Thanks to the magic of multisampling, it’s long been possible to program sample-based drum parts so realistic that even a drummer wouldn’t be able to pick them out of a line-up. However, that’s not to say the process is a walk in the park for those unschooled in the percussive arts, and there are a number of things to think about when endeavouring to simulate the infinite complexities of a live drum kit performance via MIDI. Here are some of the most important…

Get A Great Virtual Drum Kit

The first thing to consider is the sound of the drums themselves, and for that to hit the mark, you’re going to need a high quality virtual drum kit. What qualifies as high quality? Well, first, the depth of the multisampling deployed in its construction. You’re looking for as many articulations, velocity layers and round robins as possible, as well as, ideally, separate left and right hand samples. Then there’s the production side of things: while it’s obviously a great time saver if your kit has been engineered and pre-mixed to sound amazing out of the box, you may well want to start with a totally dry, unprocessed sound, to be moulded into shape as you see fit.

And finally, the variety of shell and cymbal sizes, beater types (sticks, brushes, rods, etc), manufacturers (Pearl, Yamaha, Gretsch, etc) and ‘vintages’ (a 1950s kick drum will sound different to a modern one, for example) represented may or may not matter, depending on your music, but clearly, the more the merrier.

To get down to product specifics, at the top end of the market, the big hitters are Toontrack Superior Drummer 3 and FXpansion BFD3, both of which are utterly comprehensive in every aspect of drum kit simulation. For many producers, though, those will actually be overkill, and the likes of XLN Audio Addictive Drums, Toontrack EZdrummer 3, Melda Production MDrummer or any number of third party Kontakt libraries will more than suffice, all being well up to the task of creating thoroughly authentic, mix-ready drum sounds in minutes.

Skip Everything We’re About To Tell You And Let The Software – Or Another Human – Do The Work

One of the great things about the virtual kits we’ve namechecked is that they all come with absolutely enormous libraries of MIDI grooves, recorded by professional drummers and readily adaptable to the particular requirements of your tracks. These grooves can be sequenced and edited within the instrument itself, or exported to MIDI tracks in your DAW; and there’s absolutely no shame in using them if you just don’t fancy programming anything yourself.

Another option, of course, is to find or hire a drummer with a MIDI-outputting electronic kit to play the part in question and send you the resulting MIDI file, which can then be tweaked to taste. But we’re digressing from the point of this piece, which is to help you manually program drums yourself. So…

Think Like A Drummer

If you want to program convincing grooves from scratch, it’s absolutely vital that you understand how drummers ‘compose’ and perform drum parts in the real world. Depending on the complexity of your beats, this might involve a certain amount of research and analysis of patterns (by ear and/or in notated form); but for straight-up backbeats and other relatively simple lines, you just need to get a handle on things like when to move the leading hand from the hi-hats to the ride cymbal (the chorus and/or bridge, generally), how to emphasise the end of a phrase with an open hi-hat or extra snare hit, the fact that crash cymbals should almost always be accompanied by a kick or snare hit, and so on. There’s a ton of drumming tutorial videos on YouTube that can help with all of this if you need them.

One thing that does need to be borne in mind at all times is that, naturally, a drummer can only ever hit two drums and/or cymbals at the same time (plus kick drum and hi-hats with the feet), so before you commit to any given sequence, make sure it complies with that undefeatable limitation.

Stay Off The Grid

Even the tightest drummer can’t ever play with 100% drum machine-like timing precision, landing every kick and snare perfectly on the imagined grid lines of the beat – there will always be a few milliseconds of variance from hit to hit. This subtle divergence is a good thing, though, playing a major role in defining the feel of every drum track. Indeed, a seasoned player will skilfully manipulate said fluctuations, ‘pushing’ or ‘pulling’ the groove in order to creatively shift the rhythmic foundations of the song at will.

You can easily impose these essential temporal offsets by deactivating your MIDI editor’s snap function so that the clicked-in notes don’t adhere rigidly to the grid. Don’t get too wayward, though: the idea is to replicate the variance in timing of a drummer trying to be as metronomic as possible, not to make the beat sloppy. Alternatively, to come at it from the other direction, program your beat on the grid (ie, with snap active), then nudge the notes off it afterwards, or use your DAW’s humanising function, if it has one, to do so in a more prescribed fashion.

Perhaps the best way to get your faux live drums sounding properly organic, however, is to play the part in on your MIDI keyboard or pads, then use iterative quantise and/or manual editing to tighten it up if necessary. You don’t need to be a master finger drummer to do this, by any means: you can slow the project tempo right down to make the performance much easier, and record each element individually – kick, then snare, then hi-hats, say.

Vary The Velocity

Even more ruinous to the authenticity of the virtual drummer than strict grid-locking, programming every note at the same velocity will make it sound horribly mechanical. This will be most apparent in the hi-hats and ride cymbal, which a drummer will usually play so as to emphasise the beat, with weaker hits on the off-beats in between, or vice-versa; but fast kick drum doubles, and fills and rolls on the snare and toms also demand some degree of velocity variation. Again, your DAW’s MIDI humanising functions are helpful here, but drawing in small discrepancies from note to note by hand is no great task.

This is also where the aforementioned round robin samples come into play, alleviating the ‘machine gun’ effect that you otherwise get with repeated hits at the same velocity. Be sure to exploit the articulations offered by your virtual kit, too: throw in the occasional snare rimshot on the backbeat; hammer the offbeat with the bell of the ride cymbal; alternate between left and right hand articulations on the snare and toms… Combine all that with a bit of velocity editing and you’re golden.

Ghosts In The Machine

With your virtual drummer sounding nicely fluid in its timing and hit-to-hit intensity, the final piece in the groovy percussive puzzle is working in some light interstitial snare drum action, aka ‘ghost notes’. Most commonly, these take the form of (often very) quiet strokes played by the left hand (assuming a right-handed drummer) on the snare in between the hits of an eighth-note hi-hat line to push the beat along and imbue it with pace and drive; but you can get far busier and more ‘designed’ with your ghost notes than that if you like, as a brief sojourn through any funk or fusion playlist will reveal.

We’d go as far as to suggest that ghost notes should feature in most non-16th-note-based drum tracks, even if only in that first most basic and barely perceptible form, which most drummers will work into their beats almost unconsciously.

Share your drum programming tips in the comments.

Photo by Gabriel Barletta on Unsplash