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!

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 🙂)

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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

This has been one of the best videos to help explain to a newbie/non-drummer how to make stuff sound more realistic and useful. Thank you so much for that. Also, favorite line from this video, 12:15 "Stop repeating yourself, like I said earlier..." Ha! Great video. Thanks for taking the time!

A season drummer gave me advice. He said, "Just remember, a drummer only has two hands and two feet. We are not an octopus." I've taken that advice with me ever since. I can spot programmed drums a mile away sometimes because folks program a tom, snare shot and ride all on the same measure.

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.

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.🥚

The machine gun effect - especially on snare - does not occur when a drum machine has got only one sample for the respective drum. It occurs on machines that stop playing the first sample when they start playing the next. Modern drum machines and Kontakt instruments layer dozens of samples on top of each other without cutting any of them short, which is how they achieve a far more realistic drum roll sound.

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!

For my demos, I program the drums. However, for a final recording where you want your drums to sound acoustic, record with an actual set

Toontrack’s EZ Drummer 2 and/or EZ Drummer 3. Problem solved! Best drummer I’ve ever hired, and that was 10+ years ago!!. Never talks back or shows up hungover, and he’ll never steal your girl or your money!!

I find mixing midi drums with real percussion helps a great deal. I keep a snare and brushes mic'd up near my desk and I often add this to tracks to give it a more human feel. BTW, I am having to upgrade to Catalina in order to install Kontakt 7 in order to install your soft drums ... but I know it's going to be worth it. Thanks Jon.

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.

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

As a guitarist I found this video super useful, thank you Jon! Hoping this will bring a bit of life to my demos. Great content

"You need to know what you're trying to make" -- I think you hit the nail on the head there Jon. I think the projects I get most frustrated with are the ones that I don't know what I'm trying to make.

I used to have a Boss Dr. Rhythm, which while limited, did have a few nice features. It had two different velocities, which I used to vary the emphasis of drums, and it had an output that I could plug into an analog synth to trigger the synth. That was nice. But some of the best drum patterns were created by low batteries generating some random drum patterns. Doing midi drums when I got a General Midi keyboard was a different experience. I had multiple drum sets to use, and with a midi sequencer, I could vary all sorts of effects on the sounds. It was also fun to either take a melodic midi part and set it to the drum channel, or alternatively change the drum track to a melodic track. You could get some interesting sounds and effects that way.

You’re a natural, thank you for the breakdown and info. Watching your videos always helps recalibrate my internal creative systems!

thanks for your experience insight a lot of what you said i already unintentionally did happy mistakes or beauty in mperfections

4:45 is solid gold. Worth the price of admission right there.

Fantastic information! I know I'll be watching this many times with the daw open (and your library loaded). Thanks again, cheers!

Getting behind the kit for yourself is extremely helpful. It can also inform you of what feels good to play as well. Personally, I lean towards generous cymbal washes before coming in with a fat tom groove before introducing the kick and snare from first chorus into Verse 2.

I haven’t watched completely yet but just touching on this topic is going to help! 🙏🏾😌

Bro have you made a video about your lighting set up? It’s gorgeous

Good tutorial for the finer points of building rhythm tracks musically

I learned all of this on my own. It took ages. Good advice.

I am glad I didnt get into daws into i was 35. I had over 20 years of drumming under my belt, 10 of cello and it made it so much easier. it took me maybe a month to learn keyboard, since I knew all the step patterns for about 6 modes. it did take me quite a while to understand the program though and was frustrating, but drums I absolutely love programming in a daw, some of the texture and sounds you can get are just awesome i mean i can make soo much stuff i didnt realize before. If I was younger I would not have had the knowledge I have now from over the years and and developed the right mindset and ear. at first i was a bit frustrated trying to do rolls and 32nds that werent well that machine gun, but eventually i just put another snare in and turned down the velocity and did a tiny bit of overlay on when it triggers and every few notes I would max out veloticty for an accent,

Tons of tips in here. Nice to hear that some of the things I was thinking as the way go are hints that you use yourself, having created vsti .I have a Sonor 4 piece jazz kit in my studio but I did just get a linnstrument which allows for realistic jazz style drumming, which is what I am exploring the set up on now and why I stopped by. and I also use my MPC live with time control set to off.

Jon, this was awesome! I definitely have spent HOURS to try making drums sound realistic. I have a bit of an advice request for you and any viewers that’s unrelated to drum programming. I’ve been saving for a while to get my first pair of studio monitors. However, with Apple Music’s announcement, about atmos and atmos systems being far more common in theatres/ home theatres, I’m wondering if I should just make the jump to an atmos rig. Do you think I should get a great pair of monitors like Focal Trio 6s, or an atmos system of “lesser” monitors like iLiud speakers?

Dynamics are helpful, accenting the 1 and the &, in a 16th note hi hat pattern, ghost notes on the snare, humanise the pattern by moving things slightly ahead or behind the beat. Realistic drum programming is a specialist thing and takes s lot of concentration.

Good tips on the subject! I'd like to add the importance of rim sounds for snare at least in rock/metal/etc music. Also reverb is an important tool for making the drums sound like they are in the same room

Thanks for the great informational and instructional video. Getting a set of MIDI percussion tracks not only to sound right but to FEEL right can be a daunting challenge even for someone with a pretty good sense of touch, rhythm, dynamics, and pitch. Your suggestions here are so damn USEFUL! Thank you.

Excellent video. You clearly addressed many of the pitfalls that rest between the idea of our realistic sound vs what we sometimes end up with, via midi replications. It's kind of weird. As a player in live bands for many years, and eventually a full-time music producer, I have always aimed at reproducing the "live" energy, flare and feel of the physical player. So much so, that I would (and often still do) think of the specific player, and try to emulate their style, but the chasm between the performance and the inherent limitations of the digital medium get you only so close. Thru trial and error, I've discovered so many of these suggestions to be key in "humanizing" the midi drummer, and surpassing most of those limitations. Great work. Clearly, you are a drummer, as only a drummer would consider the value of these nuances. Kudos.

Great segment, Jon. Super relatable!

Really helpful... I really appreciate cuz it has really clear off some little doubts . I used to have same perception how I think about this exercise but got confused because no school of thought gave me such orientation . This has confirmed my philosophy

So this is why so many drummers go off to make awesome home recordings.

I use drum samples from a variety of hardware sample players, & I've found extra realism by patcching some randomness into the timbre of the samples, mainly volume & brightness, but also a small amount of *pan* modulation on top of the static positioning, so that there's an imitation of sticks landing in different places on the snare & toms especially. adds a bit of movement. but yeah- remember the four limbs limit, & make every beat work for the music.

Great video, I wish I'd seen something like this when I first started programming drums

Really good tutorial! I write drums almost the same way as you! Real live playing, quantizing at a 50% or less, and I tend to write fills directly in Pro Tools because I’m no finger drummer haha

pretty good. I do consider myself to be fairly good at drum programming, and making my drums sound like a human, but I do struggle with the hihats. I should have thought of it myself, but I think performing them in future will be a useful innovation for me.

I needed this, I’m using a Roland MV-1 and on Occasion and MPC One or the MPC 2 Daw and creating drums that sound great are difficult.

I wish that I had this advice years ago. It just makes sense now! Coming to drums from a keys/guitar/bass perspective makes is hard to keep things simple, like the basic principle that you can't have more than 4 sounds at once. Duh.

There’s always also using automation and the “humanize” function on DAWS like Logic Pro. That can work to help things along as well

The same idea goes for midi e-drum kits because it's like playing with boxing gloves on, unlike actual drum kits you have to play MIDI kits with more expression.

You got killer information that I honestly have been sharing since the 90’s… unfortunately this video had way to many video ads interrupting the lesson that it was distracting from the lesson you were trying to teach… good job however with being precise with the information

“You have to know what you’re going for.” You could do videos that only say that and never run out of material.

5:32 this is true knowledge i wrote songs in a drumbrute original’s original sounds for a couple years to see that yea there is only so much i could get out of it and realizing its theme in the end.

1:34 okay, that's not always true, especially if it's based on chopped breakbeats. Even some drum machines have nudge, humanize, or even unquantized recording of finger drumming. But almost all house, techno, trance, edm etc is indeed locked to a 4/4 grid.

Trigger randomiser helps with avoiding repetition, you can write the basic structure of a fill or beat and let the randomiser do it's thing, it also helps to make sound more 'human'

Love those mini vans.

Thank you so much, these are excellent tips! The video popped up at just the right time for me too, as I wrote a song and need it to sound "performed" rather than programmed. :)

Love this video and all of your tips! Also this was filmed beautifully as well!

Thank you so much for this video man! Greetings from Argentina

Grew up in the 80's, and been making music with computers since i was like 12. Programming drums (with various technologies) has always been my weak point. I've mainly been using trackers since the early 90's and until now more professional ones mainly Renoise, where you have extreme control over every single aspect of your sound without sacrificing the "bird's eye" or overall approach to making music. In the 80's early 90's some BRILLIANT work was done with trackers using very few drum samples on very few concurrent tracks/channels with some ingenious use of sample-manipulating effects. A few tricks i've been using over the years/decades that made drummers change from saying "hey you need 5 arms and 3 legs to play that" to not even believing me when i tell them this drum track is sequenced: - Hard hit cymbal samples can be used as much more convincing weaker ones if you offset the sample playback, as in skip the transient beginning part of the hit. You can also use this trick to add variation to the same hit using smaller offset values. This may not be possible with some VST's that try to "abstract" all the technical sample-usage from you. Or it may already do this under the hood. - Using this trick, you can mix isolated initial hit samples with trail samples for more realism. - As you said, realistic sounding hihat is tricky to do if you only have 3 (or even 2) levels of closed/open. You can do quick volume ramp-downs or even note cuts on open hihat samples to make them sound more "closed". - For bass drum (and sometimes / to some extent with snare or toms), it's more lenient to use the same sample(s) and just lower the volume to do grace notes, vs. having many levels of velocity, because there's less timbre change between soft and hard hits. If the technique/software you're using allows an easy way to filter out highs per note, then even better. - You can also slightly modulate the pitch for more "multisampled" varied effect, especially effective on crash, ride, splash etc. - You can approximate ride hits at different distances from the center or "bell" by having 2 identical tracks for center and edge, then fading between them. - If using round-robin sample selection on multisampled libraries, it will sound more natural with a number of samples that isn't a multiple of how many hits there mostly are in a measure. - Renoise has a separate column for time-delay (00 means no delay, FF means almost at the beginning of next row) you can use randomization with a reasonable maximum to set these and then tweak where the notes sound too "off". I wish other software had similar features. - When repeating/looping parts of the track, i don't just leave the copy/pasted instances verbatim or add "references" to the same patterns, i typically randomize or redo the velocities and timings, if the software/library/VST/etc. doesn't do this for me. If someone hears your track hundreds of times, they WILL notice the difference. - For short and very fast passages (especially on the bass drum) what most real drummers tend to do is start these passages slightly ahead then end up trailing slightly behind. Mimicking this adds realism to your drum tracks.

Been doing similar things for years. Very well presented.

No bleed between the instruments of the drums in the mix always is a dry sound I try with my e kit to essentially layer reverb to give it all space and panning as well there’s a lot of good ways to make them sound amazing but the biggest thing is dynamics

I don't care to sound like a real drummer but this video is still very helpful. Thanks

This was so interesting. I don`t (yet) have the ambition of programming my drums. Been watching a lot of mixing / mastering videos lately. And even still learning guitar. But you really explained this well and captured my attention so I subscribed 😊!

I am glad i play drums and program them with a midi drum kit. People playing drums on a piano is pretty funny.

this is why I decided to go ahead and learn how to play drums

I start to find these kinda titles offending "you are doing it wrong!" "You did not know this about music production!" "Your drums suck!". That might have been true two years ago, but nowadays my midi drums are cool 😎

A useful reminder. Thanks!

Programmed drums still just can't sound real, and a LOT of drum programmers are a big part of the problem. You see, like Jon points out here, your hands can only do two things at once. They can only play certain patterns. Drum programmers have this terrible habit of using straight 4 on the floor kicks (fine), and adding a constant 16th note pattern on a closed hat (also fine). THEN they start adding snare hits, rolls, tom fills, crashes, double kicks, and splashes on the hi-hat, ALL AT ONCE, without modulating out anything that an actual drummer would have to. I can NOT run double bass 16th notes, AND splash the hi-hat, while ALSO running constant 16th note diddles on a closed hat that doesn't open when my third foot (since I'm playing double bass as well) plays splashes and chiks, AND add in snare rolls and tom fills at the same time while using a ... 6th? hand to play some crashes. It's just not possible, and because this is what the electronic music industry wants, no one is trying to make it better. People that listen to basic industry music have grown accustomed to the unrealistic barrage of bass and hi-hat that's gotten related to it, but ask a real drummer to play that "epic" drum part from -insert current famous rapper or popstar here- and they're gonna tell you to buzz off and learn how real drums work.

Another tip: As a drummer (and programmer) I make sure the Hi-hat varies a little in velocity. Playing 16th notes on a Hi-hat usually the right hand hits a little harder, creating accent on 1 and 3, or 1 only. This way you avoid the 'machine gun' sound which usually gives away the fact that the part is programmed.

Many good tips, but I don’t agree with hitting the snare and bass drum on the grid as a rule of thumb, it can be a good start, but most good beats has som tension created by the displacement of either the snare or bass drum or both according to the grid, very often the snare is slightly behind.

Good info thanks.

As machine learning/"A.I." systems become more and more integrated into the audio production environment, I fully expect we'll be able to use artificial accompaniment which will sound as human as the very best players one can hire today (all instruments). And it'll all be built in to our favorite DAWs.

There are times when midi/digital drums are needed & not real/realistic "imperfect" drums. These electronic drums, half sequencered, half played live, became huge in the early 1980's when synths became all the rage once their quality & engineering blossomed after their continual progress & experimentation in the 1950's thru the 70's. It's mainly for stylization, in the same way some use autotune as a stylistic effect rather than a pitch-correcting tool. Of course, as aforementioned in the video, electronic robot-sounding drums happened because some could not use real drums. That was how fuzz guitar's story also began essentially, with the distortion, clipping, overdrive, rumbling, muddiness, whathaveyou, usually as unwanted effects of noise that needed to be fixed, but then someone eventually decided that it actually sounds "cool" & since then fuzz has become a staple sound in rock/metal music as a stylization effect rather than having clean electric guitar tone 100% of the time. The point is to use robot--sounding drums when you want it & "real" drums at other times. And because of robot-sounding percussion, that itself has lent to the new nostalgia genres of retro synth sounds of the 1980's.

The most significant influence to realism with programmed drums is surely not to program them, but perform them as you do on the keyboard. Obviously some manipulation and control over the grid helps clean it up a lot, but it baffles me that anyone would try to make realistic drums on a computer using only a mouse and the grid.

Greatest thing I ever did for my drums was buying a maschine mikro mk3, and played to click. No matter how close I think I am, there's always humanity to it. Plus, if you buy it new, you get a free ticket to the kontakt drug addiction. Best thing I ever did for my music, worst thing I ever did for my wallet. 10/10 recommend.

Triggers! Except hihat triggers suck, unless you pay big $. And even kick drum triggers are not as good as using a keyboard because the first thing I noticed, right before I bought Addictive Drums, is that the software knows the difference between a free stroke and a resting stroke, meaning if you hold down the beater, the kick drum doesn't sustain; I still don't have a trigger that will do this, but I bought AD as soon as I heard it. AD has loops made from drum performances, and you may notice they don't line up perfectly with the grid on every hit; some of the sloppiest grooves only line up at the end of four bars, or eight, but generally, they're tight enough you can copypaste a single bar. I get the best feel by playing the notes in, even if programming sometimes goes faster. It's a slippery slope, though; I now have two acoustic kits and two hybrid/electric kits.

Thank You Very Much Sir! 🙂🙏

I generally program linear drum grooves, only using two sounds together when absolutely necessary.

The best thing to do is to learn to play basic drums to understand ‘feel’. If not that, then at least watch videos of drummers, the patterns and techniques they use. One important thing is to remember that the hi hat is always locked, the snare plays a little behind (in the pocket) and bass drum can play a little behind as well and also right on the beat. The hi hat is always locked on imo.

What I like to do is to use MIDI packs that have drum beats recorded by actual drummers. Then I replace my programmed parts with a matching MIDI from a real drummer and fill in the "empty" spots, eg. my very different end fill or such, using a different MIDI part so that it still keeps the human feel. Moving the beats to different MIDI notes if needed (eg. my part does a tom fill, and the MIDI has a snare fill -> I'll just move the snare notes to tom notes). You get the best of both worlds :) Custom beats that you like, but the realism of a real drummer playing them.

Thisis amazing. from the content to the the presentation and your personality too. This video is soul food for me. SUB'd and Like'd. Two thumbs waaaay way up!

Very good. Thanks.

That snare sample sounds amazing, is it the fuzzy Soft Drums?

very nice method ! thanks for sharing

Great advice 👍 thanks

Thank you Sir Keep 'em coming

Opening line real as hell

I use them on occasion. Your average music listener can’t tell. I’ve even fooled musicians. Of I’ve also been using programmed drums since the early 80s! Lots of practice.

Great content man. Subscribed!

Personally I don’t mind the fake sound. As long as everything else sounds authentic I’m happy

Hi Jon, great video!! I have already invested in a Yamaha DTX6 electric drum set which can output midi and audio. I am wondering from your perspective if I have possibly made a mistake as I could have just purchased a smaller/cheaper midi pad, or do you think a full electric drum set is the way to go if budget and space allow? 👍

The best way to make good midi drums is by 1. Practicing and getting familiar with 1 or 2 midi kits 2. You need to at least be an amateur drummer. Without those 2 things it will take years to get decent

For some reason Ableton hasn't got a rhythmic randomiser so I have to make do with the trigger randomiser