Creating realistic drum patterns?

[Dennis1990]

When I make a drum pattern its sounds to clean and doesn't really have a live feel to it.

How would you go about recreating drums like these?
How should I set up hats with the reverb and velocities?
How do I my kicks more like a pop squish type sound instead of just a pop?
And how do I emulate old fashion snares like these?

 

[Ddream]

Yeah, you've got it right about velocity: a drummer won't make two hits with the same velocity, ever. So you must add little variation on the velocity, specially on the Hi-hats and other cymbals. some velocity changes can be done on the snare too, specially when raising the speed of the hits: when a drummer is playing at high speed, the stick he's holding won't have it's "full motion", and therefore the hit will be "weaker".

Search youtube for masterclasses of some big drummers. I'd advice you to watch Mike Mangini, Mike Portnoy and Marco Minnemann masterclasses.

 

[bandcoach]

I'd also look into the abbey road 60's drums and 60's drummer libraries for kontakt

the kick is what I'd call boxy and the hats are hats miced with an overhead - the snare has the heads tuned much lower than we expect today

 

[ego killer]

also use quantize selectively, if at all. real drummers don't play exactly dead on the grid.

 

[bandcoach]

yeah iterative quantise where you specify how a big a percentage the quantise is applied is a cool tool in some daws; i.e.
100% means apply fully
50% means bring it towards the quantise point about 50% from where it currently is and any other value is applied similarly

so if the distance a given note is from a quantise point is 20 ticks and we use

50% iterative quantise will move 10 ticks towards the quantise point
25% iterative quantise will move 5 ticks towards the quantise point
60% iterative quantise will move 12 ticks towards the quantise point
85% iterative quantise will move 17 ticks towards the quantise point​

and so on

 

[ego killer]

^i use that feature in ableton a lot

 

[HalfBlacko0000]

I'd advise anyone making music play drums atleast once in there life I just started and I'm amazed at how I hear drums now and play them out

 

[steffeeh]

If you're lucky, your soundkit have several hits on the same sound (at least if it's a kit with recorded drums).
See if you can use those.

Or you can copy the same sound and add some differencies in perhaps the pitch, voume shape, length etc, and create different versions to make it all more alive.
Sometimes this is also programmable where you set the velocities in the pianosequenzer/pianoroll.

 

[odinnshred]

Has anyone used anything like a random percentage quantizer? Because if I'm playing in drums on MIDI, I know they're generally gonna be sloppy as sh*t. Is there any kind of software where you select all MIDI notes in a passage and it quantizes some notes 90%, another like 74% and its all just generally random. That combined with the human error of just playing in MIDI could make things pretty cool, just wondering if anyone's heard of anything like that.

 

[GerritBoom]

Try not to quantize too much, and also use diffirent velocity, that already creates a much more realistic sound.

 

[bandcoach]

Has anyone used anything like a random percentage quantizer? Because if I'm playing in drums on MIDI, I know they're generally gonna be sloppy as sh*t. Is there any kind of software where you select all MIDI notes in a passage and it quantizes some notes 90%, another like 74% and its all just generally random. That combined with the human error of just playing in MIDI could make things pretty cool, just wondering if anyone's heard of anything like that.

not so much a random quantise towards the beat but I have use the so-called humanise feature of pro-24/notator back in the 80's/90's which allowed you to randomly position a midi event with a +/- (+ = after the grid point, - = before the grid point) radius of where they currently were - worked best after quantising to the grid

Cubase has a similar midi feature but you can now specify the + and - values separately allowing for a more controlled and modeled behaviour

 

[agdm]

Drumming is all about rhythm and timing.
Here are my rhythm tips:

- use a controller that can give you a good range in velocity response
- turn off the quantization
- work on your timing by playing along with already recorded stuff

Clean sounding drums need to be muddied up, you may have a plug in that can do this w various settings.
I like to just mess with EQ, Filter and Delay for my drums... plus I have a crap ton of drum sounds that don't need much other than the occasional layering depending on the track.

 

[MCNCM]

If you use your own samples, a good hint is to never use the exact same sample twice. Take teh sample you want and pitch it up and down, distort it a little and work it with an eq. afterwards you will have the same sample over an over but slightly different each time