Lessons

Lesson Info

How a Drummer Plays

This is basically what a drummer's limbs are used for basically I mean this changes up obviously this is not a hard and fast rule but typically left arm on the snare right arm on the high hat with reid right foot on the kick and you know you can't see my feet but whatever and ah left foot will be clicking the high hat pedals or playing double bass now notice if someone's playing double bass they can at the same time be closing a high hat with their foot this it doesn't work they don't have three legs if they're playing uh hi hat beat over here with the snare they can't be playing a crash over here it doesn't they don't have enough limbs to do that it's just not possible and also there's only two drums at any point in time that could be played if someone can find a way to doom or I'm on all ears I'm open to the experience but uh as far as I know it's not possible and so one of the things I've seen really bad drum programming will be you got a snare floor tom a high hat and two crashes a...

ll going at once and then guitar player trying to get his drummer to play this and turns into a bad situation because yeah, some sort of a brawl this is how a drummer plays before this video really uh plays on, I'm going to just into it by saying, watch how he plays and watch what he stops playing when he does other things. When he goes to phil's, pay attention to what he's not actually playing on the drum set. This is matt from periphery, basically playing some stuff and talking about one of the many packs that you can get from tuned track, which I've got on here, that I can show you guys. But main thing is there's a lot of good views of his feet and of his hands and just try to pay attention to what he is doing but justus much of the time. What he's not doing way right now is that especially if it's, a big operation of a different piece of pills and ideas that I just laid out is that producers, songwriters or anyone do really wants to experiment with different kinds of beats uh, taking big, taking different different views, different bills I played today, and this is not different parts changed sounds change drones, but use them as templates, foundations right on top of it, work to come up with a really cool pack because each song that we did, charles saw each other all leaders. It's very different from other we try to focus on doing different tempos beats permitted for you song we try to do different variations, different types of pills using tom simple, easy, open, closed all of this a combination so that really a different type of song writing situation songwriter. Like I said, producer could really pick and choose and mix and match all these different beats floated upside down like shoes. Use some of my ideas and check out what I like you behind the drugs in terms of playing these in this house bar is a great opportunity for and he's already are desert tio okay, so you for product placement? But what did you notice? What would be the first thing that you noticed, tyler about how he plays when he went into phil specifically? Yeah, it seems like when he's doing a lot of ah, tom work. It varies from what he's doing with symbols, you know? So when he's going more into the toms, you know, he's only hitting the symbols every once in a while, going back and forth rather than you know, something that you might hear and another one bank one man band type thing where there's tom's and they're symbols and then a million different things going on at once? Yes, so if he was playing a high hat pattern on the beat and I went into a fill the high hat pattern didn't just keep going right? Absolutely lots of variations yeah or for instance, something that I see all the time is lots of people who are not very good at programming drums and if this is any of you and internet land, listen up I can't see you, but listen up uh a lot of people I'm noticed like to use their crashes instead of a high hat when programming drums because it sounds bigger and they don't know how to e q a hat right and all that and a lot let's face it on some of the other drum virtual drums software has had some pretty bad there's sound pretty damn good on this, but people have substituted the high hat with the crash a lot I get this a lot of demos where it will be a crash going from start to finish of a song and well, I think it's pretty cool to go into the crash chorus or depending on the part it's not cool at all to have it going from start to finish and especially when there's a film going on if you're playing a crash beat, how are you going to keep that crash going when this is going it's just not possible so you notice the right thing anything you noticed at all other than what he had to add not really. I mean, everything was it wasn't muddy or cluttered at all was like everything was there's a lot going on by the same time. You can tell that it was done by a drummer. Yeah. And that's important to note also because that wasn't just your simple for for blues faced nothing drumming. I think that was some pretty intense stuff done by a pretty sick drummer like that that's not entry level drumming, but even so, he had to follow the laws of physics, I guess. Or I don't know, maybe that's, not the right word or someone to blast me on the message board. That's ok, but has toe fault follow follow the rules of onley having four limbs. Uh, so this is something that is so, so, so important when programming drums like I can't say enough, if you're programming drums to sound riel, you have to take into consideration what a drummer would actually play. And, uh, I will tell you guys a story about myself. It's story time. Um, yeah, I'm playing, not playing. I've been programming drums for a while. I think, since the last century, I think since around ninety eight or ninety nine was when I started programming drums and, uh I didn't try to do the one man band thing I did the two man band thing because I couldn't find a drummer that was good enough to play what I wanted to play they just couldn't come back in those days playing to a click was unheard off now it is it's pretty normal but in the late nineties and early two thousand's to click actually scared people and that I've got really high musical standards and some people have called me a musical nazi and they might be right but I cannot handle bad musicians it makes me insane so I was having a really tough time finding a good drummer went through a lot of them made some enemies and decided I was going to start programming drums at least for the writing process like no more in the jam room crap with bad drummers or you can't hear what they're doing and they forget everything and your ears are blown out done with that I'm in a program my stuff and I started a program that and basically with the early early dauth stuff long before we got signed everything was done with a drum machine and the idea was we would then give it to a drummer um so we're right everything here's the album let's record it so first scenario was the first time I met this amazing german named kevin tally and I gave him all the all the songs with my parts and I was like, I want to hire you to play on my album and he was like, okay, here's the price so he shows up and mind you this is two thousand two or two thousand three hey shows up to my house and you can't play anything and like what the hell's wrong with you dude, you had like three weeks to learn this stuff weren't you and dying fetus like I saw the slayer audition videos you can play your awesome what what's going on like we're paying you a lot of money that we saved up what what? And hey said he started berating me he's like how do you expect a drummer to play this stuff that I look like an octopus? Do you think I have eight arms and he started yelling at me and made me feel like a complete idiot but yeah, it's because my parts were just not realistic and I expected him to play them note for note um I was taking the whole attitude of this is the song and this is the song the song was the song is the song is a song so you're an employee you're going to come in and you're going to play this song here it is drummer you're awesome play it soon or the idiot boss basically I was the idiot boss well that we can use anything uh those tracks were completely unusable we got through a little bit of three songs and it was so terrible we just stopped um and uh he told me that I needed to understand a little bit more about the drums before uh before I did this again I didn't listen to him then I hired this fusion drummer figured all right metal metal drummers maybe they're all idiots I'm going to get this session pro guy you know, the kind of guy who basically his entire life is going to play sessions so always a new situation they know how to read music everything's challenging one day they might be an orchestra pit on broadway the next day might be a bar mitzvah the next day might be a studio gig playing in some fusion thing next day might be a gypsy jazz trio like no, no consistency at all besides the fact they only is consistent for those guys is that what they're doing is always changing. So if you're all right maybe one of those guys so for that guy I actually printed out sheet music because I know how to do that so and it was right there was no problems at all there were no problems at all with the sheet music um same thing happens so this guy likes a challenge um so he actually didn't quite parade me but he said to me things like, well, I'm going to try to learn this because it's kind of fun to do stuff that's impossible, but you got to know that a drummer wouldn't should play this. This is obviously written by a guitar player and ah, he didn't have the I'd say the balls to tell me that I should change the drum parts he should have, but he was getting his paycheck, but and didn't say anything, but basically he did, telling me that these are not real drum parts like a drummer wouldn't be playing double bass and opening and closing the high hat at the same time while playing a snare beat while hitting both crashes at the same time, it just doesn't happen like it's not possible since you told us about embarrassing yourself in front of kevin um, I wanted to ask a question that a couple people have I have brought up in the chat rooms, which is about symbols, and I know this is, you know, ah, big topic in virtual drums, so dusty trousers asks any tips on how to get a realist performance of a drummer writing on a crash symbol I use superior that has multiple hits emulator that blends successive hits and it helps a lot, but I wonder if there's a particular method of varying velocities to get a more natural sound so I think this touches on a lot of things within the topic of symbols within virtual drums can you talk about that a bit? Yeah. Let me begin by saying that symbols are the hardest part to get right in virtual drums because of the nature of how a symbol works it's not just like a drum where you have the two heads that pushed the air, the symbol is actually rotating and changing shape and vibrating all at the same time. So you have a piece of metal that's I wish I had one here to change, but like a piece of paper if you had if you had a what's, that type of photography called where you get very high speed footage and play very slowly like say, okay, if you did a time lapse of china symbol or a crash cymbal you'd see that the thing is mutating and warping all over the place. And so there's so many thousands tens of thousands of permutations of the shape of the symbol hit that the basically they would have to sit there for two months tio sample symbols to actually get them to that level so that said, um that's the toughest part now I don't know that guy is starting from scratch or not and that's that would be good to know um if he's starting from scratch what I would highly recommend doing to getting his cymbals more riel is to work on velocity velocity velocity because what you'll find is that they're certain velocities that sound like total crap with some of these symbols so it would be good to identify them and then never go near those velocities and s o getting going back to what you said about you know the right velocity depending on the samples that working exactly and it's not just yeah it's not just the losses for crash it's velocities for that particular crash because, uh let me go back to easy drama real quick when you change drums for symbols on easy terms see there's a little drop down menu two options right here for this crash right now it's on a twenty and still jin medium prototype and go toe eighteen here's the twenty thiss sounds different as the same for all of these you got the nineteen here's the eighteen these are completely different symbols and so each one of these has a different sweet spot. So you're going to have to find the sweet spot for each one of these and then also keep in mind that when a drummer is hitting the symbols the symbols are turning their going up and down there there's all kinds of stuff going on so the velocities need to be reflecting that so I would vary them a lot does that answer the question at all? Okay I haven't another symbols question for your way should do that more often like yeah maybe like you should have gone before we ask you a question about very official so we have just a few more minutes so we just ask more questions this is from way have three minutes this is from blake l who says I've seen many of the other users on the tune truck programs mentioned that the symbols in many of the presets and packs come off sounding thin are underwhelming even after surgical e q what's your go to assemble preset pack in the native program or do you find yourself going external re sources such as others samples? I don't ever use other samples for symbols they are all the ones I know of outside of the tune tracks tougher awful so what I do is say you like the symbols from one of the expansion packs for instance like say say you like the drums from metal machine would I would but you don't like the symbols for whatever reason you open up a second instance of it and say you like the symbols from rock solid open up the second instance of easy drummer and just have all your symbols playing from that and symbols and rooms and then have the drums and rooms playing from your original instance uh that there's ways within superior drummer to all keep it within the same instance but and that's what I would do I would mix and match the sets until you have something you like. Is there one particular symbol set that you like an easy drummer or does it really just depend entirely on what you're what you're working with? Honestly, it depends entirely what I'm working on, but one of my favorite ones would be rock solid or the brand new rock exclamation point like it's got a low you see right here this this is loading, so we've got to give it a second but it's not uncommon at all for me to use one instance for symbols in another instance for drums, that would be the way to go, sending those sound really good and with this dropdown menu can see you have lots of options I mean that right there that doesn't sound too different than when we're checking a symbol in the studio with a real drummer I mean, that sounds like a good sounding crash as does that, so this in particular, which is one of their newest products has some fantastic symbols rock solid also not bad at all. Like gotta let it load I would recommend getting metal machine rock solid and rock ex comission point um and mick from making a frankenstein kid because you can hear those aren't thin sounding symbols at all some that's that's what I would do