s.o.s effective drum programming, part 1

7/27/2019 S.O.S Effective Drum Programming, Part 1

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Published in SOS February 1998Printer-friendly version

"I've known grown men- and thoroughlycompetent musiciansto boot - grow pale andweak-kneed at thethought ofprogramming a drumtrack from scratch."

TEENY TIP

Concentrating on

programming variations on

the hi-hat, while maintaining

a consistent kick/snare

pattern, can be a good way

to approach programming a

rhythm track for an entire

song. The basic kick and

snare provides a sense of

continuity, while the hi-hat

patterns help to differentiate

verses from choruses and

so on.

"The toe-tappability

Effective Drum Programming, Part 1Tips & Techniques

Technique : Sequencing & MIDI Controllers

PART 1: If you're after a great rhythm section, these days it's very easy to

whip a fabulous loop off a CD or nick a great groove from a MIDI file disk. But

an inside knowledge of how and why drum patterns work can help make you

a better musician and get your rhythm sections really working. NICHOLAS

ROWLAND - well, he got rhythm... This is the first article in a four-part series.

Read Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

I was talking to a man the other day - not necessarily an interesting fact in itself, I grant you - except that this man made his

living from selling commercial bite-sized MIDI files. He was explaining that, after producing a number of groundbreaking

products devoted to MIDI-fying the subtle nuances of highly expressive instruments like bass and guitar, he had been

surprised to discover that what many people still wanted were disks full of drum patterns. Quite naturally, he had assumed

that with the abundance of sam ple CDs, commercial MIDI files and preset accompaniments available, the world would be

well catered for in this area. Not so, it would s eem.

This is a curious state of affairs. Whereas in the days of hi-tech yore you

really did have to get to grips with the quirky programming systems of

dedicated drum machines, these days anyone with the most bas ic GM

module and rudimentary sequencer has the capacity to experiment with

rhythm from the com fort of their own arm chair. And as many software

sequencers now s port a special editor for drums, m any musicians are

quite comfortable with the idea of programming the rhythm track as an

integral part of creating a composition.

Yet I've still known grown men - and thoroughly competent musicians to

boot - grow pale and weak-kneed at the thought of programming a drum

track from scratch. Perhaps they're afraid of becoming the butt of all those

post-modernist drummer jokes (you know: "how many rhythm

programmers does it take to change a light bulb?").

Of course, you might argue that with more drum loops on more sample

CDs than you can shake a drumstick at, there's really no need to get your

hands dirty with all this DIY programming stuff. Just load up the appropriately labelled pattern - Soft Rock 2, Techno Fill 3 -

and press play. After all, it's the melody that's the most important thing, right?

It's true that samples give you access not just to killer grooves but also to the heavily

treated sounds it would take you a rock of ages to create yourself. Nonetheless,

working with sampled loops does bring its own set of practical headaches, not least

of which is m aking your selection. If you've ever had to trawl your way through a CD

containing 300 minor variations on a hip-hop beat, you'll know what I mean. Then

there's the is sue of pus hing or pulling the loop to fit the desired tempo, a process

which can often des troy the feel which attracted you in the first place. And just when

you think it's all over, you decide to change the tempo of your mas terpiece,

necessitating another return to the time-stretch function on your sampler.

Good God, if only people knew the kind of hel l we go through for our art...

This is where your friendly SOS comes in. The purpose of this s eries is to look at

some of the basic principles of drum programming as the inspiration for creating your

own loops. Of course, while I say drum programming I'm conscious of the fact that it's

not just drum and percussion sounds which constitute the rhythm track. In fact, I

happen to believe that all great grooves are driven by great bass lines. But all this is a

matter for that Doctorate of Drum and Bass Dynamics which I'm saving for myretirement years. As my time here between the SOS covers is short, you'll just have to take these underlying sentiments as

understood.

The motion before the house today is: how do you produce killer grooves? It's rather a vast question, given the many

variables involved, but one I shall attempt to deal with by looking at some of the main principles of drum programming. I'll

say now that my aim is not merely to present you with a set of ready-to-run preset patterns, but to give you some ideas and

examples to do with as you wish.

THE THREE ELEMENTS

In my humble opinion, a good rhythm pattern consists of three elements: the pattern itself, the sounds, and the speed at

which the pattern is played. And really great rhythm tracks usually work because the right balance has been achieved

between these three elements. A great pattern can sound clumsy or too frenetic at the wrong tempo, and a new set of

sounds can turn a bog-standard pattern into something really quite wonderful. You appreciate that when you're listening

through a sample CD: often it's not the rhythms , but the 'how did they do that?' sounds which catch your ear.

The other important point to remember is that excellence in drum

programming is also about fitting the rhythm track to the music. A groove

More In This Series:

Part 2 (Mar 1998)

Part 3 (Apr 1998)

Part 4 (May 1998)

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factor is often moredependent on yourleaving holes thanfilling up the wholerhythmical canvas."

which, when heard in isolation, knocks the audience dead at 500 paces

may not necessarily do the rest of the composition any favours.

Sometimes you have to tell your virtual drummer to stop showing off, put

the kit back in its box and just concentrate on shaking that tambourine

once every four bars. In fact, while we're on a roll of general rules of

thumb, creating interesting rhythms tends to be more a matter of

subtraction than add ition. In other words, the toe-tappabil ity factor is often

more dependent on your leaving holes than filling up the whole rhythmical

canvas. More of this in a future article.

In the meantime, let's look at what many will recognise as lowest

common denominator stuff. (I'll apologise now if what follows s eems nothing more than an exercise in patronising that

national champion egg-sucking grandmother of yours. But the SOS editors did insist that I started from square one.)

THE THREE INSTRUMENTS

Despite the fact that today's sound modules offer a wide palette of exotic percussion and non-drum sounds, the core of

most rhythm tracks is still rooted in the ins trument that the arrival of drum machines were supposed to make redundant in

the first place - the good old drum kit.

And even though many contemporary (with a smal l c) rhythms are driven by programm ers rather than drummers , the three

core instruments of the drum kit - that's the bass drum, snare and hi-hat - still remain the key elements in virtually all rhythm

tracks. It's not hard to see why this should be the case, as they give you the ability to accent the low, medium and high

frequency ranges res pectively.

It's the interplay of these three instruments which usually provides the ident (to use a local radio term) of the mainstream

musical styles. You'll probably also be aware of how different styles of music put a different emphasis on each of these

three instruments. In pop and rock, for instance, the dominant drum is usually the snare. In '80s pop, you were nothing if

you didn't have a snare drum which sounded like the ricochet from a dozen firing squads - thus putting the accent on the

backbeat (that is, the second and fourth beats of each 4/4 bar). In reggae, the bass drum accentuates the first beat of the

bar, while the snare falls on the third beat, but it's the job of other instruments, such as chopped guitar or keyboard pads, to

accentuate the two and the four.

BANG ON: THE EXAMPLES It can only aid communication if everyone is talking a common language. For the purposes of this series, I've

opted to present the drum pattern examples in terms of diamonds on grids, generated as screen dumps from

within the drum page in Steinberg's Cubase sequencing software. This not only makes li fe easy for me, it 's

also a fairly tried and trusted method of drum notation. Firstly , you don't have to be able to read music to

make sense of them; and secondly, they're easy to interpret for inputting into whatever drum machine,

workstation or sequencer you use for generating your rhythm tracks.

The important point to note is that the colours are not there just to prettify the page. They indicate the

dynamic levels/MIDI velocity values for each beat/instrument. For the sake of clarity, I've chosen to represent

only three different volume/MIDI velocity levels within the patterns - basically soft, medium and loud. I could

have had more, but then the grids would have started to look like an out-take from Joseph and his Amazing

Technicolor Dreamcoat. Feel free to play around with these dynamics and introduce more sub-levels. The

final point t o mention is that all these rhythms were created using bog-standard sounds from a GM sound

module, simply because that way I can ensure that I'm programming stuff that anyone can relate to.

This month's examples are designed to show what happens when you take a fairly straightforward bass and

snare pattern, then play around with the top line of percussion - that is, the hi-hats, plus other high-frequency

instruments such as ride cymbals and tambourines. The idea here is to encourage you to experiment with

your own top lines, or to try different bass drum and snare patterns with these.

EXAMPLE 1

This is a very straightforwa rd soft rock rhythm using 8th-note hi-hats. The important thing to note is

that all the on-beats are accented, which helps give a little more movement to the rhythm than if

all the hi-hats were played at equal volume. The open hi-hat sound is there to provide a lift at the

end of the second bar and lead in to the first beat of the next. Although the suggested tempo is 100-

120bpm (beats per minute) this can actually be slowed down to around 85-90bpm, where it will do

very nicely for slow rock ballads. Incidentally, I usually program rhythms in 2-bar blocks, with the

second bar offering a slight variation on the first. This is partly because it gives you bigger chunks

to work with when building up entire songs; it also ensures that there's twice as much interest!

EXAMPLE 2

This one is actually Example 1, but the start point has been moved on by half a bar. However, this

illustrates how you can use the editing functions of sequencers to quickly modify preset patterns,

just by chopping and changing different sections and then re assembl ing them in different orders.

EXAMPLE 3

The open and closed hi-hat sounds on GM modules are usually never more than adequate. If

you've got a module which offers a 'half open' hi-hat, you'll usually find that this makes a better

sound than the fully open version. But even within the GM sound set there is third 'pedal hi-hat'

sound which supposedly represents the sound made when the hi-hat cymbals are brought together

by the drummer pressing his/her foot down on the hi-hat pedal. This sound can be quite useful in

its own right, being somewhat thicker in tone and of slightly longer duration than the closed hi-hat.

It can be employed fairly successfully as a substitute for an open hi-hat. Here it's being used to

emphasise the off-beats of the rhythm, which helps even mid-tempo rhythms go with more of a

swing.

EXAMPLE 4

Here we have the 16th-note hi-hats beloved of the disco floor, but, thanks to crafty use of accent

levels, we avoid the machine-gun effect which used to distinguish the mechanical beatbox rhythms

of the early disco years. In this particular case the accenting could be changed around to fit more

closely with the pulse of the composition as a whole.

Drum Programming

Download hi -res diagrams for

Parts 1-4 (PDF)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

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"If you take the same basic kickand snare pattern, then programdifferent hi-hat patterns over the

top, you can alter the perception ofthat rhythm quite radically."

EXAMPLE 5

I've introduced a ride cymbal here to provide a counterpoint to the main hi-hat rhythm. Even

though it's technically impossible to use them together from a real drummer's point of view, rides

and hi-hats are sounds that work well together. The tambourine also gets an outing, again

providing an uplift by emphasising the off-beats. For all these rhythms, the standard GM drum kit

will work well. But try changing the kits around (most GM modules have at least three or four

different types) and hear how the different sounds change the feel of the rhythms.

EXAMPLE 6

16th-note hi-hats again, but with a sprinkling of open hi-hats to provide the accents.

EXAMPLES 7 & 8

For this funk-style rock example, I've changed the bass and snare drum pattern to give a more

syncopated feel, and brought in the tambourine to provide the straight 16th-note feel. The hi-hat

sounds are used more as accents to support the tambourine rhythm.

EXAMPLES 9 & 10

Now here's a useful trick. By applying a 16th-note triplet feel to patterns 7 and 8 (easily done in

Cubase, using the over-quantise function) and slowing the rhythm down a bit, you can turn what

was previously a fairly funky rock pattern into instant hip hop. Try the over-quantise technique on

all your favourite rhythms and see what you end up with. If it's not obvious to you, the grid has

changed from 16 sections to 24 (in other words, you ne ed to set the quantisation of your drum

machine/workstation/sequencer to give you 24 steps to the bar).

EXAMPLE 11

This is a simple, funk-based pattern which should be played at fairly slow tempos for best effect.

EXAMPLE 12

Although reggae is hardly a mainstream style these days, I've included this reggae pattern to

illustrate my point in the text about half-time feel.

A style like modern jazz leads from hi -hat or ride cymbal. These high-frequency instrum ents act as a kind of syncopatedmetronome, with the mid-frequency snare and low-frequency bass drum providing accents and em bellishments as and

when required. Here also the sense of regular bar divisions is not particularly important to help listeners navigate their way

through the music. In hip-hop and big beat, the rhythm is more about the interplay of bass and snare.

These are broad generalisations, I know - so respect to the musicologists among you. But you soon discover that it's the

way you play around with these three instruments that determines the feel of the drum track and how it fits with the rest of

the composition. As a simple example, if you take the same basic kick and snare pattern, then program different hi-hat

patterns over the top, you can alter the perception o f that rhythm quite radically. For example, compare a pattern using

quarter-note hi-hats (that is, four even strokes to the bar) to one using 16th-note hi-hats (16 to the bar). The second one will

appear to be fas ter, even though the tempo is exactly the same. A syncopated hi-hat pattern can, depending on the

programming, appear to push the rhythm forward or pull it back. Now take those syncopations and use them as the basis

for a series of accents to be appl ied to a 16th-note hi-hat rhythm and you have a different rhythm again .

These points are all explored in the set of examples here, which take you through some very basic variations on standard

rock rhythms and also introduce you to some of the conventions which I'll be following throughout the entire series.

TEMPO FUGIT

The question of tempo is easy to appreciate if you're a human drummer - the faster the music, the quicker you have to play.And when it goes too fast, then you sim ply have to play like crazy or leave some bits out. As rock mus ic gets faster,

drummers tend to switch from playing eighth notes on the hi-hat or ride cymbal to playing quarter notes. Not only is this

less tiring, it doesn't clutter things up as much. Conversely, what's characterised as hard rock played at slow tempos will

still see drummers playing quarter-note hi-hats. But this is to give them the musical room for some fancy footwork on the

double bass drums.

Tempo also determines the kind of s ounds which are s uitable for a track. Quite simply, long sounds, such as big gate-

reverbed snares, don't sit too well in busy mixes, unless they're part of the feature of the track. I'm sure this is why those

TR808/909 sounds work so wel l in dance tracks - they're sonically quite punchy, yet short, so they don't take up too much

space in either the temporal or frequency spectr

um. Which is a jolly good thing when you're

running at tempos of 140bpm and above.

The question of sounds - and s pecifically ways in

which drum sounds can be effected and

generally mangled around a bit - will be revisited

in a later ins talment. In the meantim e, try out the

examples contained in the 'Bang On' box onpage 50. As I've already explained, these a re

simple exercises in using hi-hat rhythms to give

different feels to very basic beats. They also

illustrate one of the key elements of successful

drum programming: correct use of dynamics. Or, put more simply, use of accents to provide a subtle and not-so-subtle

sense of movement within a rhythm.

We'll cover this in more detail in the next issue, when we look at jazz patterns and discover that programmed drums really

can swing with the best of them.

This is the first article in a four-part series. Read Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Published in SOS February 1998

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