3 Tips for Improving Your Programmed Drums

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The debut video from Thomas Brett with three tips for programming metal drums including: 1. Sound Selection (1:13), 2. Velocity (4:42), 3. Flams (7:05)

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Hey guys, this is Thomas Brett from theproaudiofiles.com and Brett Brothers Recording Studio.

Today I'm going to be giving you some tips on programming drums, specifically, programming heavy metal drums to sound a bit more realistic. The song I'm working on today is a heavy metal cover of a Turkish rap song. Me and my wife, we do weekly covers of Turkish songs in interesting styles on her YouTube channel.

Before we get started, let's just listen to the song a little bit to see what we're working with.

[music]

Okay, as you can hear, it's quite a complicated beat with a lot of syncopated parts, a lot of double kick, a lot of quick fills. Let's start by taking the drum sound and what I did to get it to sound this way.

So the drum program we're using today is Superior Drummer 3 using the Pop Punk library. This is a really brilliant library in general, and even though it's meant for Pop Punk, it actually works really, really well for heavy metal sounds.

Basically what I did in order to achieve the final drum sound that I'm using today is I started with a basic preset from the pack by John Feldmann. The Pop Punk preset. Then just tweaked a few things in order to make it fit the song a little better.

So the original Pop Punk preset sounds a little bit like this.

[drums]

As you can hear, it's already a really great sounding kit from the get-go. Basically I felt like this kit was a little bit too rock sounding, and I wanted it to be a little bit more hard, a little bit more bombastic, a little bit more roomy for my metal rendition of this rap song.

In order to reach the end goal, there are a few things that I did. I started by changing up the snare...

[snare]

Something with a little bit more ping.

[snare, new]

As you can hear, that snare has a lot more crack to it, it's a lot more heavy sounding. The next thing I did was I changed out the toms.

[toms]

These toms sound good, but they sound a little bit weak.

[toms, new]

As you can hear, this SJC Tour kit sounds a little bit more fat, a little bit more boomy. A bit more heavy. This kit doesn't actually come with the china loaded, so the next thing I did was load up a china cymbal.

[china cymbal]

I also changed out the hi-hat for something a bit more trashy sounding.

[hi-hat, old and new]

Okay, at this point, you might be thinking, “Well, you've changed every single bit of the kit, why did you use that preset in the first place if you didn't like anything about it?”

The main reason for that is that within these ToonTrack Presets, a lot of the time, there's a lot of behind the scenes mixing work going on. For example, as you can see in this mixer tab here, there's a lot of parallel compression going on, got a lot of distortion going on on the individual channels, and basically I wanted to maintain all of this routing with just some different sounds.

The only other tweak I made to get this kit to sound a little bit bigger was to increase the ambience a little bit. Just by a few dB, just to make it sound a little bigger, a little more bombastic.

Apart from these moves I did within Superior Drummer 3, the only other mixing moves I actually did for this mix was to add an SSL Channel, boost a little bit of 8kHz, and boost a little bit of 60Hz, just to give the kit a bit more high end, and a bit more low end to make it a bit fatter and a bit clearer.

Okay, now that we've finished setting up our drums, let's quickly compare the base preset we started with with the final sound we ended up with.

[drums, old and new]

In my opinion, that second sound, the final sound that we've just spent the last three or four minutes tweaking, sounds much more suited to heavy metal.

Now have a look at a couple of the methods I used while programming these drums to make them sound a bit more realistic.

In this pre-chorus section of the song, we've got a sixteenth note hi-hat alternating between closed and open hits.

[drums]

So when I'm actually programming drums and inserting each of these notes into my MIDI editor one-by-one, I'm not just keeping them all at full velocity and calling it a day, instead, I'm trying to build a realistic performance from the get go, and thinking, “What would a drummer do with each note that I insert?”

Let's start by taking a look at these hi-hats we have here. As you can see, pretty much all of the notes are alternating between hard hits and softer hits. The main reason for this is that when a drummer is playing the drums, usually, their right leading hand will hit slightly harder than their left hand.

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Видео 3 Tips for Improving Your Programmed Drums канала Pro Audio Files