how do you create your drums in a hip hop beat?

The only problem with randomizing "humanization" is just that: the random aspect. Perfect grooves have very little about them that is random, it is one or several percussion players/rhythm instruments coming together and playing perfectly phrased grooves together. The primary groove aspect is the hihat, while the gut propulsion element comes more from the kick. Snare either drives the beat on 2 and 4 or gets a little more elaborate. Each instrument has its own particular characteristics that, when fully understood, allow you to design your own grooves with perfect comprehension of what is going on. I would say, though, that if you can master the full power of the high hat and be able to perfectly phrase its parts the others fall into place much easier. I learned to understand the hi hat by buying one and learning how to play it correctly, and now I don't use sampled hi hats anymore. Getting the live transient as well as complete control on area of contact with stick, cymbal and mic positioning, along with being able to imbue actual live energy and feel to a track, makes it the single most indispensable piece of gear I have. I got a used Zildjian mastersound 14" for 200 bucks and its the best money I have ever spent.
 
Funnily enough, every human being is random in the velocities they hit and their timing - precision only comes from a machine.

Every percussionist I know (and almost everyone I have studied in depth) has a sloppiness factor; the random differences in where they hit a note that is "on" the beat - timing is never perfect when you are playing live and is certainly never perfect when working with others....

I have been working with percussionists (and as one myself) for 35+years and I am still hearing the same degrees of sloppiness today, as I did back then. By sloppiness, I mean deviations in where a note is played as on the beat - the random fluctuations I talked about are the degree to which we allow sloppiness to be heard without complaining.
 
I think we are talking about different kinds of randomization. A phrased percussion element has a specific pattern, and absolutely the velocity and perfect accuracy varies, but this phrase is maintained. The precision I am talking about is conscious groove patterns, not the slight variations that happen due to the space you are recording in and the little intricacies that do add that live character. I must confess I do not have any experience with quantization personally, so I would like to know if you are randomizing the actual DNA of the groove or the more subtle aspects when you do this?
 
Quantisation is about moving notes to a division of the beat - randomisation is about then moving those notes slightly before or after that same division of the beat. The numbers that I first quoted should have told you that we were dealing with very small variations in position.

Some programs allow you to use an iterative quantisation where you set how effective the quantisation is in moving notes back to the sub-division of the beat. This effectiveness is given as percentage (usually) and so varies over the range 0% (no effect whatsoever) to 100% (everything moved to the nearest selected beat division). Numbers bigger than 50% will move everything a varied amount towards the nearest sub-division, numbers less than 50% will move some if any notes towards the nearest sub-division.

Personally, I prefer to quantise perfectly and then apply my own randomisation to the result: moving notes so that they are +/- 7 from the grid point or are 0-+7 or -7-0 gives me a control level not possible with iterative quantisation
 
I usually play all instruments in without any quantization and then fix it afterwards- the thing about auto-quantize features is that it can be frustrating when you HEAR yourself play the part you wanted, but due to quantize values/computer latency you can get weird results. Like if your playing in a drum pattern with a couple 1/16s, but mostly a 1/8 groove, and some of the 1/8 notes get pulled out of place due to having to use 1/16 quantize in order for those notes to be recorded properly....I'd rather just deal with my own sloppiness and fixing any jarring erorrs while still keeping the human element, than auto-roboting my music and having to consciously inject the human feel into it.
 
I just recently replaced all the step buttons on my TR-808 and I got to thinking about how much I learned just by using a step sequencer, so I would recommend step sequencing to anyone who wants to learn about structure, in particular I would recommend starting with any step sequencer that gives you a visual cue with running lights so you can follow the light to the position you want to add the beat to, as this is initially far more intuitive than entering beats on a grid without any point of reference.

In addition to step sequencing I like using a method I first encountered on the first drum machine I ever owned, a little analog drum machine made by Mattel, that in addition to four drum pads for playing in real time it had three buttons for each drum sound that would repeat the sound at three different rates, basically you programed it by using note repeat and it's a method I still use today, I have two ways of using note repeat, one is synchronized to tempo and the other is not synchronized so I can shift the timing if I want to, often I will make short percussion loops with a precise length and play them like chords, I can drop them in and out or put them on hold, I can even assign different sounds/rhythms to different velocities etc.

I also like triggering my drums live, sometimes I use keys sometimes pads, I also like incorporating a bit of live percussion from time to time.


bandcoach said:
Yeah, the bad old days of Atari-based Pro-24 let you do this shit without having to come up a with a bunch of tricks to do it, so too did Notator (now known as Logic). Refined and honed my skills in these programs so that it was superfine and grooving all the time.....
:cheers:
Click to expand...

I run both Cubase and Notator on my Atari ST and it totally kicks ass, not only are the event altering functions great but the timing is so awesome that I don't really need to compensate for shitty input/output latencies like a lot of people do with modern computers.
 
For those that can't afford to buy a drum machine that does what holland suggests, get yourself a copy of hammerhead by Bram Bos

As for the Atari - to be expected as it has its own midi interface built in to the os (thanks to Sam Tramiel's son suggesting ti to his dad before they released the first ST's), so it runs natively rather than as an add-on to an already overstressed/kludged os like Windoze or MacOS.
 
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