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By Jake Weston
Co-Author: Ken Theriot
A lot of musicians are also their own recording engineers, using computer-based
home recording studios, usually set up in a spare bedroom. Trying to record
an entire band along with drums can be challenging with a studio like this,
assuming you HAVE a band and/or drummer. But what if you don't have drums OR
a drummer? Fear not. Here are three techniques that will help you create very
realistic drums in your recording.
1. Build Your Own Drum Parts
There are programs out there that will automatically play the drums for you,
sort of like the drum machines of old. But we're going to build our own drum
track bit-by-bit so that we have ultimate control and flexibility. For this
example, I'm assuming we're using a drum kit sample in a recording program
that has MIDI functionality, and that you have a MIDI keyboard attached to
your computer.
The first thing we will need to do is load up a drum
kit on one of our tracks. Start a new track and attach the virtual drums
via whatever method your software uses. In Reaper, click the track's "FX" button,
which will give you a menu of plug-ins to choose from, including virtual
instruments. Pick you drum program and then select your kit. Tell the track
to use your MIDI keyboard as its input and you'll have each drum in the kit
mapped to a specific key on your keyboard.
The next thing you need to do is make sure you establish
a tempo for your song in the software and turn on the click track. This is
important for keeping everything aligned. Then insert a blank MIDI item into
the drum track. In some programs you might have to just record for a while
to get the blank MIDI item. Finally, open the MIDI item to enter the MIDI
editor window. In Reaper you simply double-click the MIDI item. Now you can
draw drum hits or notes onto the grid (corresponding to beats and measures)
to create the first part of your drum track. This is a relatively fast process
and gives you total control. Continue drawing drum parts, high-hat, snare,
kick, etc. in the MIDI editor, until your get a complete part, which may
represent different sections of the song. Most songs are made up of drum "phrases" that
may or may not repeat throughout the song, like Intro, Verse, Pre-Chorus,
Chorus, Bridge, Ending for example.
2. Snapping and Gluing
To avoid having anything sound off-beat, I recommend the use of two tools,
Glue Items and Snap To. At this point in our example you have the start of
your midi drum track, say 10 seconds or so. But you probably also have some
left-over blank midi before the first drum-hit and after the last one. If you
exit the MIDI editor window, and click on the right edge of MIDI item in the
track and drag the edge to the right or left, you'll notice that you can extend
or shorten the midi item.
When dragging to the right, as the item gets longer, you'll notice little
notches appearing at regular intervals on the edge of the item. What's happening
here is that as you drag to the right, you're creating loops of the original
10 or so seconds of MIDI drums, the notches representing the start and end
points. Go ahead and stretch it out until you have 2 or 3 sets of notches (so
2 or 3 loops of the first 10 seconds). Now hit play and listen to how bad it
sounds (almost certainly). This is because we didn't pay attention to the starting
and ending points when we were creating the drum part because we weren't thinking
about looping. But the looping capability is really useful. We just need to
make sure we shave off the right amount of blank MIDI from before and after
the last drum hit in the pattern.
For any item that repeats lots of times, such as verse parts, you'll need
to make the item loop-able, so we can make one part repeat many times with
a drag of the mouse. IN order for this tow work properly you MUST define the
proper beginning and ending points before looping.
So the first thing to do is make sure that snapping is turned on and that
the grid on your screen represents beats and bars. Now drag the left side of
the MIDI item until the start point is right on the measure where the part
starts. Then do the same thing to the end of the phrase. Now you'll need to
check to see if it's correct. Highlight the song from the beginning of the
item to the end of it. This usually takes a bit of trial-and-error by looping
the playback of just the MIDI item.
If it doesn't sound correct the first time, simply drag the beginning or ending
(usually the ending, in my experience) a bit to the left or right and try again
until you get it right. Remember, it is vital that you have snapping turned
on here so that the end-points will always be on a logical beat or beat division.
Once you get it right, it is time to employ probably my favorite of any tool
in any recording software, Reaper's Glue Items tool. Select the item, right-mouse-click
and select Glue Items. This will shave off the correct blank MIDI, creating
a loop-able phrase of drums that you can drag, stretch, and/or paste to create
as many instances of it as you need throughout the song. Do this for each section
of the song and you have yourself a completed drum track.
3. Easy On the Perfection
During the first parts of this process I insisted you ensure the drum parts
are right on the beat, and the loops are musically correct, using such tools
as Glue Items and Snapping. But sometimes too much of a good thing is, well,
not a good thing. Sampled drums are played by a computer. If you don't tell
the machine otherwise, it will play every drum hit at the exact same volume
with the exact same energy, on the mathematically perfect rhythmic beat. But
the machine-played drums will likely sound machine-y, too mechanical to many
folks. For maximum realism, we need to tell our computers to humanize the performance.
What this means is that the drum hits will be randomly shifted in both volume
and time just a teeny bit to make them sound more like a human played them.
The volume and energy of drum strikes also need to vary in a specific way.
For example, a drummer can make a snare drum sound like 3 or 4 different instruments
just by how hard she hits the drum. Heck, Irish bodhrans can deliver dozens
of different sounds. Certain rhythms rely on having emphasized and non-emphasized
hits. So when you build your drum track, keep that in mind. You can adjust
these settings as needed, which can be done in multiple ways in most midi programs.
Believe it or not there are lots of times, in certain genres of music, when
a drum beat that is ever-so-slightly behind the beat can make it sound better
to us musically. So it's important for us to keep a little slack in the drum
grid.
So there you have it. It may take a little time, but if you want very realistic-sounding
drum tracks without having any actual drums around, use virtual drums and employ
3 important keys:
- Build the drum parts yourself for maximum control and flexibility.
- Use the Snap-To and Glue Items tools in Reaper to make it fast and easy
to create musically correct rhythms and not have anything sound off-beat.
- Use the MIDI editor and tools such as the Humanize function to ensure
the drums don't sound too perfect, which would not sound natural to us in
most musical genres.
Do this just a few times and you'll be amazed at how quickly you can build
up awesome sounding, killer drum tracks without having to have any actual drums.
How cool is that?
Learn to record and produce professional-sounding audio from home. Fun and
short video tutorials show you how. You can start with a $0-$5 budget, and
we'll show you how to improve your studio for a few dollars at a time as your
knowledge and confidence increase. For a more in-depth version of this article,
including illustrations, visit us here: Virtual Drumming
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