How to make VST drums sound more realistic
I got a great question the other day apropos of the discussion on drum augmentation, from our friend Federico Simonetti. Federico asks:
I would like to make my VST drums sound more "realistic" and transmit some kind of groove. I'm a bedroom music producer ... do you have any suggestions for me?
I do! Here are some things that I do all the time when I’m programming drums that I want to sound not completely machine-like (which to be clear, is not all the time! Sometimes I very much do want the drum machine “on the grid” feel):
Randomize velocity. I will select all the MIDI notes in the drum performance, and I will randomize them +/- 4 (or +/- 3%). If this results in the drum hits feeling too erratic, I will undo and try again at +/- 3 (or 2.5%).
Randomize timing. 2-3% tends to work well here.
Push the hat and/or snare ahead of or behind the beat. Got a song with a laid-back groove? Push the snare to the right a skosh to create a pocket. Got a song that you want to get more urgent into the chorus? Push the hat slightly to the left for the 4 bars before the chorus, then push the snare slightly left when the chorus hits — instant urgency!
Note for this one that I think it’s a very good idea not to drag the snare or hats notes willy-nilly from place to place, but instead to nudge them using a nudge increment of 500 samples. Try it out! It’s much more precise than dragging — you can hone right in on exactly the right nudge amount.Set your quantization to have a small amount of swing. When we think of swing, I think a lot of think of the kind of swing where the feel goes from straight feel to triplet feel. And, yes, that’s one form of swing! But in the computer there are so many subtler shades of swing, which can serve simply to animate the performance and give it subtle, natural groove.
For example, “straight feel” is 50% — try quantizing your hi-hats to 51% or 52% swing! It’s the subtlest thing — but it can make a part come alive. If you’re going to do this, I would do it first, then randomize timing afterwards to create even more human-feeling randomizations.Ninja level: use round-robin samplebanks. This is where there are multiple different but extremely similar samples for each instrument, and the computer randomly picks one each time the drum is hit. EZ Drummer and Superior Drummer have this functionality built in, as do many other drum VSTs. If you like to make your own drum samples, you can make your own Trigger round-robin sample programs in their free Trigger Instrument Editor and trigger them from any programmed drum.
Hopefully this sparks some ideas! Thanks Federico — jamie