Feeling the groove
Those are the fundamentals, but of course there’s much more to it than that. Rather than consciously calculating the placement of kick, snare and hi-hat notes while playing, the trained drummer ‘feels’ where they should go. He or she places them in the context of the rest of the track, in which – never forget – the drums play an underpinning, supporting role. This isn’t something you need to master in order to program realistic drums, but you do need to understand the forms that these intuitive patterns might take beyond the elementary ‘kick, snare, kick, snare’.
Generally speaking, the kick drum should work in tandem with the bassline, so try placing kick hits directly on top of your main bass notes. Most of the time the snare will fall on beats 2 and 4, but shifting one forwards or backwards by half a beat can utterly transform a groove – try it. Other variants are the half-time groove (à la dubstep), with the kick falling on beat 1 and the snare on beat 3. Then there’s the disco-style hi-hat pattern, too: you play 16th-notes with both of your hands, with the right hand moving to the snare for the backbeat.
Although it should go without saying, we’ll say it anyway: no drummer can hit more than two drums with their sticks at any one time. Just like us, they only have two arms! So, if you’ve programmed a snare, a tom and a hi-hat hit on the same beat, realism has left the building.
Little extras
A couple of drum kit variables worth bearing in mind are the ride cymbal and double-kick drums. The ride cymbal is an alternative to the hi-hats. In pop and rock, it’s traditionally used in choruses and middle eights, where the energy of the track needs to increase. In jazz, it replaces the hats as the primary riding instrument – but jazz drumming is a whole other kettle of fish that we don’t have space to get into here. Another time…
Double-kick drums are found almost exclusively in the realm of metal, where they’re the bedrock for blisteringly fast double-time grooves and fills. Feel free to use them where appropriate, but be aware that they can quickly overpower a track, and that a drummer in the real world can’t easily pedal the hi-hat and play that second kick drum at the same time.