Round-robin hi hats
Sometimes when I’m programming drum machine parts, I specifically want a very tight and drum-machine-y feel. Every note exactly the same — that’s part of the vibe for some styles of music.
But sometimes a static part can be wrong for a certain song! It can feel grating, or repetitive, or fatiguing, depending on the context.
In situations like this, I look for strategies to help keep people’s ears moving subtly; to vary the sound in little ways so that it feels more “alive.”
In this vein, something I love doing is making variations of the same drum machine hi-hat sound and loading them as multi-samples onto a pad in a drum machine that can do round-robin playback. Round-robin, if you’re not familiar, is a lot what it sounds like — the drum machine chooses a different sample to play on each hit, selected from the samples you've loaded into it.
Round-robin-ing can be either random (this is most common) or cyclical (the drum machine plays the next sample in the list for each subsequent hit, wrapping around to the beginning of the list when it’s reached the end. This is less common, and I don’t personally love it, because our ears can pick up on these patterns, and generally when I’m doing this I want to introduce an element of randomness).
When I’m setting up my samples for the round robin, I will make one a little brighter, one a little darker, one a little louder, one a little softer, one a little longer, one a little shorter, and so on. Maybe I’ll vary the pitch plus or minus a few cents (hundredths of a semitone). Maybe I’ll have one or two be a bit distorted.
I won’t always do all of the above, but I’ll experiment, and I’ll pick a few options depending on what seems to feel good for the song at hand. And then I load them all on the hi-hat drum pad, and when the programming triggers the hi-hat, it sounds so much more alive!
If you’re curious to find a drum machine that allows for round-robin multi-sample assignment on each pad, this is the one we use; it’s become the drum machine of choice around our house since it was released last year.
Tick tick — jamie