Your MIDI Drums Sound FAKE and I know why

Programming realistic-sounding drums in the DAW is crazy difficult! I take a look at the challenges and offer tips and techniques to give your MIDI drums a human touch.

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[alexmasters]

a huge help that I only started doing recently is programming the drums from your favorite songs. as not a drummer, it shows what kick and snare patterns and fills you like. a great learning experience. (same goes for bass and guitars and vocal harmonies 🙂)

[Mikegeb]

Another useful tip that is not mentioned in this video. A lot of people record 2 bar and 4 bar loop and use that in the entire chorus or verse of the song. Try to record at least 8 or 16 bars of drum before you can use it as a loop. The longer your manual recording the liveley it sounds because it will have varriations in velocity and timing. This tip is not only for drums it applies to bass lines or any track. For example, It is tempting to copy paste a bass line of the chorus whenever the chorus repeats. However, to achieve natural feel, it is always a good idea to record something multiple times even if the exact same thing is supposed to repeat in the song.

[NoahHornberger]

whatever you do, don't just slap a default reverb on after the drums! It is guaranteed to make it sound crappy. Use a realistic convolution reverb with very mild tails (.3 to 1 sec). Kill the reverb on everything below 200hz. And only mix in a tiny bit of reverb to add a sense of space. Feel the space, don't hear the reverb!

[OfficialGOTCHA]

To get nice sounding drum rolls for jazz or jungle/drum and bass I use 16/4 arpeggiators on the input, set the swing of the arp to 30% and play it in with 16th notes.

Another good thing I’ve found is once you’ve written your drums in MIDI, bounce them individually to audio, find a song that you like the drum pattern of, and flex/warp the transients to match to your reference track - basically groove robbing, you get the natural swing but from someone that’s a professional drummer so it has a nice feel to it.

[henryaposto]

this concept is quite possibly the most important thing to learn for production. Listening to drummers helps me so much with this.

[stephencshapiro]

To get rid of that "a bunch of separate samples" sound, I would bring the panning in a bit tighter. Also, maybe try to emulate some mic bleed: add a parallel bus, passing lows and highs, and mess around with the dynamics until it sits well.

[musicboy]

Great advice! I’ve been working with clicks and tracks for a very long time. Here’s something I like to do on ballads. While first-call pro drummers all have exquisite tempo, they often play with the song in very subtle ways. It’s not enough to simply keep straight time, although many if not most songs these days are strictly quantized. OK, so a ballad at 72 bpm in the verses. Change to 73 in the chorus. Then back to 72 in the verse. On last chorus- out, keep at 73 all the way out. Except for a very few freakishly talented (cursed) people, we humans cannot tell the difference in +1 bpm. However, our brains interpret it as something we musicians refer to as “lift”, or “edge”. This works really nicely for click tracks you’re playing live with. Fact: in verses you’re playing more simply, or the arrangement is more sparse. Chorus, now maybe you’re playing AND singing. Your instrument part is more involved, more rhythmic and your pulse is slightly higher. This is a natural thing when humans physically make music. Try it. It adds that little human feel you’ve been missing.

[rothloaf]

I had a drummer friend who built a kit on my DR660 in the nineties. He added grace notes and other subtleties (like you demonstrated) that forever spoiled me but also made me confront my rather lame idea of drumming. I quit trying to simulate drumming myself.

[ShadeCandle]

I don't produce on a professional level, but my techniques for more human sounding drums are to have some elements not quantized, and almost always to record some live percussion to add an organic feel to the beat - whether tambourine, maracas, djembe or whatever. Some great tips in this video too. Playing with sampled high hats is always fun, haha

[numanuma]

One thing I wish drum libraries like superior drummer would do is add rudiments to their samples. There are sometimes that I roll a slight roll for a certain groove or a double paradiddle fills or a double stroke rolls to make a triple groove.

[j-wlmm]

Wow, this is actually something I was looking for to take my drums to the next level. I would listen to old songs and wonder how can I get my MIDI drums to sound as real as possible. Great video man!

[samburtyboy]

Cracking video Jon. Rarely seen drum programming so succinctly and clearly explained before.

[Nathan_Lundstrom]

My goal as a producer/songwriter now is to demo out songs and make them shoppable. Having these types of tips for programming drums in my back pocket will be incredible. As a multi-instrumentalist who started on drums, I'm familiar with all of these on a REAL kit, but sometimes couldn't quantify it with words and you've put words to some of the 'feel' I've been able to play in with a mic'd up kit.

[TheTheimpossible]

Hey man thanks so much! Drum programming is my favorite part of writing, and I'll spend a day just doing that. Some really great advice here, from the 'one hand' technique to just being more mindful of the physical instrument. Loving the library!

[countorringtonludlow]

I've been programming drums for 23 years and playing them for about 31. Playing the real thing absolutely informs how I program them. For a non drummer to approach it, is like how I felt approaching some of the large and complex 8Dio String libraries. I can see that I clearly have everything I need to make a realistic sounding string pattern, but my lack of knowledge on what physically happens when someone plays the instrument, makes it more than just a programming barrier. It's easy to stare at a sea of articulations to choose from and question whether you are piecing together everything in a way that would pass the straight face test to a player of the respective instrument.
Drum and bass producers like Paradox are a rare exception. Non drummers that break the 4 limb rule, but still using old crusty funk breaks to program realistic sounding drums that bang very hard on a good system.

[sonicclang]

This was a really good video. It's a good summary of all the things I've learned from programming my drums for over 20 years. When I started learning, the sample libraries at the time were terrible. One sample per drum. Changing velocity just made the sample louder or quieter, but always the same sample. On top of that, I started by clicking each note into the DAW with my mouse. All my old tracks from back then sound so artificial. At some point I learned exactly what you talk about with capturing as much of a performance as possible. I also split up recording the kick/snare/toms, then come back and do hi-hat/ride/crash. Always being careful to not create a 3 or 4 armed drummer.

Most importantly, if I'm recording a song that I intend to be released on streaming platforms as a serious piece of work, I try to limit the amount of copy/paste. I re-perform the drumming for each section of the song. If my ear picks up the repetition and I get bored, my listeners will pick that up as well (albeit on a more subconscious level). I work really hard to make my drums sound like I sat behind a kit and actually played them.

[NigelDThompson]

Great video as always Jon.. As a drummer, I tend to play in my beats live, whenever I can. You are so right about the linear aspect of most drumming pattens as all four limbs hitting at the same time would most likely only sound meh! I find I get better results if I have a maximum of two hits together when programming with midi or finger drumming. Hope you and yours have a great Easter.🥚

[floofytown]

What an incredible video. All of this is exactly how I've been doing drum programming since I started doing midi drums...and I'll never forget the time the CEO of the music house I was writing for said a track of mine has the most realistic sounding drum part he's ever heard. That felt good. So: I can corroborate, this advice Jon is giving is dead-on. Program like 1 drummer with with 2 hands and 2 feet. EDIT: I'm like real tempted to buy this Soft Drums library because it was programmed by a guy who has this exacting and realistic philosophy of drum programming...tells me the library's prolly gonna be a damn detailed and usable library! Jon you're selling me man!

[robshrock-shirakbari]

Yeah, loving the sound of this library. Looking forward to getting my head out of vocal editing and picking this up next week.

[throwthisaway]

Finally. This is a must see video for a lot of youtube guitarists. I always added some sloppiness to volume and quantization to every note, and mimic patterns with air drumming. Now with electronic kit it is much easier. Also, I prefer dialing up tape saturation. It mushes the sound together, but dial back on hihat/cymbals.