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A guide to drum programming
Want to improve your beats? RA's Jono Buchanan shows you how.
In this feature we'll be looking at some tips to help you build and enhance the drum patterns you're programming for your tracks. It goes without saying that beats are at the heart of any dance music track. In fact, the patterns you program and the sounds you use tell a listener as much about the musical style they're hearing as any other sound. In this feature we'll be looking at some tips to help you build and enhance the drum patterns you're programming for your tracks. We won't be focusing on tricks common to one genre, but will instead explore a range of things to try by building a basic pattern and slowly introducing more involved techniques. Most should prove useful, regardless of your musical preferences.
Let's start with a simple pattern at 120 BPM. As you're probably already aware, most DAWs allow you to work within a grid, whereby each beat can be broken down into a number of sub-divisions. By default, this grid will usually be in 1/16th notes, meaning that there are four places you can input an individual note from one beat to the next.
Basic beats: Here's an extremely basic pattern for a Battery 3 kit, featuring kick (on C1), snare (on D1) and hi-hats (on F#1).
Developing pattern: So far, so straightforward. Let's input some additional hits to make this pattern more our own. We're extending it to 4 bars and you can see and hear where the additional notes fall to build on the foundation of the original pattern.
However, while the pattern is now more complex, it still seems extremely flat and predictable, due to every note playing back with the same velocity. In most samplers and bespoke drum instrument plug-ins (such as Battery 3, Stylus RMX, Geist and Punch), velocity will trigger level changes. As you can see from the screenshots, the same colour is attributed to each note at the moment, showing the evenness of levels from one hit to the next.
Pattern with velocity: In the following clip, we're adjusting velocities for each drum source, so that stronger hits are emphasized, while less important ones sound quieter. This makes the whole pattern considerably more dynamic.
You can hear the power of velocity editing, and this is particularly worthwhile for tracks where you're looking for a more human feel in your programming. However, if you're drawing notes into a grid, not only will velocity be even by default, you'll also end up with perfectly quantized patterns too, with each note snapping precisely to the start of its grid space. Often some swing or shuffle can make life more interesting. You can dial some swing in (if your plug-in which allows this) or select a swing quantize value, which will overrule the drawn position of each beat.
Pattern with swing: Here's our pattern again, this time with a little swing.
In order to develop our programming understanding further, let's go back to a simple 2-bar pattern. One way we could bring more life to our loop would be to enhance it with effects. Doing so will show us the benefits of splitting our sound sources up onto separate tracks.
Loop with reverb: Let's add a little reverb to the whole loop.
As all three sound sources are playing back from the same instrument, we're stuck with a single reverb treatment for all of the sound sources at present. The reverb works nicely on the snare, but it's a little too fizzy on the hi-hat. And it's doing even less favours for the kick, whose sound has become very unfocused. If we duplicate the drum track twice, we can then separate the kick, snare and hi-hat onto separate tracks and then we'll have independent control over their effects sends. Once we've duplicated the tracks and ensured that only one sound is playing back from each, we can then set up appropriate send levels.
Separate tracks for each sound source: Here's our mix again, with no reverb on the kick, a fair amount on the snare and a little less on the hi-hat.
Now that we've separated our sounds, we can apply insert effects to each one, too, rather than just work with a single effects chain..
Insert effects: In this clip, we're adding a bitcrusher to the kick to give it a little extra bite, a subtle delay effect to the snare to help fill in the gaps between hits, and a phasing effect on the hats to give them a little movement.
An easy way to thicken up the sound of your beats is to have each hit point trigger several samples at once. This is often called beat layering, and it's a hugely popular technique that can add plenty more weight to your programming.
Combination snares: In this clip, we're blending four sound sources to produce a new snare/clap hybrid. This includes a gentle "air" hit, which provides a quasi-gated reverb effect by lasting longer than the other sound sources. This lifts the mix, even when we remove the auxiliary reverb effect from the previous clips.
Another really effective technique can be to bounce down your drum tracks as audio files and reverse them. Used alongside the original hits, this can be effective as a way of fading up into your beat hits.
Reversed snare: Here we're bouncing down the combined snares and reversing the consequent audio file. Then we're moving this so that the hit is aligned, with the end of the reversed file fading up to maximum volume as the programmed hit takes over.
If you like the idea of this effect, be aware that a couple of subtle tweaks can make a big difference. It's a good idea not to use the whole file of a reversed sound leading up to the main programmed hit. In particular, the very end of the reversed sound (which, of course, is the start of the programmed hit) is usually worth cutting off, just before the main attack portion. This avoids a double-sounding hit where the reversed audio turns into the programmed note. Once you've clipped the end off the file and moved it into position, a second suggestion would be to put a short fade out (of 10ms or so) on the end of the audio file to ensure it doesn't click.
Another effective trick, if your DAW allows it, is to substitute this fade-out with a slow-down effect instead, otherwise known as a record-stop trick. If your DAW doesn't allow this, simply sample the reversed snare you've made and set up a pitch-bend range of -24 semitones in your sampler. Draw in the reversed hit and then create a pitch-bend ramp downwards to achieve the slow-down effect.
Slow-down effect: However you do it, you should end up with something like this.
These reversing techniques have the effect of adding length and weight to snares (or whichever combination of sounds you're using) to highlight the back-beat of your drum patterns. You only have to listen to commercial dubstep tracks to realise how popular elongated snares are, and it's no surprise, as they add plenty of power and drama.
There are other ways of lending additional length to these hits, such as using gated reverb or, if your plug-in list extends to one, a transient designer. Let's start with gated reverb. To achieve a long snare sound, you'll need to start with a long reverb, ideally one which carries plenty of energy from the main hit into the down-beat which follows it. Then, after the reverb, insert a noise gate and experiment with the threshold level. This determines when a signal is loud enough to open the gate and be heard, and when it's quiet enough to close the gate and abruptly cut off.
Gated reverb: Using some trial and error, you should be able to find a threshold point which shuts the gate right on the down-beat, giving your snares epic power and weight.
Transient designers are devices which intelligently stretch sounds in real-time. They do this by analysing an incoming signal and breaking it into attack and sustain portions. Then, using envelope generators, they stretch the perceived length of a sound by apportioning more energy from the attack of a note to its sustained section.
Transient design: Here's the same loop as before, with the gated reverb effect removed and transient design added.
Once you've separated sound sources and treated them to bespoke, in-channel effects, there's nothing to stop you re-combining elements by setting up a drum bus and then applying group treatments to sounds. For instance, snap, power and energy can come from a group compression treatment, as we'll hear in the below clip. We're adding some new elements now, in the form of a pitched tom and some glitchy percussion zaps from Geist.
Group compression: In the first part of the clip, you can hear all parts routed through the main stereo bus. In the second, we're sending all tracks to bus 2, where we've inserted UAD's Fairchild compressor. You can easily hear the snap and power which comes from all elements working together to trigger the compressor. Of course, if we decide that any parts sound better without being treated by the group compressor, we can route them back through the main outputs. In the third part of the clip, you can hear the sound of the bus compressor working on every part except the kick, which is re-routed to the main stereo bus, avoiding all compression.
You can take this approach further by setting up different busses for different layers of your drum programming. If you've got a pattern that adds more percussion tracks to the core drum parts, you could set up one group bus for drums and a separate, complementary group treatment for percussive sound sources. This is exactly what's happening in the below clip.
To the core beats, we're adding a shaker part and an additional percussion loop from Rob Papen's Punch. Added to the Geist percussion loop and the tom part already present in the mix, that provides four percussion layers. We're also adding a clap and a new lower snare to add some extra weight to the drums. As the percussion tracks feature plenty of natural acoustics, it's nice to bring these forward with a squashed compression treatment. This squeezes the dynamics of the hits and also emphasizes the natural space in the samples. In addition to the main drum bus, we're setting up a percussion one, too, using FabFilter's Pro-C compressor to bring these natural acoustics forward in the mix.
Different groups: In the clip, you can hear all of the elements playing through the main stereo bus first, then the drums group (with its original Fairchild compression). Thirdly, you'll hear the percussion group (assigned to its own Pro-C compressor), followed by both groups playing together. Compare the final clip to the first and you'll see what a difference group compression treatments can have on programmed beats.
It goes without saying that producers rely on a whole range of techniques to make their drum patterns stand out. Some of these are genre-specific, and others are simply born of a desire to experiment. While we've explored some key techniques, we've only scratched the surface of what's possible. Honing these techniques alone, you should be able to radically improve the quality of the patterns you program but adding your own techniques into the mix will, of course, enhance the sounds of your tracks even further.
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Published / Wednesday, 20 February 2013
 19 Comments
Photo credits /
Header - Oliver Quinlan
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