> Step by step

3. Programming a realistic drum fill from scratch

1 We’re going to program a one-bar fill at the end of a basic drum groove. We set the cycle markers in our DAW to loop at bar 8, then delete all the MIDI notes therein. We will, however, need to remind ourselves of the groove quite frequently while working on our fill, rather than drive ourselves mad listening to it over and over again out of context… 2 Our ultimate goal is to create a believable ‘performance’ that a real drummer could have played, and the easiest way for a non-drummer to do that is to start with a simple snare drum fill. So, we draw in a series of full-velocity 16th-note snare hits – a slow machine-gun roll, if you will. What a racket! But don’t worry – this is only the beginning. 3 We can easily make our snare fill more ‘human’ in terms of sound and timing by shifting the hit on every main beat to a rimshot articulation, manually offsetting each hit from the quantise grid a touch, and varying the velocities to emulate a drummer’s natural inclination to hit slightly harder with their right hand – assuming they’re right-handed. 4 Now, bring in the tom toms by picking out a few snare hits and dragging them onto the notes assigned to toms in your virtual drum kit. You can move as many hits as you like – all of them, even! – but keeping the main beats centred on the snare will ensure that the high-end energy of the groove is maintained through the fill. 5 To make our fill more ‘conclusive’, we delete the last three 16th-notes, move the last hit of beat 3 to the kick, make the final snare hit a flam, and end on an offbeat kick. To keep the feet busy, we draw alternating kick drums and pedalled hi-hat hits on and between the first three beats. An explosive crash cymbal at the start of the groove wraps things up nicely.