Finding the Right Drums Style for a Song

[frodo]

Jul 18, 2008, 10:55am, lyle wrote:Jul 18, 2008, 10:21am, frodo wrote:- that is, unless you're going for that Motown sound, - they always used two drummers! - until next timefrodoSo Motown used Rick Allen as a second drummer...? Well, no - the second one was a heavy smoker, and used one arm for that all the time, leaving just one arm and two legs for the playing. - until next timefrodo

[mewman]

Hi GreyA good drummer knows how to capture the right "kicks" in a song. What is happening with the guitar or bass is important for the drummer to "get". Jazz drummers like Tony Williams or Jack DeJohnette know how to carry a songs feel with their ride cymbals. I don't think it's much different for any style. Do you have a keyboard controller you can use to trigger your drum sounds with? Start with a high hat or ride cymbal sound that you like and play the key while listening to your tracks. Pay special attention to the guitar and bass and just have fun hitting the key and trying to get the feel of the tune. If you can play a guitar, you have enough rhythm in you to play air drums. Just translate the feel to hitting one key! Once you settle into something that feels good, enable a track and let 'er rip. Experiment with different quantization settings until you find one that tightens things up but doesn't destroy the feel you want. Next, enable another track and go for the bass drum. Think of where you want to emphasize certain kicks...maybe it's a bass or guitar hit that places a strong accent on a word or part of the guitar rhythm. Again, just listen and react. Record, and quantize. Have fun! Next choose a snare sound. Maybe your tune feels good with a steady back beat, maybe you want to be more adventurous. Record, and quantize. A good drummer knows how to mark the form with fills and cymbol crashes. What feels good to you. Sprinkle a cymbal splash or snare flourish at the end of the form each time. By building a custom drum track this way, you probably will at least come up with the kind of feel you are looking for. Armed with this knowledge, you can then peruse the pre recorded patterns available to you in your drum software and find the closest thing. You also just might stumble on something that is unique and perfectly matched to your song.I'm primarily a pianist, but I studied percussion in school and played drums in an orchestra pit, a blues band and in a few jazz combos. It was so much fun to just have to react and hit a big flat surface with a stick! I am not saying it is easy to be a great drummer, but you can trust yourself to find the right feel for your tune. If you can do that and record a version of it, it will go a long way towards giving a drummer you might hire a good idea of what you are looking for as well.Mewman

[billg]

As I'm mainly a bass player I always start with the bass part. The bass part will dictate what the kick drum part is gonna be and after that everything seems to falls into place. Same thing if you're building from a loop, if you know what the bass part is gonna be & match that with a kick drum part that fits then you're gonna be pretty much in the ballpark. One thing that kind of bugs me these days is that with so many "one man band" situations (like mine!) the relationship & interaction/tightness between the bass drum & bass is getting lost. If you play guitar it's not THAT difficult to lay down a simple but real bass guitar part. That's a good guide IMO.

[grey]

Jul 19, 2008, 7:59am, mewman wrote: Do you have a keyboard controller you can use to trigger your drum sounds with? Start with a high hat or ride cymbal sound that you like and play the key while listening to your tracks. Pay special attention to the guitar and bass and just have fun hitting the key and trying to get the feel of the tune. If you can play a guitar, you have enough rhythm in you to play air drums. Just translate the feel to hitting one key! Once you settle into something that feels good, enable a track and let 'er rip. Experiment with different quantization settings until you find one that tightens things up but doesn't destroy the feel you want. Next, enable another track and go for the bass drum. Think of where you want to emphasize certain kicks...maybe it's a bass or guitar hit that places a strong accent on a word or part of the guitar rhythm. Again, just listen and react. Record, and quantize. Have fun! Next choose a snare sound. Maybe your tune feels good with a steady back beat, maybe you want to be more adventurous. Record, and quantize. A good drummer knows how to mark the form with fills and cymbol crashes. What feels good to you. Sprinkle a cymbal splash or snare flourish at the end of the form each time. By building a custom drum track this way, you probably will at least come up with the kind of feel you are looking for. Armed with this knowledge, you can then peruse the pre recorded patterns available to you in your drum software and find the closest thing. You also just might stumble on something that is unique and perfectly matched to your song.MewmanMewman, that is fantastic! I think that's a great idea, and I'm saving this one in the big Word file full of tips and ideas that I keep. This feels like a great solution to me. I've been messing with Jamstix a lot in the last couple of days and I'm definately getting more familiar with the styles, but now I'm going to give your method a try. The great thing about Jamstix is that once I get a series of parts down as you described, I can then turn it over to the various drummer models and let them ride on it for a while to see what happens, then a bit more tweaking and I should have a great drum track. Nice. Thanks again.Enjoy the day.Grey

[mojobone]

mewman's method is similar to mine, and I would have refrained from posting after such an excellent suggestion, but for this: I usually track the kick and snare in a single pass. I often start with a track of ride cymbal, because live drummers tend to use one of their limbs to 'keep time'.

[gongchime]

To my way of thinking you can't use ANY preprogrammed sequences or prerecorded drum loops unless you're doing a certain kind of hip hop or trance music and even then, it could always be better if they weren't doing that. There is an inverse relationship between the bass guitar's activity or the lack of it and the importance of the vocal line or the absence of the vocal line. The bass guitar and the bass drum should be similar if not sometimes exactly the same. That's how we know they're supposed to be part of the same song and not completely unrelated gobbledygook. Let's say you created a killer bass guitar part but don't have a drummer and then slap some beat with that. They're never going to sound like the close-knit family that they're supposed to without significant tweaking of either the bass part or the drum part. Another issue is making the drum part sound like a human could have played it even if everyone knows it's a machine. To that end, here is my handy dandy guide to drum programming.Hopefully, your drum or bass part won't be as boring as this but, not surprisingly, preprogrammed bass drum parts often ARE as boring as this. Notice I've taken a basic four on the floor ala Copeland and repeated it with variation, then repeated all of that with variation again. The last four lines are the completed section of music, with stronger and stronger rhythmic cadences built right in.The numbers below signify the importance of each rhythmic location both on and off the beat. 84627351. The least important is given a number 1. That is the first one I've chosen to change. I'm taking my rhythms from a pool of rhythms and going through them one by one. You don't have to do this. It's just one way of working. You could just as easily use the same one from the gene pool several times.The off-beats are the least important and the on-beats go 4231 in descending order of importance and hence likelihood to change. As you can see form this, beat one is the least likely to be given an embellishing rhythmic event.I got these ideas from someone who knows drum programming. This will help your bass drum and bass guitar stuff sound MUCH better. You would of course be using your ten times more interesting bass guitar rhythm in this bass drum part instead of the example I've created except with variations at the locations indicated.There ARE other ways to create the variations in the bass drum. This is just one sure fire way.There should also be a relationship between the high hat and the keyboard/guitar parts and most probably the vocal rhythm. The relationship to the other parts should be heard in either the high hat's accents if it's straight eighths or straight sixteenths or it's actual rhythm it it's not straight eighths or straight sixteenths.

[gongchime]

If the previous rhythm was a chorus and you wanted the intensity of the song to come down a bit for the verse or bridge sections, here's a way of constructing that from the rhythm of the chorus. You COULD use an entirely different groove but frequently all that serves to do is to make it sound like the verse and chorus are part of different songs and should not be together in the same song.Of course this is just one method of bringing the intensity down. It shows the original rhythm of the section and then less intense variations created through the technique of subtraction.

[geo]

Jul 19, 2008, 7:59am, mewman wrote:Hi GreyA good drummer knows how to capture the right "kicks" in a song. What is happening with the guitar or bass is important for the drummer to "get". Jazz drummers like Tony Williams or Jack DeJohnette know how to carry a songs feel with their ride cymbals. I don't think it's much different for any style. Do you have a keyboard controller you can use to trigger your drum sounds with? Start with a high hat or ride cymbal sound that you like and play the key while listening to your tracks. Pay special attention to the guitar and bass and just have fun hitting the key and trying to get the feel of the tune. If you can play a guitar, you have enough rhythm in you to play air drums. Just translate the feel to hitting one key! Once you settle into something that feels good, enable a track and let 'er rip. Experiment with different quantization settings until you find one that tightens things up but doesn't destroy the feel you want. Next, enable another track and go for the bass drum. Think of where you want to emphasize certain kicks...maybe it's a bass or guitar hit that places a strong accent on a word or part of the guitar rhythm. Again, just listen and react. Record, and quantize. Have fun! Next choose a snare sound. Maybe your tune feels good with a steady back beat, maybe you want to be more adventurous. Record, and quantize. A good drummer knows how to mark the form with fills and cymbol crashes. What feels good to you. Sprinkle a cymbal splash or snare flourish at the end of the form each time. By building a custom drum track this way, you probably will at least come up with the kind of feel you are looking for. Armed with this knowledge, you can then peruse the pre recorded patterns available to you in your drum software and find the closest thing. You also just might stumble on something that is unique and perfectly matched to your song.I'm primarily a pianist, but I studied percussion in school and played drums in an orchestra pit, a blues band and in a few jazz combos. It was so much fun to just have to react and hit a big flat surface with a stick! I am not saying it is easy to be a great drummer, but you can trust yourself to find the right feel for your tune. If you can do that and record a version of it, it will go a long way towards giving a drummer you might hire a good idea of what you are looking for as well.MewmanThat's sorta my approach as well... my main instrument is bass... so I always pay close attention to the kick.... I normally program loops in the arrange window of logic... hi hat and guit are nice to get a little sync going... especially when the hat opens.... fills are my hardest to replicate... Mazz's suggestion of visualizing a drumming is good advice... my early programs were way too busy... I might have had a 4 armed drummer in there....I use loops sometimes... mostly for writing so I don't get bogged down.... I would suggest just spending some time with your library... most programs allow you too favorite loops, so you can have a shorter list to work from... also try them all... if you can alter them try stripping the percussion out of a Latin beat and use it for rock... things like that.... and of course listen to what your "ala's" are doing on their tracks as a base reference....Hope something in there helps...Peace, Geo

[elser]

Had to chime in on this cause I haven't heard anybody else bring it up. I like to use midi or audio loops that were played by real drummers. The nuance in velocity and feel is real hard to duplicate when drums isn't your first instrument. Coming from that point of view I will then start auditioning loops that I suspect are close to what I want to hear, i.e. 4/4 meter with closed hi hat pattern, something general like that.Now when I start listening I try to be less of a 'composer' than say a band guy, as if I were in a room with a real drummer. I would rarely expect a real drummer to play every nuance and inflection as I supposedly hear it in my head. Rather I would give him a general description of what I want, then play for him and see what he comes up with. I would then play along and make it work.Similarly, when auditioning drum loops, I'll have this open minded approach and perhaps I'll find a pattern that's better than the one I had in my head. Or maybe it just needs a few editing tweeks to make it just right.Of course this isn't an approach to take with orchestral or electronic music or other such genres, but if your trying to make your song sound like a band played it, it just might be helpful.elser

[aimusic]

The method I took was to learn to play drums, funny enough - I used to just do air drumming like a madman, I'd stick on my music (rock mainly coz I love those insane fills they do - specially Danny Carey (tool) or Josh Freese (A Perfect Circle) ) and air drum it but hold sticks so that it kinda feels different, It worked because when I sat behind a drum kit I could play it 1000 times better than a mate of mine who had been drumming for a good year...That way you start to think like a drummer as opposed to programming, like mentioned above, when programming, you can sometimes get a LITTLE crazy....also a good tip is, never under-estimate the power of the kick on a weaker beat, adds flavour