Making Drum Tracks Without the Drums

By David Franz

This month, we're going to move on from guitars and create some great drum tracks in Pro Tools without using any "real" miked drum tracks. To do this, it helps to put yourself in the mind of a drummer. Given the plethora of drummer jokes out there, this might sound like a sketchy idea…but trust me, thinking and acting like a drummer in this one situation will pay off. (Having played drums for many years, I've earned my official "bust on drummers" license!)

While sampling beats is a common practice, there's a more creative (and legal) way to model beats and rhythmic feels in Pro Tools. In this column I'm going to take beat sampling several steps farther, and use a cool beat as a stepping-stone to new ideas.

Sampling vs. Modeling with MIDI
The two main reasons people sample beats are for the feel and for the sound. Since the typical beat loop is a short recording of an actual performance, the feel is amazing and the beat is familiar. Many listeners like hearing familiar sounds and feels, because they can relate to them or even remember them from earlier periods in their lives.

One of the techniques I use to create a new beat is to rework a beat from an old funk or R&B song and transfer some elements of its feel into a hip hop or electronica groove. For example, I'm a fan of David Garibaldi, best known for his drumming with Tower of Power. Many of his beats are simply amazing. For this column, I analyzed his main beat in the verse of the song "Soul Vaccination," and modeled the groove in MIDI.

How to Model a Beat in Pro Tools
Step 1: First, listen very carefully to the original track — in this case, "Soul Vaccination." Then transcribe the beat, or at least jot down notes about where specific notes (snares, kicks, etc.) are played, and their relationships to the other notes.

Step 2: Next, find the sounds. Create a MIDI track and assign it to a drum sound set that is similar to the original beat. For this example, I went through numerous sound sets in Sampletank auditioning snares, hi hats, and kicks. I ended up choosing the "Weckeld B Proud" sound set from Sampletank's Acoustic Drum sample CD.

Weckeld B Proud drum sounds

Step 3: Find the tempo. Use Tap Tempo in the MIDI portion of the Pro Tools transport window to estimate the original beat's tempo. The tempo for "Soul Vaccination" varies a little, but it's generally around 106 bpm (beats per minute), a fairly common funk tempo.

Pro Tools transport window with Tap Tempo highlighted

Step 4: Input the MIDI notes. Pro Tools lets you do this in a couple of ways. You can either play the beat on a MIDI controller and record your performance, or enter the MIDI notes with the Pencil tool in Grid mode. Even though I'm a drummer, I chose the latter option for this example, simply to prove that you don't have to be a drummer to make this technique work.

Initially, I had all parts (snare, hi hats, kick, etc.) on one MIDI track while I was developing the sound of the beat. But I ended up separating out the "ghost note" snare track, so that I could boost the level of its individual notes without increasing the velocity past the point where the sound changed from a ghost note to an unaccented snare note. NOTE: "Ghost" notes often fall between accented beats, and fill the spaces while giving the groove continuous motion. In this case, ghost notes occur when the drummer hits the snare drum very softly, creating a sound similar in level to an unaccented hi hat beat.

Step 5: Alter the MIDI notes to create a "feel." Anybody can plop notes down on a grid with the Pencil Tool and make a drum track. However, without some manipulation, those beats can often sound sterile and mechanical. There are places for those types of beats, and I call them $50 toy keyboards. If you want to give your beats a more interesting feel, you've got to tweak some of the MIDI parameters and move the notes around.

Usually I start by tweaking the velocities of almost every note in the groove, adding accents and "ghost" or "grace" notes to give the track more life. Then I mess with some of the quantization parameters — the ones I use most often are Swing and Randomize. At the same time, I'll move individual notes forward or back in time, to adjust the feel.

In this example, I used a wee bit of quantization: 7% swing and 5% randomize. Then I tweaked each measure individually, moving some notes ahead of or behind the beat to improve the feel. I don't trust the computer to do all the tweaking for me — I rely on my own sense of feel and timing. Making each measure slightly different gives the loop subtle variations. Finally, I really pumped up the velocities, as you can see in the following screen shot.

	click to enlarge

Never used quantization in Pro Tools before? My advice is to learn what each parameter does, and then experiment with different values for each parameter. The tricky bit is that you need to understand and hear the relationships between the parameters, because often they can affect each other. In my book, I describe detailed techniques on how to use quantization to make your beats sound more real.

After all the tweaking, here's what my beat sounded like. Check out this MP3.

Pro Tools 6 users can save this rhythmic feel as a Groove Template. For more info on Groove Templates, check out the latest Pro Tools Reference Guide.

The New Beat
OK. We've got a cool beat modeled in MIDI. Now the real fun begins. Let's mess with it!

Step 6: Adjust the tempo. For this example, I decided to transform the beat from funk into hip hop. When a new tempo is entered in the MIDI portion of the Transport window, Pro Tools automatically moves all the MIDI notes and measures to the new tempo. I slowed the beat down to 90 bpm, a tempo more common in hip hop.

Step 7: Change the sounds. Now that we're in the genre of hip hop, our funky drum sounds don't really cut it for this beat. It needs a sound that's more current. So I separated out all the parts of the beat (hi hat, snare, kick, etc.) onto their own tracks, and assigned individual sounds from different Sampletank sound sets to each part. See the following screen shot.

	click to enlarge

For this new beat, I actually kept a few of the sounds from the original beat, but switched out the majority of drum samples for sounds from the "Electronic Snare, Kicks, and Hi Hats" sound set in Sampletank. I also layered the kick — that is, two different samples are playing the kick track to thicken the sound.

Step 8: Alter the beat. Change anything about it. Tweak some of the velocities, the timing, or the quantization. In this example, I did none of those things. The feel is exactly the same as the original beat. However, I did tweak one thing. I moved the beginning of the four-measure loop so that it starts halfway past beat four (what drummers call "Four And"). That way, the first snare hit in the new rhythm lands on beat two, which I think solidifies the groove better in this hip hop feel.

Step 9: Mix the new beat. By separating each sound onto its own track, you can mix MIDI drum tracks just like mixing a regular miked drum kit. To add more power to this groove, I added compression to the snare and kick, as well as some EQ to all the parts of the groove. (The reverb was already on the original samples in Sampletank.)

Listen to this MP3 to check out the new hip hop beat.

Wrap-Up
Like a drum groove on an old CD? Mimic it with MIDI. Then go farther. Add some different sounds…change its tempo…and there you go, a new beat with old-school influences. More interested in current trends? Make new beats with new-school influences. Or just make your own from scratch. However you like to create, the techniques presented here can improve any drum track you make with MIDI in Pro Tools. Join me next month, when I'll cover more creative ways for using MIDI to make great drum tracks in Pro Tools. See you soon. Peace.

Like what you see in this column? Check out my book Producing in the Home Studio with Pro Tools (2nd Edition). You can buy it online right here through Digidesign's web site, or visit www.protoolsbook.com. Interested in personal instruction on Pro Tools from yours truly? Visit www.berkleemusic.com and learn about several amazing Pro Tools learning experiences available online though Berklee College of Music. Interested in hearing my band? Visit www.lipfloater.com. Wanna see my studio and hear some samples of my work? Visit www.undergroundsun.com and/or www.davidfranz.com.

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