Lessons

Lesson Info

Grooves and Programming

Let's talk about grooves and programming some and I touched on that already but grooves are something that are included with easy drummer and superior drummer and you could buy some of these on their own and they basically are just midi that was recorded by a real drummer on elektronik drum set that plays back through superior or easy drop some of these air really really great they have some amazing drummers like john tempesta or thomas hacky or harry pronounce his name I like the john tempesta ones and the drum kit from hell ones the best but there are really some amazing ones here and everything from cats and stuff what's cool about these is that they're organized also too the basic library that they come from so you jazz elektronik metal machine rock solid see every time I switch that goes to new library than the song I mean the song is or the type of songs so you got heavy midtempo uptempo metal machine heavy mid and fast drum kit from hell has organized a little differently you go...

t metal straight for four beats metal straight for four triplets and it's not really by song but it's by type of beats so when you go to double kicks a u pick groove one that's what open hats other open hats slightly more open slightly more open really open as you can hear that actually feels like a drummer played it it doesn't feel like some really stale programming job is because a real drummer played it and not edited mostly out of curiosity did the velocities come from the actual tracking themselves over those programmed afterwards? They're the actual velocities here I'll pull up a groove and let you see or will actually take a look at the groove that I pasted in earlier you see all these velocities like I'm gonna highlight justice basically when I highlighted the snares here it shows you the velocities down here those air obviously not even doubt but that's exactly what the drummer played that's just bizarre to me that they have the technology to have a pad that will measure the velocity of each it that's crazy the v drum kit that they use is basically the best that's out there and it has shells like a real drum and the pat is incredibly sensitive and has rebound just about like a real drum and that's ah it's a very expensive v kitt and very, very sensitive but you can hear I mean these sound like somebody sitting there playing it um give you guys a couple other examples of these just so you kind of know uh what what's out there and what's available I'm just taking a look at what's on this computer but just in the rock one mid tempo was picked midtempo so you basically have if you get the lives of the many libraries you basically have any beat you could think of and like I said before one thing that's really cool about the way superior divides them is that it adds this extra menu right here now the reason that school is because what if you just want this kick pattern the way says kick right here I just wanted to build off of that I would just select it and good to go select it drag it awesome okay so let's recap about the grooves pre recorded files they come with every stds and easy x and there by the same drummers who they made this stuff with so they made a kid with john tempesta john tempesta gives you a bunch of groups like metal machine um and like we said the mideast not edited velocities are exactly the same so one thing that I do sometimes is if I have to program drums for a record is all program from scratch and then I'll find the beat that I had programmed within the grooves and replace my own thing with the drummer of my choice. Now the thing you have to be careful with is that since all these fields are preserved the if you put different groups together from different drummers you're going to be changing fields within a song multiple times so I pro tip is to try to keep it within one library because these really do end up feeling like the drummers of you're going to go with the dude from the sugar start with him and stay with him if you're gonna go with tempesta start there there and stay there all these drummers play very differently so that's just a pro tip for you guys so I reference human drummer who's goingto re record it when I get going usually so I start albums with superior now almost a za rule now the exceptions would be save I was recording a drummer like sean there's no reason to do that absolutely and just so you has no when I was giving him directions that was for informational purposes only like what drummers like that you just got to get out of the way and let them do their thing completely so anyways with a human drummer I will figure out what they want to do I'll find you the groove in there and put it down and then tweak it by hand the reason that I do that I talked about earlier the reason I do that is because I want to make sure that the songs are absolutely perfect before recording drums you don't like to edit drums know you like them to be one take from start to finish now honestly I feel like that's the most ideal situation possible if I could do drum takes without punching in I would do it without punching in so one thing that's required a prerequisite for being able to record that way is the drummer knowing the material so if you're going to be making lots of changes in the production process it's good to wait on that because edited drums khun sound kind of weird so you get the grooves there you let the drummer learn the grooves then you record the drummer you have ah much higher likelihood of the drummer actually knowing this stuff and getting getting it right um one of the reasons that I don't keep my original programming generally is because you have to do a lot of work to get program drums to sound real it's just it just takes forever in my easy drummer class which is going to be available for download anybody who gets this I think that you're going to learn all about velocity is kind of program from scratch but that said it's easier said than done it's definitely possible but it's easier said than done it takes a really really long time the key to it is variation in velocity and on the grid so let me show you this real quick you notice with this groove museum in this stuff is not on the grid it's in its own time then the way you can tell for those of you her uninitiated is this line right here is the grid here's the note I know basic stuff but you look throughout see different velocities, different placements. This is how a real drummer plays all over the place within reason yes, which ah trump samples this who's the drummer this I believe is were I in vic? It'll mainly asking out of curiosity because I can see it on the grid and he pushes temple a little bit. Yes, we just curious. Yeah, and the cool thing about this is we're going to discuss this further if you want to edit thes drums you can it at these drums if you take the grooves and you want to do what you would do to acoustic drums to them you can do that, but they leave it up to you, which is cool. The getting the feel of the original drummer is pretty important. I think you might actually like us feel a lot of software companies that give you prepackaged gru's will kwon ties everything and just give you that and that's why I've never ever liked using that sort a thing, but the fact that these performances air preserved makes it way way easier and it's also easier to communicate the part to a drummer because there's some field there um a lot of drummers hate program drums because of the lack of feel and a lot of records with program drums sound terrible because of the lack of feel people just don't respond to that very well so one of the key things another pro tip that I can give you guys is to just try to think like a drummer when your programming drummers have two arms generally two legs and one head and that that's it you're not going to find a three armed drummer or a forearm drummer or a three legged drummer that you might find a one armed drummer but you won't find you won't find a three armed drummer so that said, when you're programming drums, you get to keep that in mind now I took drum lessons for about six months just to be able to understand how drums work and I think that anybody who's an engineer producer I should take drama lessons, voice lessons, all that stuff but just enough to understand how the instrument you're working with to understand the instrument like a player would approach it. So with that said like to play you guys a video from my easy drummer course if you want to get really really into programming this is the course you guys hear the amount of variation in that. All right? So one of the things I noticed about bad drum programming back in the day when I was programming beats and still to this day when I get stuff from people when there's like closed high hat there's just like closed high hat is quiet has literally one or two samples and it's just it just doesn't sound right for some reason I've never been able to figure out why until now but uh that sounds legitimate to me and again check out o play it solo doubt and uh check out the va la city variation on that okay, so that high hat is highlighted so notice it's going soft loud soft loud soft loud soft loud soft, loud soft loud but even within that there's variation is not just it goes down tto one soft velocity and one loud velocity is changing every every one of them is different now however, it looks like the loud ones are very close to each other there's still a little variation there so even on these simple you would think all you had to do is program in quiet high hat and that will take care of it even on these simple beats, the dynamic velocity variation is key to making this sound real here is unsold sounds like a drama played it alright so l what else did you cover in that course? We covered basically everything there is to know about programming drums via easy drummer writing phil's writing any type of beat double bass be making them sound riel working with the feel of everything making your symbols sound more riel basically if you've wondered about it ari drum programming we covered it it it was a six hour day on drum programming. Basically, via easy drummer. I highly recommend it because we're not really going to too much detail about programming drums here. And you should definitely know how to do that.