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3 Tips for Working With Virtual Drum Software

Joe Gilder — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000

As most of you know, I’m a big fan of EZDrummer. I used it exclusively on my latest album for all of my drum sounds.

While there’s no replacement for recording a good drummer in a great-sounding room, EZDrummer lets us home studio hacks get great drum sounds for MUCH less than we would spend on booking a professional studio or even buying all the mics, preamps, and stands we would need to record drums ourselves.

First things first.

I want to re-iterate this before I give you some tips for dealing with virtual drum software.

Use a real drummer if you can. While software is amazing, you’ll always be better off recording a real human on drums.

Is it more expensive? Yep. Is it worth it? Absolutely.

I recommend simply finding a professional studio in your area, booking their big room for a day, and tracking all the drums for your project. I plan to do this on my next album, because as much as I love EZDrummer, I love a real drummer even more.

However, realistically a lot of home studio folks simply can’t afford to book a studio, or perhaps they just can’t pull it off logistically (don’t know any drummers, there are no studios nearby, etc.)

That’s completely understandable. In that case, you should use virtual drum programs like EZDrummer, and you can get some great-sounding drum tracks.

Here are 3 quick tips for working with virtual drum software:

1. Use MIDI grooves as your starting point

Any drum program worth buying will come with tons of MIDI grooves. These are just little 1-4 bar phrases with all the drums already programmed.

I highly recommend using these rather than starting from scratch. Unless you’re an experienced drummer, the grooves you come up with will always sound like they were written by a non-drummer. (Trust me, I’ve done this enough to tell you I’m not a great drum programmer.)

INSTEAD, find a MIDI groove that fits with your song. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just close. Then drop that MIDI groove on your drum track and adjust the various notes as needed.

I usually remove a kick drum here or add an extra snare hit there. Nothing major, just locking it in more tightly with the groove of the song.

2. “Humanize” the timing

One of the major issues with virtual drums is that they can sound too perfect. Every note is 100% in time, which seems great at first, but in reality it sounds very robotic and stiff.

The small imperfections of a real drummer are what makes a drum track sound energetic and powerful, so you need to “inject” some of that human-ness into your drum tracks.

How do you do that? By humanizing the timing of the MIDI notes. You know how you can quantize MIDI to make an out-of-time performance more IN time? With drums, you need to do the opposite.

Your goal here is to make them sound less in time and therefore more human.

Most DAWs have some sort of “humanize” button in their MIDI quantize window. Look around for it and spend some time trying it out. It will make things sound worse…which is better.

3. “Randomize” the velocity

This goes along with humanizing, but it takes it one step further. While humanizing quantizes the timing of the notes, you can also do the same thing with the velocity of the notes.

In Pro Tools it’s fairly easy. You open up your MIDI editor window, select all of the velocities (along the bottom of the screen), then open up your MIDI quantize window and select “randomize” and give it a percentage.

This will take each of the drum hits and make them slightly louder or software than all the others, which is a GREAT way to make sure the drums sound realistic and not fake.

Try doing this on individual pieces of the kit (kick drum, snare) or even on the entire kit. It’ll take some practice, but once you master it, you’ll be well on your way to great-sounding drum tracks.

What do YOU think?

Weigh in below by leaving a comment.

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“Humanizing” Virtual Drum Software

Joe Gilder — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:01:12 +0000

Yesterday I posted a video review of EZDrummer.

Mark, one of my readers (and a member of MixWithUs.com) asked in the comments section if EZDrummer has a “humanize” function. It does. I forgot to mention this, but it’s the little button on the bottom left side.

The bigger question, though, is what does “humanize” mean and why should you care about it?

Cold, Lifeless Drummer

In a perfect world, we would all have a huge drum room in our home studios. We’d have a closet FULL of great mics, great preamps, plenty of inputs, and a top-notch drummer and drum kit.

In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t live in a perfect world. Down here in reality it costs thousands of dollars to build out a drum room and buy all the necessary equipment to track drums. And it still costs several hundred dollars to hire out a studio and record the drums there.

First off, let me just say that if you CAN record live drums, do it. If that’s not possible, you’ll need to turn to virtual drum software, such as EZDrummer, BFD, DrumCore, Steven Slate Drums, etc.

As cool as these programs are, and as awesome as the included grooves are, it’s still fairly easy to tell when a drum part was played by a human vs. a piece of software. A human never plays perfectly in time. A computer can. Hence the problem. The computer is too perfect.

To fix this, you’ll want to humanize the drums.

How do you do this? Well, a lot of the popular drum programs have a humanize function, which introduces imperfections into the performance. This can be effective, but you may want to do your own humanizing. That’s what I do.

2 Steps to Humanizing Drum Parts

1. Mess up the timing.

The less perfect the drum part is, the better. So if you can take the perfect timing of a plug-in and mess it up, then you’re on to something.

You can manually humanize the timing by going in and actually moving individual MIDI notes around. This can be tedious, but the results can be good.

Another option is to use quantization. Normally you quantize MIDI to correct timing issues. However, in this instance, you’ll want to use the “randomize” feature to actual introduce a certain amount of randomness back into the perfectly timed drum part. (See How to Quantize MIDI for more.) Instead of snapping all the notes to the grid/tempo of your song, the randomize feature will move them farther away from perfection.

2. Mess up the velocities.

One of the easiest ways to pick out a non-human drum part is to listen to the velocity of the drum hits. If the snare is hit at exactly the same volume every time, it becomes obvious that it’s not a real drummer. By randomizing the velocity of each piece of the kit, you can introduce a healthy dose of “human.”

You do this essentially the same way you would with messing up the timing. Either go in there and manually adjust the velocities, or select one note (i.e. drum) at a time, and randomize its velocities. This will cause your drum software to trigger slightly different samples for each hit, which will sound MUCH more realistic.

Thoughts? Leave a comment!

[Photo by wrestlingentropy]

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