How To Program a Basic Drum Beat

[alcoyot]

This is something I've struggled with for a while now, several times spending too much time on it, and then giving up in despair. However I feel I have finally cracked the code, and am sharing this easy method now to save you the hours of anguish that I went through.If you're like me and ever record you're playing, but would like to hear a realistic drum beat in the background, either for a cover of something you've recorded, or you're own compositions, here's how to do it.

First of all, I would highly recommend NOT trying to use prefabricated drum "loops". What will happen is you will spend a few hours listening to all the loops in your program, and then when you don't find anything suitable you will go to the internet. This only leads to more disappointment. All the loops I've ever found are WAYYYY too "busy", and frankly sound like 80s/early 90s hip hop. If you are an 80s rapper that's great news, but for other styles of music read on, unless you're planning on changing your name to something like
"Sir Ice Fresh " After listening to about a thousand pre-made loops, I've only found two or three that MAYBE would work, but those weren't what I wanted either.

The best way to do this, is to use a midi drumkit, and create a separate track on your DAW for each different drum you'll be using. Then hit record, and manually play each drum individually for one or two measures. I'm pretty sure most programs have an auto-timing alignment option, so if you don't play perfectly on the beat, that will fix it. Not only is this the easiest way but you will also get a better sound out of each midi drum when it has its own track. Additionally you can treat each drum individually to give it the correct balance of reverb, and whatever else you might want.
Here's the basic rock beat in 4/4 time.
Bass Drum- One quarter note hit, on the first beat of the measure, or first and third as another option.
Snare-One quarter note hit on the third beat of the measure.
Closed Hi-Hat- Play 8th notes on each beat, so 8 hits per measure.

That's it! A very simple drum beat which sounds good, solidly keeps the beat, and most importantly isn't overwhelming with all kinds of extraneous sticking. Its also nearly the exact beat used on MANY great, famous rock songs. Check out just about any ACDC like you shook me all night long!

The final thing is how do you find which drums are the best on your midi. The way I did this was I opened up a recording of a song in which I really like the drum sound. I listened to the sound of the bass/snare/hi-hat on the recording, and then played through every single sound on the drum midi program, until I found the one which sounded the most similar, and then selected that one. This is less time consuming than it sounds, since there will usually be only be a few good options.

Here is the excellent web page, where I learned this simple rock beat, so you can listen to exactly what it sounds like.
http://drumsetfun.com/online-drum-lessons-beginner/