Realistic sounding double kicks and drum rolls

[schismatic]

Hi guys,

I'm doing a cover of a song and I have a midi file of the drums for it (it's Schism by Tool). I am use Cubase to sequence the thing. All sounds very nice except for when the drums play double kick patterns i.e lots of bass notes together, fast. When this happens I tend to get very unrealistic, 'drum machine' sounding notes. I am aware of the velocity variation as a way of making it sound a little less rigid, but I was wondering if anybody who was into any sort of metal where such drums are used could give me some good tips on how they go about getting a good sound. I have decent samples (drumkit from hell where a kick is recorded at about 8 different velocities to give a range) but I have no idea how to really take advantage of the samples to get a great sounding and hopefully realistic sounding kit. The same thing happens for me with tom rolls too, they're often sounding rigid, unnatural, almost too 'in time'. I'd love it and be very grateful if somebody could talk me through how they'd go about programming, adjusting etc and what particular software they like to use to do thi (DKHS, Battery etc)

Cheers!

 

[metalhead28]

About all you can do is vary the velocity and timing a little. You could also cut down the volume a little in those sections.
Sometimes a slightly mechanical sounding kick drum roll sounds fine in a full mix anyway. Have you listened to it like that?

 

[Farview]

In your situation, you would need to vary the velocity. The drum machine sound iis from the same sample triggering every time. You need to make it so that the sequence triggers different samples every time. If you have Drumagog, you can make your sequence trigger the Drumagog samples which are multi-sampled. That way, even at the same velocity, different samples get triggered every time.

 

[schismatic]

thanks for the input guys.......i haven't tried it in a mix no, i'll try that at some point. am i right in understanding that say i have a 16 note bar of kick (4/4 time) that drumagog would be able to accurately replace individual notes with different samples done at different velocities in a quick and effective manner?

oh yeah one more thing, as far as timing variation goes just how much is effective and how would i go about doing this? do i just slightly nudge notes in a midi editor or something? could i run them through some sort of thing that varies timing slightly by say 1-5%?

 

[TragikRemix]

i think (depending on your software) you can do something along the lines of 'quantize velocity' and set it to something like 'humanize' or 'randomize' by XX%

i use DFH for midi. it rawks.

 

[TragikRemix]

and the second question- that should be in your quantize settings, where you can vary how exact you want it to be.

 

[Farview]

thanks for the input guys.......i haven't tried it in a mix no, i'll try that at some point. am i right in understanding that say i have a 16 note bar of kick (4/4 time) that drumagog would be able to accurately replace individual notes with different samples done at different velocities in a quick and effective manner?

it can go as fast as it needs to. Cubase is latency compensated, it will just work.

 

[Superhuman]

DFHS has a built in quant feature that uses a number of different samples for each drum, each sample is a separate shot on the drum so it sounds way more organic than just changing the velocity on a standard 'one sound per drum' set up. You can set the velocities to change as you see fit to make things even more realistic. It sounds pretty damn convincing on a steady beat, rolls also sound great - there are plenty of downloadable midi files mapped for DFHS (makes things a lot easier than programming every single beat). Check it out.

 

[schismatic]

thanks for those suggestions, the DFHS thing about triggering different samples sounds just what I'm looking for. can any other software do this i.e. bfd or else?