Last year, we shared 6 drumming cliches to steer clear of when you want to make your programmed rhythm tracks stand out from the crowd. For those, probably more frequent, occasions when ’real drummer’ performance realism is in fact your goal, here are half a dozen ways to make sure your MIDI-generated beats tick the right authenticity boxes, along with a few suggestions as to how you might mess with them in the name of experimentation.
Off-beat hats
Outside jazz, disco and a few other genres, for most drummers, the de facto default hi-hat pattern is a continuous run of straight eighth-notes – it just almost invariably works. And unless the player is unusually stiff-armed or aiming for a deliberately mechanical feel, they’ll generally strike land hits either on or off the beat harder than the others.
While on-beat accenting provides a bit of extra anchoring for the pulse, emphasising the off-beats on the hats can utterly transform a groove, adding a particular swagger and lilt, and upping its perceived pace. Indeed, so profound is the effect of this funky syncopation that drummers will sometimes drop the on-beat hits altogether, stripping back to off-beat quarter-notes instead – a common manoeuvre in ska, for example.
Easily replicated in MIDI, off-beat hats are always worth a go if your programmed ’live’ drum track is feeling a little clunky or heavy-handed. And for characterful alternatives, try mixing up on- and off-beat accents within the bar, or shifting some of those off-beats from your sampled drum kit’s closed hi-hat articulation to the open one. Be aware, though, that applying that last suggestion to every off-beat will see you entering old-school disco territory – speaking of which…
16th-note hats
In disco-influenced dance and pop music (not to mention actual vintage disco), 16th-note hi-hats, played with alternating left and right hand strokes, are de rigueur, imbuing the rhythm track with a manic sense of drive and momentum that eighth-notes can’t match. When programming such parts, remember to skip the hi-hat when the snare lands, just as a real drummer would; and throw in hits on your virtual kit’s open hat articulation for that ‘pea soup’ vibe – on every off-beat, as described above, or less frequently, as befits the song.
Perhaps the most important consideration with this style of pattern, though, is accenting the closed hats, as a constant stream of fixed-velocity 16ths will sound very robotic indeed. If you’re programming drum machine parts for classic house or synth pop, that might be the desired effect, but in just about all other scenarios, you’ll want to vary the velocity from note to note, in order to either simulate the nuances and dynamism of a real drummer’s performance, or just make your electronic beat sound more interesting. This variation can be cyclical – ie, tweak the velocity across four or eight hits, then copy them out to the rest of the track. And if your virtual kit features separate left and right hand articulations, take advantage of them for further subtle note-to-note differentiation.
There are numerous possibilities when it comes to putting your own spin on the 16th-note hi-hat standard, including the introduction of triplets to the pattern (a la trap and hip-hop), injecting occasional five-stroke rolls and other embellishments, and leaving out certain hits to break up the regularity of the line.
Doubling the kick drum and bassline
In most beat-driven styles of music, it’s pretty much standard practice to have the bassline and kick drum work together as a composite low-end entity. This generally involves the bass player (or programmer) following the kick drum pattern in terms of the placement and sometimes dynamics of the notes played, so that the two instruments fuse into a unified groove, the kick providing the essential percussive pulse and the bass rhythmically underpinning the harmonic structure of the track as a whole. Don’t take this concept too literally, though. It’s rare to find a bassline that slavishly doubles the kick note for note, and the aim, really, is to strike the right balance between adherence and artful interplay – the bass doubling the main kick hits, with incidental notes in between, say.
Subverting this one, unsurprisingly, is a simple matter of making sure the kick and bass never coincide. There’s already a precedent for this in dance music, with the offbeat basslines of trance; but far more interesting things can happen when you challenge a real-life drummer and bassist to piece together a viable groove under the ‘no doubling’ rule, so put yourself in both of their shoes and see what you can come up with in your piano roll MIDI editor.
Switching to the ride cymbal in the chorus
A staple of rock and pop drumming since time immemorial, moving the leading hand from the hi-hats to the ride cymbal is a great way to kick things up a gear for the chorus, the washier sound of that particular metalwork contrasting beautifully with the tight ‘chick’ of the hats in the verse. You have two ‘voices’ to play with here: the ping and subsequent sustain of the tip of the stick striking the bow of the cymbal (this will be the main ride cymbal articulation in any sampled kit), and the shorter, more clangorous ‘tang’ of the shoulder of the stick on the bell. Use one or the other, or alternate between the two, with the bell on or off the beat, depending on your intended emphasis.
Reimagine this tub-thumping fundamental by transferring the ride pattern to a crash cymbal for a more aggressive attack, or a cowbell for an alternative staccato report to the hats. Or swap the hi-hat and ride cymbal roles around, playing the latter in the verse and the hats in the chorus – assuming the track in question is open to such strange orchestration, of course. Oh, and phasing or flanging the ride cymbal can yield wonderfully ear-catching results, too.
Backbeat rimshots on the snare
When a drummer really digs into a pop or rock track, they’ll often play rimshots on the snare to lay down a much louder, harder and more emphatic backbeat than would be achieved using regular ‘head only’ hits. To be clear, a rimshot – frequently confused with the very different sidestick – is played by hitting the rim of the drum with the shaft of the stick and the centre of the head with the tip at the same time, and it’s an automatic component of any decent drummer’s technique, applied unconsciously as the primary snare sound on beats 2 and 4 much of the time.
To bring this to your programmed drum parts, simply ensure that your backbeat snare hits are triggering the ’rimshot’ (not sidestick!) articulation in your sampled drum kit, rather than the ‘centre’ articulation. The difference in punch and impact will be immediately obvious, as will the contrast between the backbeat and the non-rimshot ghost notes in between.
Don’t abandon the centre articulation completely for those focal hits, though, as you won’t always want your snare to be that powerful – when working on more acoustic material, for example, or dropping the intensity for the verse relative to the chorus.
Kicks and snares under crash cymbals
Last but not least, it’s written in the musical statutes that every crash cymbal hit has to be backed up with a kick or snare drum hit, since a crash on its own is a floaty, light, distracting thing that can sound more like a mistake on the part of the drummer than the explosive accent it truly wants to be. Honestly, listen to just about any (non-jazz) drum track and you’ll be hard pressed to find a crash, splash or China-type that isn’t tightly coupled to a bolstering drum – and if you do, it’ll likely stand out as unusual. Make it so.
Unless you don’t want to! Yes, throwing the odd isolated crash cymbal into a drum groove might occasionally work, depending on what’s going on around it. If your beat is of the more delicate, jazzier variety, for example, integrating small crash cymbals for atmosphere can be surprisingly effective, as ably demonstrated by Alex Reece in his drum ’n’ bass classic, ‘Pulp Fiction’, and drumming demigod Manu Katché on Peter Gabriel’s ‘I Hear That Voice Again’.
Do you have any other rules of thumb for realistic drum programming to share? Let us know in the comments.