MASTERCLASS
Program your way down deeper into the groove with our guide to emulating the timing, feel and techniques that human players use
Needless to say, drums are essential elements of all modern – and a huge chunk of non-modern – music. Remove the drums from a tune, and the character of the music changes almost completely. Other instruments can be rhythmic, sure, but by dropping any pretense of melodic function and concentrating solely on the timing of a piece of music, drums are the first and last word in a track’s rhythmic statement.
As soon as electronic music became viable, drums took their place on a rhythmic grid, and their timing was as precise as the clock signal running the whole rig. Electronic musicians thought they had discovered the holy grail: a source of drums that played on time every time – and one that didn’t take a portion of the royalties or ask for any artistic input.
Drum machines became so successful that, for a time, human drummers started to attempt to emulate their rigid playing style and even their sound. The ’80s was an era of electronic drum kits and little rhythmic room to manoeuvre – especially as music gear became generally more interoperable. But it wouldn’t last. It turned out that, in a sea of ‘perfect’ timing, that urge for humanity still lurked somewhere under the surface. As the ’80s gave way to the ’90s, the music-loving public started to rediscover what they had been missing, and drum machines became just another part of the landscape – akey part of certain genres but vilified in others.
Today, we’re used to the benefits of both methods. The regularity and consistency of programmed drums helps with the precise techniques needed to control headroom in competitive dance music, but we still recognise the need for groove and feel, whether it’s through breakbeats, recording and sampling, or using today’s top drum software.
The modern DAW and computerbased music setup offer far, far more than just a simple grid for snapping MIDI notes to. DAWs may have given us quantisation, the ability to snap even shoddily-played notes to a grid – but they’ve also given us humanisation functions, microscopic timing adjustments, iterative quantisation, and all sorts of contemporary twists to bring the soul back into our computer-based system and its ‘grid’.
Through this feature, we’ll showcase how to take your rigid, straight-timed ‘electronic’ drums and transform them into something altogether more human. By playing with timing, adding groove and swing, we’ll demonstrate the techniques used by real human drummers and then show you how to apply them to bring humanity to your own rhythmic elements.
We’ll then attempt to apply these principles to places where they’ll be more challenging: both to the humanisation of electronic genres and their drums, and then
