MusicRadar

Get a drum pad and your recorded beats will sound much more realistic.

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Good drum production boils down to having the right sounds, the right patterns and the right processing – it’s no more difficult than that. However, getting these three pieces of the jigsaw to fall into place can be a challenge, which is why MusicRadar has put together this handy guide. Whether you record live drums or program your beats, this advice will be highly relevant…

Recording

1. Once you know what to listen for, phasing is painfully obvious, but if you’re not sure, try muting and unmuting the drum channels in turn and in pairs – particularly the overheads. If there is phasing, you’ll immediately hear a big qualitative difference and so know which tracks to fix.

2. Mic placement is everything in recording, and the only way to get it right is to don the headphones, get down on your hands and knees and move the mics until you get the best sound you can. Don’t stop until you get it spot on, as while you can improve a bad recording, you can’t entirely fix it!

3. Headphone bleed can be a bit of a problem for drummers, as they tend to need their backing tracks pretty loud. A good pair of noise-isolating ’phones is indispensable – Sennheiser’s HD25-1s or HD25 SPs, for example. A cheaper option is to use ear-bud headphones with a set of industrial ear defenders over the top.

4. If your passion is for drumming and not engineering, but you still want a great sound, check out one of the excellent electronic MIDI drum kits available from Roland, Yamaha and others. These come with astonishingly realistic sounds and can also be used to create MIDI parts to play back through the drum sample library of your choice.

Programming

1. The best way to create cutting-edge, authentic-sounding drum parts is to start out by mimicking your favourite tracks. Import one and chop the beats up, either manually or with a beat-slicing tool, then slow the loop down to analyse it and see what’s really going on. You’ll be amazed at how just one drum hit in an unexpected (and not rigidly quantised) place can transform a groove from the mundane into something special.

2. Use the drum pads on a dedicated MPC-style drum pad controller to play back chopped up loops or even synth patches for a more percussive approach to jamming. You’ll come up with edits and riffs you simply wouldn’t get any other way, leading to everything from choppy hip-hop grooves to J T Vanelli-style jacking house sounds.

3. Whenever you come up with a particularly good drum fill, edit or skip, save that part out as a MIDI file for use in later tracks. No, it’s not cheating – it’s just common sense. We’re not saying you should use them all on every track and never do anything new, but if something’s worth doing once, or works exceptionally well, it’s got to be worth trying again. It might even end up becoming your rhythmic trademark.

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