MIDI DRUMS: The Non-Rocket-Science Method
“MIDI drums sound lifeless.”
“Real drums just feel so much better.”
“A machine can never replicate what a human can do.”
If you’re a musician and you have ears (a likely confluence), then you have heard these sentences before.
You’ve also heard them spoken by people who regularly listen to MIDI drums without knowing it.
Nobody dislikes the sound of programmed drums; they dislike the sound of poorly programmed drums. Or they dislike the psychological experience of knowingly listening to programmed drums while contemplating our inevitable extinction at the hands of our own technological innovations.
However, at this point, an experience we’ve all been having for years is that of listening to MIDI drums that are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. They can be achieved, they are achieved all the time, and surprisingly, it isn’t even very difficult or expensive to do — that is, once you wade through all the pervasive misunderstandings and Luddite paranoia.
Let’s start at the very beginning. What are MIDI drums, and how do they work?
It’s easy to get swept away in technical information. All you really need to understand is that a MIDI drum instrument, like any MIDI instrument, is a library of pre-recorded sounds that you trigger by playing a keyboard. In turn, that keyboard itself can be played by your computer instead of your fingers, and using MIDI you can write and adjust each and every note by hand until you are perfectly satisfied with the resulting performance.
Drums are particularly conducive to this. Unlike many other instruments, drums are played by both humans and MIDI in essentially the same way; you can hit any drum, at any time, at any velocity…and that’s about it. This means when you construct a “virtual kit,” you can instruct the computer to play that kit in exactly the way a human would. However, whether or not the result sounds like a human playing depends on some other factors. It is these factors that form the only blueprint you actually need to achieve excellent MIDI drums.
1. Do you, or does someone in the room with you, know how to play drums?
This is so frequently overlooked, and yet it is arguably the single most important factor overall. If you don’t know how the part you’re creating would actually be played, you can’t make it sound realistic.
This doesn’t mean you need to be able to play it in real life; it means that you need to understand how it would be played, and you need to be reasonably certain that somebody with the proper skill could play it. There’s really no way around the need for at least some experience behind a real kit.
2. What MIDI instrument are you using?
Not all virtual kits are created equal. My personal, non-sponsored, honest opinion is that you can either use Toontrack’s Superior Drummer 3 or you can settle for the suboptimal.
That being said, there are other high quality products on the market and more being released every year. IK Multimedia’s Modo Drum or Steven Slate Drums SSD5 might also suffice depending on the style/sound you’re after.
The point is this: the better MIDI instrument choice you make, the less work you will have to do.
For my project Watch Me Breathe, I have used Superior Drummer 3 and only a lightly modified variation of the stock preset “Metal Premiere” kit on the last two albums. With the exception of ghost notes and occasional flourishes, I set every single hit to full velocity and lock absolutely every hit to the grid. I think it sounds great, and does so within literal minutes each and every time I produce a new track.
Instead of obsessing over minute adjustments in your programming and falling down the rabbit hole of “what does/does not sound natural,” try investing in a top-quality plugin and see how it sounds dumb-simple and gridlocked. You might be surprised.
3. How are you mixing?
You can go a long way with presets, especially with a massive world-class preset library such as Superior Drummer 3. However, one of the most fun and creatively stimulating parts of MIDI drum use is the construction of your own kit. Swap out different snares, different kicks, different blends. Try a new room. Adjust the levels, compress, EQ, refine. This is fun, and it is also important — but understand that mixing MIDI drums is unlike mixing anything else. In the numerous possible adjustments to be made, there is ample opportunity to expose the inauthenticity of the sound.
When you record a real person playing a real drum kit in a real room, as we all know, there is a very special phenomenon called bleed. When the drummer hits the snare, that unique individual snare hit happens in every microphone simultaneously. Beneath the prominent sound of the snare mic itself, the hit is subtly bolstered by 8 or 10 or 12 other microphones capturing the exact same sound. The same is true for every hit of every piece of the kit, and all microphones together create a very detailed illustration of the performance from every angle.
MIDI drums aren’t like that. Each hit is individual and isolated. In order for MIDI drums to have bleed like real drums in a room, some really, really, really smart math-knowing people had to figure out how to simulate it. Not every MIDI drum instrument has this advanced software included; and if it doesn’t, you can forget it.
However, even with sophisticated plugins like Superior Drummer, you have to be extremely mindful of this “blended full picture” effect. This might sound like a headache, and it certainly can be; but over the years I’ve been able to condense it all down to one crucial ingredient: the virtual room.
Any drum plugin worth trying to use will give you a simulated room mic channel. This channel is your golden ticket to a realistic sound. Compress it and crank it. I guarantee you will be surprised how loud you can make this channel. Listening to the drums isolated, it may start to sound like 50% or 75% room mic and like less and less detail, but listen again in the full mix.
4. Ears or eyes?
Last but not least, how are you evaluating your results? If there is one tip I could give to struggling producers, it would be to forget everything they think they know about music production and simply listen to the music they are trying to emulate.
I learned to produce in the metalcore scene, and I still work with metalcore artists from time to time. The gist of what I’m about to say can be applied to just about any genre though.
While cutting my teeth working on metalcore demos, I found myself initially absorbed in all kinds of conventional wisdom. One relevant example was: drums are supposed to sound natural, not robotic.
This seemed obvious to the point of unimportance, until I bothered to actually listen to the popular metalcore bands everybody else was trying to emulate.
Clearly, the ubiquitous objective among top metalcore producers was to make the drums sound as robotic as possible and pay no mind to what is “natural.” Even in the cases where bands were confirmed to have recorded real drums in the studio (by BTS footage, for example), the person at the desk would then quickly get to work manipulating the recording to be as similar to MIDI drums as possible; layering or outright replacing with samples, quantizing 100% to the grid, etc.
All this means that one’s ears (which are always most important by definition) told a different story than what was being told everywhere else.
Whether you’re producing metalcore, or indie pop, or experimental fusion Mr Bungle remixes; you will find incongruities between what your hear people saying and what you hear in apex recordings. Always trust your ears, and be prepared for them to refute the ideas of your peers and even mentors.
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At this point in my career, I am convinced this is all you need to program amazing MIDI drums. As is so often the case, it’s as much about what you don’t need to do as it is what you do.
Invest in a complete professional program like Superior Drummer, compose a drum part that can actually be played in real life, make sure your room/ambient channel(s) are nice and prominent, and beyond that…just do what sounds good to you. Feel free to ignore audio propriety and dive into your own aural pleasures. I’ve been doing that for 10+ years now and it’s taken me a long and thrilling way.
