 Knowing how to program drum patterns is a great asset in the studio and in this video we're going to learn how I do it. Hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Creating your own drum patterns is a great skill to have in the studio. It means that you remain in control of your composition rather than it being directed by some presets which came with your drum plugin. Now this is going to be my method of doing it. It doesn't mean you have to follow it exactly. There's many different ways you could go about this but if you're just starting out I recommend you kind of follow this method and then adapt it to your own needs later on. Now I'm going to be doing this properly rather than quickly and those two things are not always compatible so I'm going to start off with a couple of key pieces of background information that I think really help you to understand why you're doing things. Now notice I say key pieces of background information rather than theory because if I'd said theory a number of you would have run away already. In fact some of you have. Anyway let's get started by looking at drum rolls. Now I don't mean drum rolls I mean the rolls of drums. So let's take a look at the typical roles of the various parts of our drum kit. Starting off with the kick drum and the snare. Now these two are often used together to form the basis of the beat sounding something like this. Now they're often used in combination with this over here. This is the hi-hat. Let's have a listen and see how that beat sounds now with the hi-hat, the kick and the snare. Now this is the most common combinations of parts of our kit which are formed to use the core rhythm or the core beat. Now there's a slight exception to this which I want to mention. Often the hi-hat is swapped out for the ride symbol over here. Sometimes within the same song a drummer will swap from one to the other to create a different feel to the beat. Let's have a listen to the same beat but this time with the hi-hat swapped out for the ride. So we've got the ride symbol there but we've got a whole bunch of other symbols. Now the other symbols are often used for accents rather than being used as a main part of the rhythm. Let's just have a listen to the selection we've got here. Now they can be used in any way you wish to accent certain parts of the song. However they're often used right at the beginning of sections to sort of punctuate the beginning. Let's have a listen to that in action. So that's the key drums there, the kick, the snare, the hi-hat, the ride and then the symbols. What about fills? Well more often than not we use a combination of toms which you can see here. Sometimes also the kick and the snare for fills as well but let's just focus on the toms for now. Now they're often used to lead up to the beginning of a section. Okay and to sort of punctuate those in combination with symbols as well. So let's have a listen to those as they lead into our section. Now of course I have just talked about the very typical roles of these drums but there's lots and lots of examples in famous pieces of music where they're used in different ways. For example actually especially the floor toms can often be used to hold down the core rhythm. Okay and sometimes some of the other symbols are used to keep sort of a regular rhythm as well. They're not just used on accents. So there's all different kinds of ways these drums can be used but these are the most typical uses in contemporary music. So here we're going to create two drum rhythms both at the same speed so 70 beats per minute and both with four beats per bar sounding like this. One, two, three, four. Okay let's get rid of that click track and just add a hi-hat to each of those beats. It's going to sound like this. One, two, three, four. Okay so let's do something different to each of them now. With the first one I'm going to take each of those main beats and divide it by two. With the second one I'm going to take each of those main beats and divide it by three. You can see the grid lines here to reflect that. Now I'm going to place hi-hats on each of those grid lines. So the first one is going to sound like this. One and two and three and four and okay. Now the second one sounds like this. One and then two and then three and then four and then. So it's kind of helpful to count along in that kind of way with the two different rhythms. So one and two and three and four and and then with the second one one and then two and then three and then four and then. That may become a little bit more important later on. Okay so moving on let's now add a snare drum to the second and fourth beat of each of these rhythms and then let's add some kick drums or bass drums depending which part of the world you come from and we're going to add those two different points but we're going to make sure they're on the grid lines. Okay that's important. So the first one has those eight different grid lines. The second one has 12 different grid lines because we divided each of the four beats by three. So let's have a listen now to the first one and the second one. So you can hear they sound distinctly different. Okay well let's add some instrument to that. So we're going to add to each of these a very familiar sounding guitar pattern which fits each of them. So the first one sounds like this. And the second one sounds like this. So even though they're both in 4-4 and they're both at 70 beats per minute they sound quite different yet in terms of their rhythm properties. Have a listen to the first one again. Okay and the second one. So what if we took the guitar part from the first one and swapped it with the guitar part from the second one. So we're mixing up the kind of rhythm properties of the instrument and the actual drums. First of all let's listen now to our first rhythm. Can you hear how it almost sounds in time but not quite. It's as if the rhythm is kind of loose and a little bit out of time there. That's because we've taken that guitar part which is been divided basically into three parts for each beat and we've mixed it up with the drum part which is being divided by two parts for each beat. Okay they don't quite fit together. Now let's have a listen to the second one. Now this gets a little bit complicated because that doesn't quite fit together but you may sometimes creatively do that. It's not unknown for someone to be playing a straight rhythm and then for a drummer to play in triplets over the top. So you may want to do it creatively but let's just say simply at the moment it doesn't quite fit together. Now it's important to understand the difference between these two types of rhythms and for most contemporary music there is that basic difference. There is four four rhythms if you like which have divisions of two and you can subdivide by two again of course and there's those which have divisions of three. Normally instrument parts which have that division of three and drum parts which have that division by two don't quite fit together. Now how do you know when you're first starting out with that guitar part or that piano part you've already written has those divisions? Well I find it helpful to do that counting we were doing earlier. So with the first one one and two and three and four and with the second type of counting one and then two and then three and then four and then if you count along with your instrument part which you've already written if it doesn't seem to quite fit with one or the other then that's a good indication other than that a little bit of trial and error. Now that's important in terms of constructing your drum parts but it also becomes important to have this little bit of knowledge when you come to quantising something that we're going to cover a little bit later on. Oh by the way if you're finding this video useful could you go ahead and hit the like button for me do it right away so that you don't forget and if you do like this kind of content make sure you subscribe and ring the bell so that you're notified about my other videos. Now we're going to move on to a real-world scenario I've got a guitar part and I want to create some drums for it and this is a key thing in my approach the drums are working with the existing composition this is what makes this method so cool. Now I know that some of you can play whole drum parts on your keyboard or on drum pads and I'm not that skilled at that so I like to break it down into different sections that just makes things easier to manage and I can treat them a little bit differently so we're going to start off by adding the hi-hat. So I'm using Cakewalk today but it doesn't really matter which door you use the principles are just the same it's just some of the details about how we go about things which are a little bit different. Now you can see here that I've got a guitar part loaded up this is my reference for my drum pattern now I don't always go ahead and record things like a guitar part up front sometimes it's just in my head and I use what's in my head as a reference but assuming that you're not mind readers I've put it here for you today so you know what I'm referring to. Now before I play I just want to point out there's some distinct sections to this right at the beginning here there's a sort of fairly repetitive pattern then it changes here for a little while in this section here then it goes back to the original pattern here and then again changes towards the end. So let's start off by listening to it and listen for the first change which is here and it's those variations in a piece of music that really makes me want to write custom drum parts it then feels like the whole thing is sort of cohesive and a real piece of music played by a real band. If you play sort of preset parts then it can all sort of feel a little bit manufactured. So I'm going to start off by recording the hi-hat now you can record all of your drum parts in one track but I've elected to actually record some of them on separate tracks it makes it a little bit easier for you to see what I'm doing and also I do sometimes do it in that way. I'm going to start off with this hi-hat so I'm just going to back the play head up to around about a bar before I actually the guitar starts there and I'm just going to go ahead and play the hi-hat notes from my MIDI keyboard. So that's a successful take or good enough for now. Now you can see that the main thing that we can see in terms of variation I mean the beats will be slightly on and off the beat but the main thing we can see in variation is the velocities there that's really important I think that's a part of what gives it a more natural feel. If we just recorded some small section here and then copied and pasted it across it would all sound very familiar to the listener as the song goes on. So I actually like to record large sections like that even though it's a little tedious or sometimes I even record the whole song just on the hi-hat like that just to make sure there's no real repetition now you don't always hit the right velocities when you have your performance so you may want to go ahead right away and adjust some of the velocities. I think just here where that guitar did change I think this note could just be a little louder just like these four here they match the pattern of what the guitar's doing there yeah. Now you could go ahead and fiddle but I think that's going to be good enough for me for now. The next thing I want to do is just make sure the timing is nice and tidy especially for the hi-hat. So you can see the notes here are sitting pretty close to the grid which means my timing wasn't too bad today but some other days it really isn't that great and also if you're dealing with things like latency it can be quite off. So it's a good idea at this stage to tidy up especially with the hi-hat which creates a kind of a framework for the other drums to sit around in most cases. So I'm going to go ahead and tidy things up now I could do it manually so I just could grab notes like so and just start to drag them around closer to the grid that probably wouldn't help that much today since they all are pretty close to the grid but sometimes that can be a good way to approach it just when you've got the odd one or two notes which are just you know more off of the grid than you want them to be. The other thing you may want to do is deal with things in bulk and most stores have what is called a quantized feature for that. So a quantized feature will tidy up those notes and put them on the grid or close to the grid we'll talk about that in a moment but first of all let me just select all of my notes here like so and then in cakewalk here I press Q on the keyboard to bring up the quantized dialogue box. Now the first thing that's important is to select the correct resolution over here. Now I did play one eighth notes on the hi-hat meaning each bar was divided into eighth so this is already the correct resolution but I may have played faster notes or slower notes in which case I would pick the most suitable resolution. Now remember earlier we talked about things being either divided by two or divided by three this is where this becomes very very important. If you have a basic division of three then you may be wanting to use the triplet selections here. Now in cakewalk it says triplet in some other doors it may just have a little letter t or be symbolized in another way but that's why understanding that principle is extremely important when it comes to using the quantized feature. Now you can just go ahead and experiment sometimes it won't go well and you'll just have to undo and try a different setting. Now the other setting which is really important is something called strength or at least here in cakewalk it's called strength. This is a setting which controls how close to each grid line it's actually going to push that note to. Now if we have it on 100% like so and I click on okay you'll have seen the notes shuffle around there and now they're all exactly on the grid line. Now you may or may not want that depending on a genre of music and how natural you want it to feel. I like for this type of music to use something less than 100% so I'll open the quantized box again and I'll go to a strength let's just go to say 80 that should be fine. So I'll just click on okay for that to happen. You saw them shuffle around now they may look as though they're exactly on the grid but they're not. I could try different settings but I'm happy with that for now. That's really important stage I think with the hi-hat in making sure it's nice and tidy. So next I'm going to add the kick and the snare this is where our rhythms really going to start to come together. Now the snare part for me is pretty obvious if I listen to the guitar part the accents are on the second and the fourth beat. Now that's very very typical for contemporary music. They don't have to be on the second and fourth beats and some of the most interesting rhythms don't have them there but in this case it does seem the most suitable thing. I'll play the track and I'll show you what I mean by just playing the snare. I think you'll hear what I mean there that's just where it's naturally going to be sitting. Now the kick isn't quite so straightforward. The kick is certainly going to be on the first beat of each bar but beyond that there's lots of different variations we could do. Now what you actually decide to do will depend on your own creativity what you're looking for and your own particular piece of music. In this case I would also be thinking about what my bass guitar part is going to be and either I will try and write a kick pattern which is going to fit in with that or I'll write a kick pattern I like and when I write the bass guitar part I'll fit in with the kick somewhat. You don't have to be exact. Now I'm going to give you a demonstration on some of the things I could do with the most basic one first. That's one of them. Let's try something different. You get the idea. There's a few different things you could do with that kick. I am going to stick with the most basic one for now and we'll look at some variations later. Let's record them. Now that was very very basic. Sometimes I will record things more complex than that rather than go in and edit but just so you guys can see what my approach would be in terms of adding some embellishment to this. I've recorded the most basic version and I'll add the embellishments in a moment but the first thing I'm going to do before I do that is tidy things up again so I'm just going to click on my track there where I've just recorded click on cue on my keyboard bring up that quantizer window and I'm just going to leave the same settings yeah one eighth notes and on 80 strength click on okay and then we're some slightly shoddy playing in there so that may have helped me. I'll just give it a quick listen. Yeah I think that's working quite well but it would be nice to have some more sort of human types of variation in there. Let's take a look at that next. So this stage I just want to make that kick and snare pattern a little bit more exciting or a little bit more natural by adding in a few notes which are as quite as important as these other ones but they're going to play a nice role as I say in making things sound a little bit more natural and have a bit more variation. Let's start off with the kick here okay now you may have an idea in your head where you want those extra beats to be or you may just want to experiment that's what I'm going to do now I'm just going to throw in a new kick beat here on the grid just on that second note there you can see that and I'll just make sure with this that the velocity is down fairly low with these sort of extra notes there's sometimes called grace notes you want to make sure that the velocity is down pretty low okay let's just have a listen to that okay that's fine a little bit boring actually so I'm just going to move it to a different spot up here let's have a listen to this that's fine I could copy that and make it the same I guess over here maybe add another one in here and I'll just bring the velocity down a little bit let's have a listen to those two bars that's okay again I'll just adjust the velocities there you get the idea you can really just experiment it here now sometimes of course less is more and you don't need all of this but if you do just want to create that little bit of variation in your rhythms this is a fun way to go about actually drag that one up there instead of keeping it there let's have a listen to that bar you get the idea so it's not quite so monotonous now you could create regular patterns out of this or you could as I say just go ahead and randomly put some things in there I'd leave that up to you in your creativity but it is fun to experiment in this way now I can do the same thing with the snare in fact this is it's even better with the snare in terms of grace notes so let's just try something here I'll just put one in here okay make it a little bit louder let's see how that bar now sounds it's okay but it's not exactly what I want to get what I want I'm actually going to have to increase the resolution so I'm going to change it from one eighth notes up to let's try this one sixteenth notes here and let's just shuffle that little snare beat over there just by one step now let's have a listen yeah I love that sort of thing I'm just going to do that again down here let's have a listen okay that one was a little bit okay maybe maybe not with a lower velocity maybe it could work for different songs don't really like it that much but you know you get the idea play around with it experiment with it and just put those extra little sort of beats in there to create that nice bit of variation as if the drummer is just not doing the same thing every single time now another thing that you can do which does work quite well with snare beats is what they call flams this is where again you have two beats but they're close to each other but not on the grid they're much closer together than that I'll just zoom in here I'll just move along a little bit let's take this extra note we had here and I'm just going to drag it so I'm just going to turn snap off I'm just going to drag it back so it's right next to this note here let's have a listen I don't know if you heard that there but that's called a flam you need to adjust the velocities a little bit to get the right effect but usually they're going to be really close together like that and you'll get that sort of sound and that's another really nice bit of variation that you can put in there to make your drum sound a little bit more natural I'm going to go ahead and do that by myself now and I'll catch you in the next segment okay so I'm now going to go ahead and add some accents with various symbols starting off with actually the hi-hat the hi-hat has another option to it normally which is the open hi-hat sound and this is a special sort of note within most plugins for drums where they where the note actually interacts with the other notes which control the regular hi-hat sound what I mean is you can play an open hi-hat yeah like so but if you play that and follow it up with a regular hi-hat sound it makes the sound of that hi-hat closing you don't hear both at the same time yeah one kills off the other so I'm going to let my original hi-hat play but I'm going to play some open hi-hats in there just to add some accents let's go ahead and do that now okay so you heard what was happening there I'm just going to grab what I did there and I'm just going to right click here in cakewalk and go to bounce the clip so that they're all on the same line you can see those open hi-hats there okay now I could go ahead and quantize those I suppose I'll just I'll do it do that now I don't really probably need to but hey let's do it anyway so that's that done the next thing I'm going to do is add in some accents for symbols I'm going to do it right at the beginning I'm going to have a symbol crash in the first beat but I'll do it in some other places as well now I'm actually going to record this on the same track where I recorded this hi-hat there's a reason for that which I'll explain in a moment but I have renamed the track over here to hi-hat and symbols so let's go ahead and just record those symbol crashes that's starting now okay so again I'm just going to grab all of those in cakewalk right click bounce the clip so that they're all there together we can see the symbols down here now the main reason I've put this on the same track is I actually don't want the symbol crashes and a hi-hat to happen at the same time I'm not sure if you can sort of do you can do that on the drums but it doesn't feel quite natural to me so I usually get rid of hi-hats where a symbol is playing so I'll do that now I'll just delete that hi-hat there where that symbol's playing I'll delete it here now I have to be a bit careful because this open hi-hat which we can see here is going to remain open so I've got a couple of choices here I could get rid of that or I could move this one closer let's just see how that sounds it could be interesting no I don't like that at all let's not do that instead well I think I'll just get rid of both of them okay so I'll get rid of that I'll actually get rid of the open hi-hat let's have a listen okay that's all good and again I'll do the same thing down here get rid of this open hi-hat get rid of this hi-hat and I'll just leave the final crash there at the end okay that's working just fine for me so that's the general idea with symbols and as I say the main principle that I follow is I just don't have them playing at the same time as the hi-hat you don't have to follow that as a rule if it sounds okay to you keep it like that now if you remember earlier I talked about the fact that the hi-hat could be swapped out in some cases with a ride symbol I just wanted to give you a quick demonstration of that I've got our same part here in the first half I'm using a hi-hat in the second part I'm using a ride symbol I just want you to appreciate the difference in feel when you do that let's have a listen now it's a bit beyond the scope of this tutorial to talk about the really fancy parts the frills and the fills if you like if you'd like me to make a tutorial about some more advanced things to do with beat making or drum beat making then let me know about that in the comments down below now I have added a couple of frills and fills to this mostly using a combination of kick and snare for some fills and tom-toms for others so for example just as an intro I've used this a little beat between the kick and the snare here something typical for me at least I don't know how many other people do it sounds like this and then a little further on if we go down here and I scroll this around you can see there's some toms here now just as a rule of thumb when you do tom fills they normally go from high to low of course there's no rules with this if you can make it sound good with different variations but as a starting point if you're just starting out generally we start off with the high toms and work a way up work our way down now with toms I try not to quantize them at all personally I like those to sound really natural and being a little behind or ahead of the beat can sometimes sound really good with tom fills so I generally unless they're really really bad I don't quantize them at all and if they are really bad I'll just generally adjust them manually that's the very quick guide to those fills and frills now obviously in this video I've used a lot of generalizations in terms of the rhythms and also the roles of the drums of course the world is your oyster in terms of creativity and indeed outside of contemporary music with other forms of music some of this stuff doesn't quite apply if you'd like me to make a video about some of the more advanced techniques and particularly how I get these drums to sound even more natural could you let me know in the comments down below if I get enough of you asking for it then I'll definitely go ahead and make that video now while you're down there check out the link in the description for my patreon.com where for as little as one dollar per month you can help me help you by making more videos like this and I'll see you in the next video