Effective Drum Programming: Part 1

If you're after a great rhythm section, these days it's very easy to whip a fabulous loop off a CD or nick a great groove from a MIDI file disk. But an inside knowledge of how and why drum patterns work can help make you a better musician and get your rhythm sections really working. (This is the first article in a four‑part series.)

I was talking to a man the other day — not necessarily an interesting fact in itself, I grant you — except that this man made his living from selling commercial bite‑sized MIDI files. He was explaining that, after producing a number of groundbreaking products devoted to MIDI‑fying the subtle nuances of highly expressive instruments like bass and guitar, he had been surprised to discover that what many people still wanted were disks full of drum patterns. Quite naturally, he had assumed that with the abundance of sample CDs, commercial MIDI files and preset accompaniments available, the world would be well catered for in this area. Not so, it would seem.

This is a curious state of affairs. Whereas in the days of hi‑tech yore you really did have to get to grips with the quirky programming systems of dedicated drum machines, these days anyone with the most basic GM module and rudimentary sequencer has the capacity to experiment with rhythm from the comfort of their own armchair. And as many software sequencers now sport a special editor for drums, many musicians are quite comfortable with the idea of programming the rhythm track as an integral part of creating a composition.

I've known grown men — and thoroughly competent musicians to boot — grow pale and weak‑kneed at the thought of programming a drum track from scratch.

Yet I've still known grown men — and thoroughly competent musicians to boot — grow pale and weak‑kneed at the thought of programming a drum track from scratch. Perhaps they're afraid of becoming the butt of all those post‑modernist drummer jokes (you know: "how many rhythm programmers does it take to change a light bulb?").

Of course, you might argue that with more drum loops on more sample CDs than you can shake a drumstick at, there's really no need to get your hands dirty with all this DIY programming stuff. Just load up the appropriately labelled pattern — Soft Rock 2, Techno Fill 3 — and press play. After all, it's the melody that's the most important thing, right?

It's true that samples give you access not just to killer grooves but also to the heavily treated sounds it would take you a rock of ages to create yourself. Nonetheless, working with sampled loops does bring its own set of practical headaches, not least of which is making your selection. If you've ever had to trawl your way through a CD containing 300 minor variations on a hip‑hop beat, you'll know what I mean. Then there's the issue of pushing or pulling the loop to fit the desired tempo, a process which can often destroy the feel which attracted you in the first place. And just when you think it's all over, you decide to change the tempo of your masterpiece, necessitating another return to the time‑stretch function on your sampler.

If only people knew the kind of hell we go through for our art...

This is where your friendly SOS comes in. The purpose of this series is to look at some of the basic principles of drum programming as the inspiration for creating your own loops. Of course, while I say drum programming I'm conscious of the fact that it's not just drum and percussion sounds which constitute the rhythm track. In fact, I happen to believe that all great grooves are driven by great bass lines. But all this is a matter for that Doctorate of Drum & Bass Dynamics which I'm saving for my retirement years. As my time here between the SOS covers is short, you'll just have to take these underlying sentiments as understood.

The motion before the house today is: how do you produce killer grooves? It's rather a vast question, given the many variables involved, but one I shall attempt to deal with by looking at some of the main principles of drum programming. I'll say now that my aim is not merely to present you with a set of ready‑to‑run preset patterns, but to give you some ideas and examples to do with as you wish.

The toe‑tappability factor is often more dependent on your leaving holes than filling up the whole rhythmical canvas.

The Three Elements

In my humble opinion, a good rhythm pattern consists of three elements: the pattern itself, the sounds, and the speed at which the pattern is played. And really great rhythm tracks usually work because the right balance has been achieved between these three elements. A great pattern can sound clumsy or too frenetic at the wrong tempo, and a new set of sounds can turn a bog‑standard pattern into something really quite wonderful. You appreciate that when you're listening through a sample CD: often it's not the rhythms, but the 'how did they do that?' sounds which catch your ear.

The other important point to remember is that excellence in drum programming is also about fitting the rhythm track to the music. A groove which, when heard in isolation, knocks the audience dead at 500 paces may not necessarily do the rest of the composition any favours. Sometimes you have to tell your virtual drummer to stop showing off, put the kit back in its box and just concentrate on shaking that tambourine once every four bars. In fact, while we're on a roll of general rules of thumb, creating interesting rhythms tends to be more a matter of subtraction than addition. In other words, the toe‑tappability factor is often more dependent on your leaving holes than filling up the whole rhythmical canvas. More of this in a future article.

In the meantime, let's look at what many will recognise as lowest common denominator stuff. (I'll apologise now if what follows seems nothing more than an exercise in patronising that national champion egg‑sucking grandmother of yours. But the SOS editors did insist that I started from square one.)

The Three Instruments

Despite the fact that today's sound modules offer a wide palette of exotic percussion and non‑drum sounds, the core of most rhythm tracks is still rooted in the instrument that the arrival of drum machines were supposed to make redundant in the first place — the good old drum kit.

And even though many contemporary (with a small c) rhythms are driven by programmers rather than drummers, the three core instruments of the drum kit — that's the bass drum, snare and hi‑hat — still remain the key elements in virtually all rhythm tracks. It's not hard to see why this should be the case, as they give you the ability to accent the low, medium and high frequency ranges respectively.

It's the interplay of these three instruments which usually provides the ident (to use a local radio term) of the mainstream musical styles. You'll probably also be aware of how different styles of music put a different emphasis on each of these three instruments. In pop and rock, for instance, the dominant drum is usually the snare. In '80s pop, you were nothing if you didn't have a snare drum which sounded like the ricochet from a dozen firing squads — thus putting the accent on the backbeat (that is, the second and fourth beats of each 4/4 bar). In reggae, the bass drum accentuates the first beat of the bar, while the snare falls on the third beat, but it's the job of other instruments, such as chopped guitar or keyboard pads, to accentuate the two and the four.

A style like modern jazz leads from hi‑hat or ride cymbal. These high‑frequency instruments act as a kind of syncopated metronome, with the mid‑frequency snare and low‑frequency bass drum providing accents and embellishments as and when required. Here also the sense of regular bar divisions is not particularly important to help listeners navigate their way through the music. In hip‑hop and big beat, the rhythm is more about the interplay of bass and snare.

These are broad generalisations, I know — so respect to the musicologists among you. But you soon discover that it's the way you play around with these three instruments that determines the feel of the drum track and how it fits with the rest of the composition. As a simple example, if you take the same basic kick and snare pattern, then program different hi‑hat patterns over the top, you can alter the perception of that rhythm quite radically. For example, compare a pattern using quarter‑note hi‑hats (that is, four even strokes to the bar) to one using 16th‑note hi‑hats (16 to the bar). The second one will appear to be faster, even though the tempo is exactly the same. A syncopated hi‑hat pattern can, depending on the programming, appear to push the rhythm forward or pull it back. Now take those syncopations and use them as the basis for a series of accents to be applied to a 16th‑note hi‑hat rhythm and you have a different rhythm again.

These points are all explored in the set of examples here, which take you through some very basic variations on standard rock rhythms and also introduce you to some of the conventions which I'll be following throughout the entire series.

If you take the same basic kick and snare pattern, then program different hi‑hat patterns over the top, you can alter the perception of that rhythm quite radically.

Tempo Fugit

The question of tempo is easy to appreciate if you're a human drummer — the faster the music, the quicker you have to play. And when it goes too fast, then you simply have to play like crazy or leave some bits out. As rock music gets faster, drummers tend to switch from playing eighth notes on the hi‑hat or ride cymbal to playing quarter notes. Not only is this less tiring, it doesn't clutter things up as much. Conversely, what's characterised as hard rock played at slow tempos will still see drummers playing quarter‑note hi‑hats. But this is to give them the musical room for some fancy footwork on the double bass drums.

Tempo also determines the kind of sounds which are suitable for a track. Quite simply, long sounds, such as big gate‑reverbed snares, don't sit too well in busy mixes, unless they're part of the feature of the track. I'm sure this is why those TR808/909 sounds work so well in dance tracks — they're sonically quite punchy, yet short, so they don't take up too much space in either the temporal or frequency spectrum. Which is a jolly good thing when you're running at tempos of 140bpm and above.

The question of sounds — and specifically ways in which drum sounds can be effected and generally mangled around a bit — will be revisited in a later instalment. In the meantime, try out the examples contained in the 'Bang On' box on page 50. As I've already explained, these are simple exercises in using hi‑hat rhythms to give different feels to very basic beats. They also illustrate one of the key elements of successful drum programming: correct use of dynamics. Or, put more simply, use of accents to provide a subtle and not‑so‑subtle sense of movement within a rhythm.

We'll cover this in more detail in the next issue, when we look at jazz patterns and discover that programmed drums really can swing with the best of them.