from NI Battery 4. Pulling it by 15ms and pushing it by -20ms gives a similar impression of slowing down and speeding up as with live drums.

6 Finally, a good technique for pulling an electronic drum track back while still retaining the positioning of its hits is to ‘smear’ the backbeat. The backbeat snare in my drum track comprises a handclap layer as well as the snare, and pulling just the clap slightly later gives the whole drum track a lazier feel.