>Step by step

Programming a typical crescendoing drum roll

1 With your multisampled snare drum loaded, start by drawing in a series of very fast notes over, say, two bars with snap turned off – don’t worry about the timing grid or keeping the spacing even. A press roll doesn’t have any meaningful rhythm to it, and each hit will inevitably be slightly fluctuant in terms of timing.

2 The idea is for the hits to sort of ‘blur’ into each other, so if you are able to still hear each one as a discrete stroke, try and move them closer to each other. If it isn’t already, set the velocity of the notes to somewhere around 60-70 – drum rolls are very rarely played with the maximum amount of force.

3 If your sampler has separate left and right hand samples, switch between them every two strokes. If not, lower the velocity of every other pair of notes slightly. Either way, shift overall velocity level (keeping the spacing of each pair) up and down slightly as the roll progresses, for a touch of human variation.

4 To create the crescendo, we need to apply an upward ramp to the sequence, again without breaking the carefully programmed relative velocity positioning of our double-strokes. Logic Pro makes this easy with the Cmdmodified pencil tool, but if your DAW doesn’t, you’ll have to do it by hand.

5 Assuming your sampled snare has sufficient multisampled velocity layers, your roll should already sound realistic. However, many virtual drum kits include humanising features, like Superior Drummer’s Randomise Hits and Use Adjacent Layers. Turning these on adds even more ‘real drummer’ authenticity.

6 If you are using Superior Drummer 3, the Smoothing control provides further realism by softening the attack of rapidly repeated hits – ie, drum rolls. And for that final conclusive flourish, simply whack the velocity of the very last note, which should fall on the first beat of the bar, all the way up.