soundboikilla
New member
Hey FutureProducers,
I'm basically new here and thought I'd start off by trying to help out some newer producers. I know when I first started making beats and getting the hang of melodies and drum patterns, I could never get my drums to sound right. They always sounded weak, too rigid/computerized or like they came from a toy.
I eventually figured out that I had two problems - my drum sounds, and my groove.
Hope this can help some of you out.
Making Your Drum Sounds NOT Suck
When you're starting out you use stock sounds that come with your software/hardware. At first it's just cool as shit to be making beats so everything sounds great. But soon enough when you compare your beats to other music - you realize they dont hit hard enough.
So you download every drum kit you can find. But in my experience 75% of the drums you download online for free are garbage unless you heavily stack them and mess with them. And that's one way of going about it...
Stacking Basics
Basically open up a drum sound you want to beef up in a multi-track program like Reaper. Add a new track and import a new sound you think would sound good if played together with the original.
Make sure the sounds are on top of each other (i.e. "stacked") and play back. Change out sounds, add new ones, adjust when it hits/comes in, mess with effects, etc - and you'll be designing heavy duty drums in no time.
Downloading Good Samples
If you are like me when I first started, I didn't have the patience for any kind of sound design.
I wanted to download drums and just make the damn beats. I've downloaded a ton of drums and a lot are repetetive and honestly weak. Like I said - 75%+. But my favorite drum sounds usually come from Raw Beatz, Deviant Noise and Traumah Drums (Deviant Noise and Traumah Drums both have pretty solid free downloads). If I need more acoustic sounding drums I use EZDrummer
But I've started to get more into stacking my own drums lately.
How To Get Your Groove Back
The groove is super important - just as important as the sounds you're using. It's kind of like the overall feeling of the drum pattern. I'm sure others here could describe it better than me.
Groove was a little harder for me to figure out, but basically my drums sounded robotic. I thought my patterns were dope, so what was the problem?
It revolved around one thing variation: timing, velocity, timbre, drops, etc. I used to do basic 8-th note or 16-th note repeating patterns and call it a day - BAD MOVE.
Don't Quantize All Your Drum Notes
The reason my drum patterns sounded robotic was because I either a). made my patterns with a mouse or b). quantized my live playing right to the grid. It's super easy and sounds useful but in reality you want that human element in your pattern, and that comes with notes not hitting exactly on grid. Those tiny micro-errors that real live musicians make.
Native Instruments Maschine has the setting to only quantize 50% which helps, but even still, its better to practice playing it out until your timing is right and recording a live take, no quantize.
What If You Don't Play Out Your Drums
If you set up your drum patterns in the sequencer without playing/recording live, then in the piano roll use the mouse (note: make sure the grid quantize "snap" setting is turned off) to move/nudge the notes very slightly away from the grid lines.
You don't need to shift things far - a couple tiny milimeters to the right or left of a grid line should do the trick.
Play around with it until it sounds right.
VELOCITY
The second biggest thing messing up my groove was velocity. You need to vary the velocity of your hits. (you can usually mess with velocity setting in the piano roll of your sequencer.) The two images below show the velocity controls in Reason and FL Studio (the verticle bars in the bottom half).
Randomize them until you start to hear a good groove. No real drummer ever hits a drum the exact same way more than once. Every hit is a little bit different. And that's what makes the groove.
Do this with:
For example, with hi-hats, have the first note hit hard, the second note hit at 50%, third note hard, fourth note 50%. Repeat this for all high-hat notes and play it back - you'll notice it sounds and feels different.
You can go even further and clone your hi-hats and mess around with the sound of each clone so every hit even sounds a bit different when played back.
And That's That
All this stuff will help you get a solid groove that feels right and sounds so much better than the robotic machine gun high hats and computerized kicks and snares. Experiment with different things, go beyond the basic ideas here and try different things.
This isn't just for any particular type of music either - it can be applied to absolutely any genre. It's all about how it sounds, and more importantly, feels.
I'm basically new here and thought I'd start off by trying to help out some newer producers. I know when I first started making beats and getting the hang of melodies and drum patterns, I could never get my drums to sound right. They always sounded weak, too rigid/computerized or like they came from a toy.
I eventually figured out that I had two problems - my drum sounds, and my groove.
Hope this can help some of you out.
Making Your Drum Sounds NOT Suck
When you're starting out you use stock sounds that come with your software/hardware. At first it's just cool as shit to be making beats so everything sounds great. But soon enough when you compare your beats to other music - you realize they dont hit hard enough.
So you download every drum kit you can find. But in my experience 75% of the drums you download online for free are garbage unless you heavily stack them and mess with them. And that's one way of going about it...
Stacking Basics
Basically open up a drum sound you want to beef up in a multi-track program like Reaper. Add a new track and import a new sound you think would sound good if played together with the original.
Make sure the sounds are on top of each other (i.e. "stacked") and play back. Change out sounds, add new ones, adjust when it hits/comes in, mess with effects, etc - and you'll be designing heavy duty drums in no time.
Downloading Good Samples
If you are like me when I first started, I didn't have the patience for any kind of sound design.
I wanted to download drums and just make the damn beats. I've downloaded a ton of drums and a lot are repetetive and honestly weak. Like I said - 75%+. But my favorite drum sounds usually come from Raw Beatz, Deviant Noise and Traumah Drums (Deviant Noise and Traumah Drums both have pretty solid free downloads). If I need more acoustic sounding drums I use EZDrummer
But I've started to get more into stacking my own drums lately.
How To Get Your Groove Back
The groove is super important - just as important as the sounds you're using. It's kind of like the overall feeling of the drum pattern. I'm sure others here could describe it better than me.
Groove was a little harder for me to figure out, but basically my drums sounded robotic. I thought my patterns were dope, so what was the problem?
It revolved around one thing variation: timing, velocity, timbre, drops, etc. I used to do basic 8-th note or 16-th note repeating patterns and call it a day - BAD MOVE.
Don't Quantize All Your Drum Notes
The reason my drum patterns sounded robotic was because I either a). made my patterns with a mouse or b). quantized my live playing right to the grid. It's super easy and sounds useful but in reality you want that human element in your pattern, and that comes with notes not hitting exactly on grid. Those tiny micro-errors that real live musicians make.
Native Instruments Maschine has the setting to only quantize 50% which helps, but even still, its better to practice playing it out until your timing is right and recording a live take, no quantize.
What If You Don't Play Out Your Drums
If you set up your drum patterns in the sequencer without playing/recording live, then in the piano roll use the mouse (note: make sure the grid quantize "snap" setting is turned off) to move/nudge the notes very slightly away from the grid lines.
You don't need to shift things far - a couple tiny milimeters to the right or left of a grid line should do the trick.
Play around with it until it sounds right.
VELOCITY
The second biggest thing messing up my groove was velocity. You need to vary the velocity of your hits. (you can usually mess with velocity setting in the piano roll of your sequencer.) The two images below show the velocity controls in Reason and FL Studio (the verticle bars in the bottom half).
Randomize them until you start to hear a good groove. No real drummer ever hits a drum the exact same way more than once. Every hit is a little bit different. And that's what makes the groove.
Do this with:
- Hi-Hats
- Kicks & Snares (off-beat hits)
- Percussion
For example, with hi-hats, have the first note hit hard, the second note hit at 50%, third note hard, fourth note 50%. Repeat this for all high-hat notes and play it back - you'll notice it sounds and feels different.
You can go even further and clone your hi-hats and mess around with the sound of each clone so every hit even sounds a bit different when played back.
And That's That
All this stuff will help you get a solid groove that feels right and sounds so much better than the robotic machine gun high hats and computerized kicks and snares. Experiment with different things, go beyond the basic ideas here and try different things.
This isn't just for any particular type of music either - it can be applied to absolutely any genre. It's all about how it sounds, and more importantly, feels.
