If you ask many, they may tell you that they do not agree with using midi drums in their songs.
To be honest, I never thought so. Of course I wanted my songs to have natural drums, but we work in a home studio and our possibilities are limited.
Technology has advanced and if you are involved in drum programming, you will have found that today’s vst instruments have very good samples and you do not need anything else.
When I started making my first recordings in my own studio, I remember using Sample Tank or Battery and I was very excited about the result. As I progressed and got better, I realized that something was “wrong” with the overall set.
Although, the sample was very good, the way I handled and programmed the drums was wrong. For this reason, I want to talk to you in today’s post about drum programming.
First of all, what is drum programming? You can say that it is the process of composing the part of the drums. You create each part of the drums using vst instruments and samples of drums. It’s a very important part of music production, so we need to take some time to learn how to do it right.
How to programm drums properly
If you want to make your songs and have drums that sound right and professional, using a vst instrument, then the following tips will be very useful. It is very important that the drums sound as natural as possible, so
Listen to drummers play
Listen to songs similar to the genre you write and listen to the drummer.Listen and pay attention to how and when he plays the kick drum and the snare or how he handles hi hats. Also how he adds fills (breaks -fill in)
This way you will start to understand the drummer mentality to capture it later in your song.
Another great way is to pretend you are a drummer. It may seem a little funny, but this way you will be able to understand what and how much a drummer can play, because as you understand he has two arms and two legs.
I say this because I have heard some songs that are like playing 2 to 3 drummers together. To tell you the truth, I did that too in the beginning.
So it is very good to try to play what you hear, pretending to play. You will achieve a very natural playing on the vst instrument.
Beat it with your mouth!
You may not be a drummer, but your mouth is. you can make the rhythmic pattern you want to use and apply it to the vst instrument you will use for your song.
Do not make the beat boring and repetitive.
A drummer, before starting to record a song, has made a plan of how to play the whole song.
That is why I suggest the following that you will find very useful.
- Differentiate the rhythmic pattern in the chorus, from the verse.
- In each section of the song, use small fills. They give a pleasant note in the transition from one section to another or even from one verse of the verse to another.
- Differentiate the rhythmic pattern in the 2nd verse from the rest of the song.
- At some point in the song, do not use drums, pause to bring them back and there is an orchestral interest
Humanize your recording
What do I mean by that? If you listen to a drummer, each of his plays does not have the same dynamics, nor are they all at the same time. This is what makes the drummer playing more beautiful.
There are some plugins that have this setting to make our gaming more realistic, but we can also do it manually if we change the velocity and position of the drum parts a bit.
This way you will see that you will have a much better result.
Using drum machine or loops
Another way you can use rhythmic patterns for your songs is the drum machine. It is exactly the same as the vst instrument, but here we do not need to pay attention to all the above.
There is no need to differentiate the choruses from the verses. They can be repetitive although I would not suggest it to be the same throughout the song. You can use some variations of the pattern, you just do not have to deal so much with fills. -fill in)machine.
The sound is so characteristic, that everyone will understand that it is a drumSo you do not need to pay attention to the timing and dynamics of the game. You can quantize and everything is on time!
Best vst instruments for drums
Addictive drums 2
The ,Addictive Drums 2 is the vst I use all the time . It has very good samples and has many ready-made kits for many types of music. You can buy vst and gradually buy some sets or buy it all from scratch.
Slate SSD 5.5
The ,Slate SSD 5.5 demo is one of the best samples I have heard and is the free version of the paid plugin.
Gives you the Deluxe kit 2 free, the “Hugo” and the “Dry & Tight”. It is worth trying. You can download it for free, as long as you create an account and install it on your computer.
Superior Drummer 3
The ,Superior Drummer 3 is also a very good vst instrument with very good samples and you as before vst to process all samples individually and make your own sound and save your own presets.
There are many other vst instruments and some of them are free that we will talk about in future blog posts
Drum machines
If you want to use more electronic sound in your songs, then I suggest 2 plugins that I think will help you a lot.
Beatskillz Beatfactory
,Beatskillz Yourgives several sets of sound from 80’s, rock and hip hop but has many percussion and pop music can be used.
It has 12 pads and various sounds krouston.Mporeis to control dynamic tension, decay, sustain in each sample
StudioLinked Drum Pro
The ,StudioLinked gives you the Drum Pro with 20 kits and 12 pads
The pads contain each 2 kick drums, snare, hi hats, claps and they also have a lot of different percussion sounds.
And in this drum machine you can modify the dynamics and intensity of each sample.
As you can see, it does not take much, nor to buy a drum set to bring a drummer to your home to record your songs. You can achieve very good results in simple ways, which definitely require practice.