Possible video: creating drum parts
KeithHandy posted in Composing, Featured Posts, Instruments, Producing, Tools on February 3rd, 2008
So far I haven’t scripted any of my YouTube demonstrations, but I think for something like this it would be good to plan out what I’m going to say instead of babbling like I normally do. Instead of being a talking head facing the camera, I think this would be a voice-over while I focus on the computer screen, my hands on the keyboard, and occasional cut aways to glorious drummers of yesteryear. Since I may not get around to actually making this one for a while, I’ll share the script with you so you can watch it in your mind.
The writing style here contrasts a bit with my usual blogging style, in that, I’m trying to not “over-write” my sentences and make them more clear… not so much “dumbing them down” as cutting out all the little linguistic curlicues and somersaults… such as phrases like “linguistic curlicues and somersaults”. You get the idea.
Hi, my name is Keith Handy, I’ve been recording my own music for over 20 years, and in this video I’m going to show you how I record drum parts. There are lots of ways to do that, but this is one approach that works really well for me lately. It involves using samples.
Sampling in general just means using sound that has already been recorded. A sample can be a musical passage, or it can just be a single note. It’s common for people to sample a measure or two of drumming and just loop it. Personally, I find loops too monotonous, so I like to build up drum rhythms from scratch using individual hits.
Quick little back history here: I started getting into music in my early teens, which was in the early eighties. While my friends and I were just starting to lose our musical virginities to the warm, organic sound of classic rock bands like The Beatles, The Doors, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin, the pop landscape was being taken over by the cold, mechanical sound of sequenced digital keyboards and drum machines, particularly in dance music, which I found really irritating. I was totally on the anti-drum machine bandwagon. I felt like a hypocrite, though, because I preferred the clean sound of a studio recording to the sound of real live drums in a practice room. This forced me to admit that at least on some level, I preferred a “fake” thing over a “real” thing.
Fast forward to the 1990s — my band breaks up, and my attempt to form a new band is a dismal failure. I had to keep moving forward with my music, though, because it was either that or gouge my eyes out with a grapefruit spoon… so out of necessity, I caved in and bought my first drum machine. By that time they were getting more affordable, and sounding a little more realistic, so I could make rock rhythms with fills, crashes, and other variations… which might not have fooled any drummers, but could at least create enough of a drum-like impression that a listener could suspend disbelief if he wanted to. The Yamaha RY30 drum machine got me through the 90s, and I pretty much milked it for everything I could get out of it.
Sometime around the turn of the millennium, my old friend and former drummer Thom DeLooze happened to leave his drum set at my studio for several months. During this time, I set them up and recorded myself playing them for a couple of hours. The results of the session weren’t outstanding, because I’m not a drummer, but bits and pieces of it were useable with some patching up. A side benefit of doing this, though, was that I could raid this recording for individual drum and cymbal hits, which I now use in my sample library.
These aren’t the “biggest”, “baddest”, or “most awesome” drum sounds in the world, but they’re drums. I think if you want music to sound “big”, “bad”, and “awesome”, that has to come from how instruments combine together, not from how they sound individually. And the fact that these are recordings of me hitting actual drums with actual sticks, in a weird way, gives them a sort of roundabout authenticity.
I have a different sound assigned to each key on the keyboard. I have several slightly different versions of the snare, hi hat, and ride cymbal, because if you’re going to play the same drum or cymbal several times in quick succession, it’s more realistic if it doesn’t sound identical on each hit.
I didn’t have any good, isolated ride cymbal hits from the session, so I had to steal those sounds from elsewhere. And there’s one crash I use that’s from a different session, different drummer, and different set. But the rest of the drums and cymbals were all me hitting Thom’s set.
On one key I have a soft snare drum roll. This is the only one that cuts the sound off when I release the key. The roll sounds good in a fill once in a while, and it’s more believable if I hit a loud snare or tom tom at the end of it.
The roll is fake… I can’t actually play a roll. I edited a bunch of quiet snare hits together to make that.
And last but not least, I have this guy counting to four. I’ve had this guy’s voice on a cassette since the dawn of time, and I keep finding ways to sneak him into my music, like a recurring theme. I don’t know who he is, but I’m sure he’s dead now.
A really nice thing about modern recording software is that audio recording and sequencing are integrated into one application. This is a godsend for those of us that like to record our parts all out of order, i.e. doing acoustic instruments first and then sequencing the electronic stuff, which I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing ten years ago.
Before I begin working on drum parts, I definitely want to have a tempo grid in place. If the bars and beats don’t line up with the music in my tracks, then I won’t be able to take advantage of quantizing, which means automatic correction of timing. If I’ve imported older projects into the software, or if I started recording the song without a click track, I have to fiddle with tempo changes throughout the song until the barlines match up with the music I already have. This isn’t as much of a nightmare as you would think; it’s actually pretty easy once you’ve done it a couple of times.
Once the tempo of the project and the actual tempo of the music are in the same universe, I’m ready to begin recording a drum part. I’m not recording audio, I’m recording MIDI. So instead of seeing a waveform in the new track, I’ll see a piano roll. Any note I’ve played can be dragged to the left and right to make it play earlier or later, or up and down to a different “note”, which in this case means it would play a different drum sample. I can cut, copy, and paste it, change its volume or length — in this case, the length doesn’t affect anything, because my drum sounds are set to ignore the release of the key, and always play the entire sound — and I can use the pencil to draw additional notes.
Instead of trying to play the whole keyboard as a drum set, I break it down into simpler tasks. I usually focus on the kick and snare first, since these sort of define the beat. I always quantize drum parts. It may sound sinful, but if you’ve ever tried to play a totally kick-ass drum rhythm on a keyboard, you soon realize it was never the right tool for the job; the keyboard is just not ideal for precise rhythms the way a drum is. So I think of it less as a “performance”, and more as “entering notes in real time”. Typically, you would quantize to the nearest “16th note”, or “nearest 1/4 beat” as it shows here, but if there are any flams or triplets, I have to work around them and deal with them separately. Also, in the case of notes that were played too sloppily initially, I have to check to make sure they weren’t corrected in the wrong direction.
Generally on the second run-through I’ll add hi hat or ride cymbal. When it gets to the point where I’m adding fills and crashes, I reach a point where I’m doing less playing and more drawing. I just go by my ear; if I’m listening back and I hear it differently in my head than what’s coming off the playback, I’ll just hit stop and edit the bar I just heard to better match what’s in my head. It’s like what a painter does; you start off with something broad and rough, and then you spend a lot of time examining and finessing the details.
I don’t like to give my imaginary drummer three arms. Maybe it would sound perfectly fine, but I like to try to stay within the constraints of playability. For the same reason, when I used to do more bass parts on a keyboard, I avoided playing notes below the low E. So if I add a crash, I generally erase the hi hat or ride cymbal on that beat. I’m old fashioned that way.
Eventually, I declare it to be done, and render the track. This means the software converts the track from a sequence — that is, a piano roll which only triggers the drum samples — into an audio track containing an actual waveform of the complete performance. This means I can’t twiddle with the individual notes anymore, but it also means the software won’t have to work as hard to play it back. It also forces me to commit to it, so I can let go of it mentally, and move on to other things.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with the end result, but in the near future I’ll probably make some adjustments to the sounds I’ve been using. The kick drum in particular is a little “harder” and brighter than I’d like it to sound. I think I’ll rearrange the keyboard layout so the most commonly used sounds are all on black keys, because those are easier to hit rhythmically. Just for variety, I’d also like to create some alternate drum sets using sounds from records, or making beatbox-type drum sounds with my mouth.
So has this technique of using a MIDI sequence to trigger recordings of actual drum sounds, hit by myself with actual sticks, muddied my moral dilemma about “real” vs. “fake” from twenty-some years ago? I think the bottom line is this: it has nothing to do with our tools and techniques. “Real” is about doing it all in the right spirit.
