>Step by step

Working glitchy fills and rolls into a live drum track

1 Here’s my raw drum pattern. It’s been played in live via edrums and is triggering a modified version of Superior Drummer 3’s Tight and High Plate preset kit. I’m going to make copies of the kick, snare and hi-hats for separate triggering and manipulation.

2 I start by saving the edited snare drum out as a User preset for loading into a new Instrument slot – much quicker than copying the settings across from one snare to another. I then load this into the kit using the Add Instrument function, and map its Center articulation to the unused MIDI note 113.

3 Turning off Hit Variation for the copied snare means it will always sound the same when played, with no round robins or randomisation – just what we need for the ‘machine gun’ effect we’re after. I then repeat the process for the kick and hi-hats, mapping the duplicates to notes 114 and 115 respectively.

4 Now we’re ready to draw some notes in. The exact form these take will depend on your drum track, but here, I’ve dragged certain kick, snare and hi-hat hits up to the note lanes of their dehumanised alternatives and used them as the start points for fast, ‘mechanical’ note runs.

5 The next step is to automate the duplicate kit pieces to take any remaining realism out of them, and Superior Drummer 3 makes this easy with its Macro controls, which enable multiple parameters to be mapped to a single knob for grouped tweaking. I start, however, by flipping the hi-hats into reverse.

6 Good targets for automation in this particular scenario are the hi-hat Reverse Time, and tuning and envelope release for all three instruments. By mapping those controls to three instrument-specific Macros, recording or drawing transformative modulations into the host DAW as automation is a cinch.