Music Lesson: Understanding Drummer Functionality

So let's go back to here. I'm going to concentrate on this region here, and I'm going to take the library away just to make this a little bit nicer and less cluttered.

Overview of the Drummer Box

What we have is this box here. Now, this box allows you to do quite a few different things.

• Instruments: The instruments you see lit up at the moment, the kick and the snare, can be taken away independently.
  • For example, as we grey out the kick by clicking on it, the kick goes away.
  • I can add it back in and take the snare away, which would make for a nice breakdown or pre-chorus situation.

Kick and Snare Patterns

What you see on the kick snare slider here is a few things. These are different patterns that you can slide through for the kick and snare.

• I'm a fan of that. We'll keep that.
• You can also move to double time and half time.
  • Here's what half time would sound like on the kick and snare.
  • And then double time, this is going to sound pretty fast when you want to really inject energy in.

Follow Feature

You have this checkbox here, which is "follow."

• This allows you to do something very interesting and is a feature I really like about the drummer.
• Let's say you have a pattern that you already like. It might be a rhythmic pattern, a bass line, or anything really.
• You can get the drummer to follow as closely as possible the rhythm of that sound you have.

So what I'm going to do here is jump in and see if I can make something work. Let's go for the keyboard collection. Yeah, why not? Let's see if we can find a nice keyboard part to drop in and then have the rhythm of the kick and snare follow that to accentuate that.

Using a Keyboard Part

Okay, so we've got something going on here. I picked a more rhythmic part on purpose.

• Remember, you don't have to create a new track and then drag it onto there; you can just drag it straight over.
• Now we have a rhythm here that is rhythmic on this part.

I'm just going to double that.

• They're working well together.
• But let's see what happens when we ask it to follow the rhythm of the piano.

If I had more tracks here, it would ask me, "Which one do I want it to follow?"

Adjusting Patterns

So here we go.

• You can hear it's kind of like punching in with that pattern a little more rather than following its own kind of groove and rhythm.
• This is a super great feature of the drummer, particularly if you're working on a part that's quite rhythmic.

Let's say you've played it on the piano or acoustic guitar, and you love the rhythm that drives your song. It's a good feature to have.

Hi-hat Modifications

Working with all of that in mind, we have the hi-hat, which we can change as well.

• Now we've kind of got this all on follow.
• I'm going to go back and just adjust this with our new piano pattern in play.

I like that hi-hat pattern; it's pretty cool.

Introducing Percussion

Let's get some percussion going on.

• Currently, the percussion is not in play.
• So I'm going to choose, should I have a tambourine or some maracas?
• Let's get some maracas. Actually, let's have a tambourine.

Again, I can choose when that's going to play by either going to one and just adjusting it.

• You can hear that's happening on the two and the four.
• Different patterns here, the same pattern. So let's just cancel that one out just to hear what that's doing by itself.

Fill Options

So there were different patterns.

• I'm going to go for the number two pattern on the tambourine.
• That's working. Let's bring the piano back in.

Cool!

• Here, these two sliders essentially allow us to have more or fewer fills.
• If we wanted them to play loads of fills throughout this section, maybe it's the last chorus or something, we can dial it all the way up, and he's going to play a fill all the time.

Swinging the Beat

You can hear he's playing many more fills than he was before. It was kind of around there.

• If we took it down, then he would play fewer fills.
• We also have the ability to swing this beat.

Now, swing is a concept that is often not understood.

• When you hear it, you usually go, "Oh yeah, that swing. I know about that."
• Instead of the hi-hats going da da, da, da, da, da, which is very rigid, they might go da da da da da da, which has a lot more swing.

Understanding Swing

Swing is the manipulation of where something lands, where a drum hit lands essentially within the beat.

• It might be swung backwards, it might be swung forwards, and it ties closely with the feeling of shuffles as well.
• The best way to hear this is to take the piano away and concentrate on the hi-hat pattern.

Let's just swing that right. You can hear now, it feels like swung drum.

Humanizing the Drummer

To show you the difference:

• Without swing, the pattern sounds much straighter.
• With the swing on, it feels a bit more choppy and jumpy.

If you don't incorporate swing in certain genres, it can feel robotic and rigid, which might be outside of groove-based styles.

• Adding a little bit of swing here and there improves the human feel of the virtual drummer.

Detail Settings

You can lock the fills and the swing dials so they don't change unexpectedly.

• If you click on details, you also get more information where you can change things like the feel.
• You can make the drummer play behind the beat or push it to add drive.

Let's hear what that sounds like.

• Here's what it is normally, then I'll move towards the pull side, and then we'll push it.

It's interesting because it feels sped up, but it actually hasn't sped up, the drum is still playing at the same tempo.

Electronic Drummer Options

Now, one thing to be aware of is that what we see for an acoustic drummer is different from what we'll see for an electronic drummer.

Let's pick Magnus and start playing.

• Keep the same kit and everything.
• From time to time, you will get a message like: "Changing the drummer will replace settings you have made on this track."

If you wish to keep these settings, select "Keep settings when changing drummers."

Now I've got something completely different.

• Let's take away the piano.
• Magnus is playing a much more contemporary sound.

When you look at stuff, it's pretty much the same.

Detail Tools for Electronic Drummers

In details, it also looks a bit different.

• Per sound, you have the ability to change the complexity.
• You can go into auto half time and humanize the electronic drummer.

This will bring in slight differences in timing to make it feel more human, and you can add more variation to phrases as well.

Exploring Quincy

Let's look at Quincy again.

• You can see you basically get the same thing.
• If I go out here, we've got our presets, all of the instruments being played, and in detail, you can change the complexity and humanize it.

So that is how you use the drummer, how to play with the different parameters, and how you can vary them to build dynamics across the song.