A lot of musicians are also their own recording engineers, using computer-based home recording studios, usually set up in a spare bedroom. Trying to record an entire band along with drums can be challenging with a studio like this, assuming you HAVE a band and/or drummer. But what if you don't have drums OR a drummer? Fear not. Here are three techniques that will help you create very realistic drums in your recording.
1. Build Your Own Drum Parts
There are programs out there that will automatically play the drums for you, sort of like the drum machines of old. But we're going to build our own drum track bit-by-bit so that we have ultimate control and flexibility. For this example, I'm assuming we're using a drum kit sample in a recording program that has MIDI functionality, and that you have a MIDI keyboard attached to your computer.
The first thing we will need to do is load up a drum kit on one of our tracks. Start a new track and attach the virtual drums via whatever method your software uses. In Reaper, click the track's "FX" button, which will give you a menu of plug-ins to choose from, including virtual instruments. Pick you drum program and then select your kit. Tell the track to use your MIDI keyboard as its input and you'll have each drum in the kit mapped to a specific key on your keyboard.
The next thing you need to do is make sure you establish a tempo for your song in the software and turn on the click track. This is important for keeping everything aligned. Then insert a blank MIDI item into the drum track. In some programs you might have to just record for a while to get the blank MIDI item. Finally, open the MIDI item to enter the MIDI editor window. In Reaper you simply double-click the MIDI item. Now you can draw drum hits or notes onto the grid (corresponding to beats and measures) to create the first part of your drum track. This is a relatively fast process and gives you total control. Continue drawing drum parts, high-hat, snare, kick, etc. in the MIDI editor, until your get a complete part, which may represent different sections of the song. Most songs are made up of drum "phrases" that may or may not repeat throughout the song, like Intro, Verse, Pre-Chorus, Chorus, Bridge, Ending for example.
2. Snapping and Gluing
To avoid having anything sound off-beat, I recommend the use of two tools, Glue Items and Snap To. At this point in our example you have the start of your midi drum track, say 10 seconds or so. But you probably also have some left-over blank midi before the first drum-hit and after the last one. If you exit the MIDI editor window, and click on the right edge of MIDI item in the track and drag the edge to the right or left, you'll notice that you can extend or shorten the midi item.
When dragging to the right, as the item gets longer, you'll notice little notches appearing at regular intervals on the edge of the item. What's happening here is that as you drag to the right, you're creating loops of the original 10 or so seconds of MIDI drums, the notches representing the start and end points. Go ahead and stretch it out until you have 2 or 3 sets of notches (so 2 or 3 loops of the first 10 seconds). Now hit play and listen to how bad it sounds (almost certainly). This is because we didn't pay attention to the starting and ending points when we were creating the drum part because we weren't thinking about looping. But the looping capability is really useful. We just need to make sure we shave off the right amount of blank MIDI from before and after the last drum hit in the pattern.
For any item that repeats lots of times, such as verse parts, you'll need to make the item loop-able, so we can make one part repeat many times with a drag of the mouse. IN order for this tow work properly you MUST define the proper beginning and ending points before looping.
So the first thing to do is make sure that snapping is turned on and that the grid on your screen represents beats and bars. Now drag the left side of the MIDI item until the start point is right on the measure where the part starts. Then do the same thing to the end of the phrase. Now you'll need to check to see if it's correct. Highlight the song from the beginning of the item to the end of it. This usually takes a bit of trial-and-error by looping the playback of just the MIDI item.
If it doesn't sound correct the first time, simply drag the beginning or ending (usually the ending, in my experience) a bit to the left or right and try again until you get it right. Remember, it is vital that you have snapping turned on here so that the end-points will always be on a logical beat or beat division. Once you get it right, it is time to employ probably my favorite of any tool in any recording software, Reaper's Glue Items tool. Select the item, right-mouse-click and select Glue Items. This will shave off the correct blank MIDI, creating a loop-able phrase of drums that you can drag, stretch, and/or paste to create as many instances of it as you need throughout the song. Do this for each section of the song and you have yourself a completed drum track.
3. Easy On the Perfection
During the first parts of this process I insisted you ensure the drum parts are right on the beat, and the loops are musically correct, using such tools as Glue Items and Snapping. But sometimes too much of a good thing is, well, not a good thing. Sampled drums are played by a computer. If you don't tell the machine otherwise, it will play every drum hit at the exact same volume with the exact same energy, on the mathematically perfect rhythmic beat. But the machine-played drums will likely sound machine-y, too mechanical to many folks. For maximum realism, we need to tell our computers to humanize the performance. What this means is that the drum hits will be randomly shifted in both volume and time just a teeny bit to make them sound more like a human played them.
The volume and energy of drum strikes also need to vary in a specific way. For example, a drummer can make a snare drum sound like 3 or 4 different instruments just by how hard she hits the drum. Heck, Irish bodhrans can deliver dozens of different sounds. Certain rhythms rely on having emphasized and non-emphasized hits. So when you build your drum track, keep that in mind. You can adjust these settings as needed, which can be done in multiple ways in most midi programs. Believe it or not there are lots of times, in certain genres of music, when a drum beat that is ever-so-slightly behind the beat can make it sound better to us musically. So it's important for us to keep a little slack in the drum grid.
So there you have it. It may take a little time, but if you want very realistic-sounding drum tracks without having any actual drums around, use virtual drums and employ 3 important keys:
1. Build Your Own Drum Parts
There are programs out there that will automatically play the drums for you, sort of like the drum machines of old. But we're going to build our own drum track bit-by-bit so that we have ultimate control and flexibility. For this example, I'm assuming we're using a drum kit sample in a recording program that has MIDI functionality, and that you have a MIDI keyboard attached to your computer.
The first thing we will need to do is load up a drum kit on one of our tracks. Start a new track and attach the virtual drums via whatever method your software uses. In Reaper, click the track's "FX" button, which will give you a menu of plug-ins to choose from, including virtual instruments. Pick you drum program and then select your kit. Tell the track to use your MIDI keyboard as its input and you'll have each drum in the kit mapped to a specific key on your keyboard.
The next thing you need to do is make sure you establish a tempo for your song in the software and turn on the click track. This is important for keeping everything aligned. Then insert a blank MIDI item into the drum track. In some programs you might have to just record for a while to get the blank MIDI item. Finally, open the MIDI item to enter the MIDI editor window. In Reaper you simply double-click the MIDI item. Now you can draw drum hits or notes onto the grid (corresponding to beats and measures) to create the first part of your drum track. This is a relatively fast process and gives you total control. Continue drawing drum parts, high-hat, snare, kick, etc. in the MIDI editor, until your get a complete part, which may represent different sections of the song. Most songs are made up of drum "phrases" that may or may not repeat throughout the song, like Intro, Verse, Pre-Chorus, Chorus, Bridge, Ending for example.
2. Snapping and Gluing
To avoid having anything sound off-beat, I recommend the use of two tools, Glue Items and Snap To. At this point in our example you have the start of your midi drum track, say 10 seconds or so. But you probably also have some left-over blank midi before the first drum-hit and after the last one. If you exit the MIDI editor window, and click on the right edge of MIDI item in the track and drag the edge to the right or left, you'll notice that you can extend or shorten the midi item.
When dragging to the right, as the item gets longer, you'll notice little notches appearing at regular intervals on the edge of the item. What's happening here is that as you drag to the right, you're creating loops of the original 10 or so seconds of MIDI drums, the notches representing the start and end points. Go ahead and stretch it out until you have 2 or 3 sets of notches (so 2 or 3 loops of the first 10 seconds). Now hit play and listen to how bad it sounds (almost certainly). This is because we didn't pay attention to the starting and ending points when we were creating the drum part because we weren't thinking about looping. But the looping capability is really useful. We just need to make sure we shave off the right amount of blank MIDI from before and after the last drum hit in the pattern.
For any item that repeats lots of times, such as verse parts, you'll need to make the item loop-able, so we can make one part repeat many times with a drag of the mouse. IN order for this tow work properly you MUST define the proper beginning and ending points before looping.
So the first thing to do is make sure that snapping is turned on and that the grid on your screen represents beats and bars. Now drag the left side of the MIDI item until the start point is right on the measure where the part starts. Then do the same thing to the end of the phrase. Now you'll need to check to see if it's correct. Highlight the song from the beginning of the item to the end of it. This usually takes a bit of trial-and-error by looping the playback of just the MIDI item.
If it doesn't sound correct the first time, simply drag the beginning or ending (usually the ending, in my experience) a bit to the left or right and try again until you get it right. Remember, it is vital that you have snapping turned on here so that the end-points will always be on a logical beat or beat division. Once you get it right, it is time to employ probably my favorite of any tool in any recording software, Reaper's Glue Items tool. Select the item, right-mouse-click and select Glue Items. This will shave off the correct blank MIDI, creating a loop-able phrase of drums that you can drag, stretch, and/or paste to create as many instances of it as you need throughout the song. Do this for each section of the song and you have yourself a completed drum track.
3. Easy On the Perfection
During the first parts of this process I insisted you ensure the drum parts are right on the beat, and the loops are musically correct, using such tools as Glue Items and Snapping. But sometimes too much of a good thing is, well, not a good thing. Sampled drums are played by a computer. If you don't tell the machine otherwise, it will play every drum hit at the exact same volume with the exact same energy, on the mathematically perfect rhythmic beat. But the machine-played drums will likely sound machine-y, too mechanical to many folks. For maximum realism, we need to tell our computers to humanize the performance. What this means is that the drum hits will be randomly shifted in both volume and time just a teeny bit to make them sound more like a human played them.
The volume and energy of drum strikes also need to vary in a specific way. For example, a drummer can make a snare drum sound like 3 or 4 different instruments just by how hard she hits the drum. Heck, Irish bodhrans can deliver dozens of different sounds. Certain rhythms rely on having emphasized and non-emphasized hits. So when you build your drum track, keep that in mind. You can adjust these settings as needed, which can be done in multiple ways in most midi programs. Believe it or not there are lots of times, in certain genres of music, when a drum beat that is ever-so-slightly behind the beat can make it sound better to us musically. So it's important for us to keep a little slack in the drum grid.
So there you have it. It may take a little time, but if you want very realistic-sounding drum tracks without having any actual drums around, use virtual drums and employ 3 important keys:
- Build the drum parts yourself for maximum control and flexibility.
- Use the Snap-To and Glue Items tools in Reaper to make it fast and easy to create musically correct rhythms and not have anything sound off-beat.
- Use the MIDI editor and tools such as the Humanize function to ensure the drums don't sound too perfect, which would not sound natural to us in most musical genres.
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