>Step by step

Organic beats

1

Looking at acoustic drummers, we can pick something up right off the bat by thinking of that classic moment in a rock anthem that never fails to inspire air drumming – the drum fill. You can break up the monotony of robotic repetition by changing up your MIDI patterns every four bars or so, or introducing new samples into the mix such as toms.

2

When an acoustic drummer hits a snare or hi-hat, they never hit quite the same part of the instrument, or with the same level of intensity, twice. The crudest, but most essential, way we can imitate this in a DAW is via MIDI velocity mapping – think about making notes falling on strong beats (ie, the ‘1’ and ‘3’) louder, with those on weak or off beats, quieter.

3

The way acoustic drummers play hi-hat patterns is especially interesting – listen and you’ll hear an alternating sequence of quiet and loud notes, referred to in music theory as ‘accenting’. Quiet, so-called ‘ghost notes’ played on the snare drum on off beats are another example of this, which will add rhythmic spice and dynamism to your pattern-making.

4

In the real world, when you hit a snare drum with more force, the sound isn’t just louder, it will also be brighter, as more harmonics are stimulated. We can recreate this, in crude fashion, digitally by engaging the parameter mapping function of a sampler. Map incoming MIDI velocity to low-pass filter cutoff to make quieter notes duller and loud notes brighter.

5

Parameter mapping is a key tool in our bid to humanise electronic drums – we can take things a few steps further by also mapping MIDI velocity to pitch (making louder notes a few cents higher in pitch) and amplitude envelope (so quieter notes decay more quickly than louder ones), all helping us to subtly imitate what happens when a drummer plays a real kit.

6

Next, let’s look at timing. The ‘feel’ that good acoustic drummers possess is largely down to their sense of rhythmic pacing, not always playing everything 100% strictly on-grid. The first step we can take in this regard is to gently push and pull our MIDI notes around directly within the piano roll or timeline, subtly altering the overall rhythmic feel of our pattern.

7

Developing this further, we can introduce a more organic sense of timing to our programmed beats simply by quantising them less after they’ve been recorded in. Any decent DAW will offer you a percentage amount for controlling how much quantisation to apply, so try playing in your patterns then only quantising them by 75% or so.

8

Sample delay can be a helpful tool also, particularly for creating more authentic clap sounds. Try using two or three clap samples on separate tracks, with sample delay applied to each; automate the delay time before every hit in your sequence to create a composite sound that feels more natural than the three sounds triggered simultaneously.

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A final tip for nudging timings offcentre is to use plugins that introduce a variable amount of delay into the signal, such as chorus. This works wonders on hi-hat patterns by giving them width and warble by mixing a delayed copy of the audio back in with itself, varying the delay time with an LFO. Trap hats don’t have to be so machine gun all the time, after all!

10

Returning to our sampler’s modulation matrix, a simple way we can introduce a bit of unpredictability into our drum parts is by calling upon the gods of chaos and engaging any randomisation features they have. Logic Pro X’s new sampler for example, offers up ‘random’ as a mod source, meaning we can dial in just a touch of pitch drift per MIDI note etc.

11

Sometimes however, a straight-up, hard quantised drum machine beat works best, especially for house and techno. How do we bring the human touch into this equation? Well, one method is to layer in shaker loops or hand percussion patterns performed by acoustic musicians, offsetting the pounding precision of the drums with relaxed, real-world groove.

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Finally, bring the real world into your DAW by working with real-world impulse responses inside a convolution reverb plugin. Logic Pro X’s Space Designer has folders full of recorded reverberations from genuine spaces – load a short-decay verb on a send bus and feed varying levels of signal from across your drum kit. Look for something similar in your DAW!